Curt Doolittle

Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

  • No Whoopie, It’s Not About Race.

    Over on Real Clear Politics, Whoopie Goldberg says she’s Playing The Race Card. To which I reply: It’s not about race. It’s about the welfare state’s collectivism vs classical liberalism’s individualism. Three Rules of Politics:

    • RULE 1: “People will not tolerate rulership by someone who despises them and their values.”
    • RULE 2:“People will not tolerate taxation when the proceeds are used for purposes with which they disagree.”
    • RULE 3: “Everyone reverts to group persistence under duress. EVERYONE. So people have racial, cultural, class, and genration biases. They are biased for their group under duress, and egalitarian under prosperity. This is basic behavioral economics. There is no data, anywhere, that supports an alternative view.

    If someone despises you, and uses your taxes for purposes that you disagree with, and you’re under economic duress, then that’s all that’s required to understanding their political position. People despised, and continue to despise Jimmy Carter for the same reasons as they do Obama. FACT 1: Whites pay the vast majority of taxes. While the government does everything it can to obscure the fact that taxes are primarily a white burden, the fact remains, that taxes are almost entirely a white burden. This violates Rule 2 above. And under economic duress it invokes Rule 3 above. If anything is racially loaded, it’s that whites are unique in the world, and in world history, in preferring classical liberalism’s individual freedom and responsibility over the alternatives offered by other, less successful cultures. If race is involved, it’s because Obama demonstrably disdains white people. I didn’t use the word ‘hate’. That’s a loaded word for silly people. But, why else would he call a meeting with a board of six like minded economic advisors this spring without a single white person among them? If race was involved why would whites try to draft Colin Powell, and why would whites be such avid supporters of black conservatives? So, it’s not about race. It’s about being anti-American. American being defined as a class of rights that white, anglo-germanic people invented, and codified in a constitution, and who have consistently extended those rights to other peoples. And have fought wars to extend to other peoples. And born sacrifices to carry to other peoples. So if you want to make it about race, and we actually get the data out during the election cycle, it will have quite the opposite effect that advocates of ‘playing the race card’ will intend. That’s because white people are beginning to act like the minority that they are becoming. And in that process, they have, and will continue to cease feeling guilt over slavery, or their dominance over the expansion of the institutions of prosperity that we call capitalism, and will increasingly act as does the Jewish lobby: in self interest. And for African Americans, if whites lose their guilt and become a minority, and act as diasporic capitalists like the Jews, how is the rest of the world going to treat Africans and African Americans? Playing the race card is a losing proposition. So lets just stick with having the argument over the welfare state and collectivism versus classical liberalism and individualism.

  • On The Myth of Sisyphus

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2568Reflections On The Myth of Sisyphus.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-04-21 10:25:00 UTC

  • French posted this short article on our education ‘bubble’. I”m trying to figure

    http://mises.org/daily/5211/Conventional-Education-Will-Go-the-Way-of-Farming?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4da8bacf251b69e9%2C0Doug French posted this short article on our education ‘bubble’. I”m trying to figure out if it’s thought provoking. Maybe. I don’t think we’ll save on education in the future. I think that we overspend on irrelevant education, but that we could spend much less on relevant education. Unfortunately, under Democratic Secular Humanism, the university is the church. And good luck getting the church to change it’s doctr

    Source date (UTC): 2011-04-15 17:42:00 UTC

  • Ayn Rand’s ‘Selfishness’ Is A Play On Words In Order To Hook Your Attention

    Selfishness, as defined by Rand, is a play on words in order to hook people’s attention. It is a classic marketing trick. It assists her in marketing her ideas specifically because the word ‘selfish’ has negative connotations. While she uses the word ‘selfishness’ the general idea is used by other writes as any one of: individualism, responsibility, enlightened self interest, or pragmatic self interest. The purpose of the idea of self interest is epistemic: you can’t KNOW enough to work for other people’s interest in a division of knowledge and labor. In a division of knowledge and labor, you can’t KNOW very much. We’re necessarily ignorant. Our view of the world is very limited. It’s simply a proscription for ‘think globally, act locally’. So, self interest, or selfishness is simply a play on words for the purpose of making us look at individual responsibility inversely – as taking care of others by taking care of ourselves, rather than as the duty that we have to one another to take care of ourselves. Rand was trying very hard to market individualism and freedom during a period of socialist expansion, when there was rampant false attribution of success to the soviet model by western sycophantic pseudo intellectuals – the soviet model that had destroyed her family. So she is making a play on words to hook your attention. There is nothing in rand that is not, at least in implication, in Adam Smith or Frederic Bastiat. Hayek tries to remind us that the source of freedom that we know as Classical Liberalism was a product of the English empirical pursuit of science, and the analysis of data that had accumulated by the 18th century, as the middle class grew in size. But that at the same time, the French were pursuing the concept of freedom as a REACTION to the english, by RATIONAL or verbal reasoning, rather than by data – the germanic protestant versus latin catholic approach to life shows up everywhere. These rational arguments are moral arguments. Moral arguments are by definition specious. But they are easier to digest by the common person, and easier to manipulate by politicians. In large part, the language of freedom was distributed by translation that were made from french literature using the french interpretation in rational terms of english empirical principles and reasoning. So the language we use today to discuss freedom has become the rational of the french, rather than the empirical of the english. This french rationalism is where marx obtained the foundation of socialism and communism.

  • The Remaining Marxists Are Not Trying To End Poverty

    From a Comment on Cafe Hayek: “Marxists must define poverty as a relative phenomenon. Otherwise, they couldn’t in good conscience be marxists.” Or perhaps, better said, they wouldn’t have a semi-rational reason to justify class envy, and therefore attempt to obtain unearned social status through political power rather than through market service of others.

    [callout]Social status is important. It’s a cognitive necessity. It tells us who to imitate.[/callout]

    The left’s desire is not to end poverty, it is instead, the desire to alter one’s natural, biologically and environmentally determined social status either by gaining access to unearned income or by gaining status through access to political power. And social status is not irrelevant. Social status is important. It’s a cognitive necessity. It tells us who to imitate.

  • Anarcho Capitalism Is As Logically Ridiculous As Marx’s Communism – But Both Have Something To Teach Us

    Marxist doctrine states that steps are required to create the utopian communist society. The eventual result of marxism’s destruction of the system of property was for the purpose of creating an anarchic society where everyone had what they wanted, and wanted nothing more – the fixed-pie fantasy. The state was only necessary as a first step in order to make it possible to get to that utopia. Socialism was simply the first step in reaching the marxian utopian dream of the non-propertarian, anarchic, left libertarian society. Socialism means ‘state ownership of the means of production’. Communism means that there is no property whatsoever or the need for it. Communism was the next evolutionary step after Socialism. People tend to treat communism and socialism as synonyms but they are not. They are a sequential strategy for achieving the marxist utopian society.

    [callout]Once you understand how ridiculously impossible communism is, you can also understand how ridiculously impossible anarcho capitalist libertarianism is.[/callout]

    Once you understand how ridiculously impossible communism is, you can also understand how ridiculously impossible anarcho capitalist libertarianism is. Socialism is impossible because of the problem of knowledge (distributed and fragmentary), prices (provide the information system), and incentives (encourage people to produce). Communism is impossible because humans never cease to want new stimulation and because we are unequal, and our reproductive strategy insures rotation such that we shall never be equal. So effectively, communism is impossible because populations need property in order to produce prosperity. Anarcho capitalism is impossible because of the problem of creating and maintaining complex forms of property. Men will no more stop seeking better mates and more stimuli, than they will stop seeking to benefit by fraud theft and violence. We need political institutions to channel men’s actions into market activity rather than hedonism or predation. We need very few of those institutions. and the fewer the better. But we need them. If you think communism is impossible, then logically anarcho capitalism is impossible. They both depend on a belief in the nature of man that is counter to self-reflection, observation and history.

  • Americans May Be Wiser Than We Think After All

    Newsweek did another poll that purports to measure our cultural ignorance.

    How Dumb Are We? NEWSWEEK gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test–38 percent failed. The country’s future is imperiled by our ignorance.

    Which brings to mind a chain of reasoning: 1) To increase productivity and therefore decrease prices, we must all participate in a division of knowledge and labor. 2) As productivity in the division of labor increases, the total stock of human knowledge increases. 3) As the stock of human knowledge increases, each of our shares of that knowledge decreases. 4) As our individual shares of that knowledge decrease, our knowledge consists largely of those things that we can act upon given the resources at our disposal. In other words, people aren’t so much ignorant as they are knowledgeable about what actually matters. They may not have room for the irrelevant.

    [callout]The general perception, and the presupposition of the boomer-era article’s sentiments, is that political knowledge is valuable.[/callout]

    The general perception, and the presupposition of the boomer-era article’s sentiments, is that political knowledge is valuable. And it implies that we can possess the knowledge needed to understand the issues that our government must manage given it’s current constitution. And it further implies that political freedom is a ‘good’ – when, it’s evident from the record of history that personal freedom is absolutely a good, but political freedom is simply a necessary evil in order to prevent the government from forming a predatory bureaucracy, and treating the population as it’s property. So people only need the minimum knowledge of government needed to preserve their personal freedom. People aren’t ignorant. They’re too ignorant of political knowledge and economic principles to make political and policy decisions. And that’s not surprising because political decisions are of necessity made in ignorance. And decisions are made in ignorance either out of political necessity or political contrivance. They must be. Because we do not possess sufficient knowledge or DATA in government to make any other form of decision OTHER than decisions of political necessity and political contrivance. Politics has become ridiculous and irrational because at the scale of our empire, the data no longer exists with which to make rational arguments in real time. The political structure cannot operate without data. And so, like the chinese, we have devolved into sentimental moral arguments rather than practical, political and economic arguments — the furtive gestures and spittled pontification of silly Keynesian probabilists to the contrary. So it’s good that people are ignorant of it. There is no value in the study of falsehoods. Maybe Americans are wiser than we think after all.

  • tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker sa

    http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/31/japans-nuclear-rescuers-inevitable-die-weeks/”Speaking tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker said: “My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation.” – There really are men of honor left in this world.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-03-31 16:24:00 UTC

  • opportunity criticism

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2421Equal opportunity criticism.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-03-12 19:48:00 UTC

  • Play. Priceless. Very well acted. I kept thinking that adding the characters of

    http://freudslastsession.com/Short Play. Priceless. Very well acted. I kept thinking that adding the characters of Nietzsche and Tolkien would have really made for an interesting evening. I’d side with Nietzsche and Tolkien over Lewis and Freud any day. 🙂

    Wanted to catch the version of Macbeth that’s scheduled but it hasn’t started yet.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-03-12 19:30:00 UTC