Curt Doolittle

Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

  • Paul Krugman Says “No” To Responses To Critics. I Explain The Consequences

    Would I Please Respond? I get a lot of comments along the lines of “Would you please respond to the criticism of your work in ______?” Um, no. Do you have any idea how many articles there are out there attacking me? I literally don’t have the time to respond to them all, or even to differentiate between the usual sliming and actually interesting critiques. Just saying.

    Paul, You know, it might not hurt to have some grad student compile the top five criticisms and respond to them. (You would certainly have plenty of volunteers.) Most of the time, I disagree with the preferences implicit in your goals, not your analysis. These differences aren’t arguments over some form of absolute truth but disputes founded in preferences, demographics, social order, culture, class and in race warfare. Your egalitarianism is mathematically accurate in application. But your failure to incorporate into your rhetoric that these differences are meaningful to people, and these differences bear material costs to those who you impose your egalitarianism upon — including costs to monetary, cultural, status, and political capital. Each of these costs affects their consequential opportunity costs. Taking people’s money is one thing. Taking their culture, their political power, and their social status is another. Taking it and funding things they absolutely disagree with vehemently is something else (foreign wars, or immigration). Imposing a permanent social cost structure upon a people who have a very uncertain view of the future, or one that is far more pessimistic than you do is not a matter of scientific argument. It’s one of fantastic and deceptive narrative. Unless you address these issues, both you and your critics will continue to wrestle with scientific but inapplicable, and possibly deceptive arguments on your end, and sentimental and inarticulate arguments on the conservative end. Both of you are struggling for power, the power to implement your ideas. Power is not obtained by honest debate. It is obtained by pragmatism. And whether you understand it or not, you’re talking past them just as much as they past you. But if you do address these issues, you will bring into the open the basic problem: the USA is a domestic as well as international empire with significant tensions both internally and externally. The loss of our ability to issue debt is simply ending our ability to mask these differences with consumer credit. And the underlying duress is emerging with the economic circumstances. Under duress people revert to tribalism. They do so because it is smart for them to do so. Conservatism has led to stability for centuries. It doesn’t have to be right. It just has to increase the cost of change enough that the most stable, least dangerous model evolves. Pick on the neocons for seizing their opportunity for Roman glory. That’s rational. They failed. Pick on conservatives for fighting socialism and communism, and rejecting redistribution of status, cultural dominance, and political power, and you’re simply wrong. Conservatism is a sentiment. That does not mean the sentiment is founded on irrational principles. It means the principles are either un-articulated, unable to be articulated, or people are unwilling to articulate them. And at least since Burke, if not since the English civil war, conservative sentiments have been very helpful for Anglo civilization. Perhaps even the cause of it. Perhaps the honest answer is to lead by addressing the real issue. Not circumventing it. It is rhetorically and politically convenient for both sides to avoid the real issues. But if we discussed the real issue there might be room for compromise.

  • Review: War by Sebastian Junger

    A work of personal experience by a reporter cohabitating with soldiers in Afghanistan. A work that states the patently obvious. At least, patently obvious to anyone with testosterone: That men fight for the men beside them. That the bond between soldiers is the greatest emotional bond that men can experience. That the platoon is approximately the same size as the maximum survivable hunter gatherer group. That this level of in-group altruism is particular to man. In that sense, the book is perhaps interesting to the common man. In the political sense, it is yet another silly book by silly people, for silly people.

    [callout]Or let me put it this way: there isn’t anything in that part of the world that’s more interesting to do than go hunt and kill people. It’s status enhancing. It’s entertaining. And it’s simply more interesting than the absolutely fruitless and boring alternatives.[/callout]

    I explain to people often, universally at their amazement, why it’s so hard to convert people in that part of the world to something on the order of advanced civilization. It’s not a complicated reason. It’s that in a world where farming is so fruitless, the land so barren, and the civilization so lacking in infrastructure, that the comfort, thrill, joy, and sense of success that men can possess as raiders is impossible to replicate elsewhere. Or let me put it this way: there isn’t anything in that part of the world that’s more interesting to do than go hunt and kill people. It’s status enhancing. It’s entertaining. And it’s simply more interesting than the absolutely fruitless and boring alternatives. Our boys are captured in prisons we call classrooms. Forbidden to move. Forbidden to compete. Forbidden to display dominance. Forbidden in fact, to be male. Forbidden to interact with the world except with words, like girls. These boys disassociate from society because of these deprivations. They play video games. They play sports. They wear clothing that represents abandonment. They don’t enter college. They just simply give up on society. They don’t ‘own’ responsibility for society any longer. THey don’t want it. And in many respects, they can’t handle it. Because they have been so sensory-deprived that they have no capacity, nor any learned method of how to do so. How many of these boys, when deprived of modern entertainment and food surpluses, when given the chance, would happily carry around rifles and grenades, and with joy, enthusiasm, and wonder, attack an entrenched enemy sequestered in small numbers, in fixed positions, on the defensive?

    [callout]How many of (our) boys, when deprived of modern entertainment and food surpluses, when given the chance, would happily carry around rifles and grenades, and with joy, enthusiasm, and wonder, attack an entrenched enemy sequestered in small numbers, in fixed positions, on the defensive?[/callout]

    How many of our current soldiers, if told ‘select your team, select your weapons and ammunition, take your time, and kill everyone on the other side you can, while taking the fewest casualties of your own’ would not happily join up in record numbers? It’s not a small number. It’s just surprising that Junger, or anyone for that matter, would fail to understand these basic human traits. That is, unless you’re a member of the church of secular humanism. Where you live an abstracted view of christianity. Where you think that submission and safety are the same as competition, winning and experience. It’s also surprising that any military historian, any military strategist, would fail to understand Kegan’s Thesis: that ‘winning’ is a cultural, and perhaps, civilization-defining construct that has been inherited and reinforced for millennia. And that the western concept of winning is pointless in central asia. Indeed, pointless among any of the Raiding-Cultures. And that in turn, how one could fail to understand just how endemic the ‘Raiding’ concept is to central asian and arab thinking. And how they cannot conceive of any other, just as how westerners can rarely conceive of any other. And once that Tribal-Raider-versus-Heroic-Army is understood, it becomes obvious that islam is a Raider’s Political Strategy rather than a western heroic army strategy, or western ‘religion’ in any sense of the word. Or more strategically, the raider sits and waits until you’re vunlerable to strike, and the heroic army seeks the defining clash. Therefore: 1) We cannot win a war fighting it on our terms. We can only win the war fighting it on their terms. 2) It is enjoyable, and even preferable for many men to live in combat, versus the tedious and boring farming or industrial life. It is only when the benefits of capitalism and trade are sufficient to be vaguely fascinating, and the freedoms are sufficiently broad, competitive and entertaining, that men will, on occasion, for some period of time, find peace all that interesting.

    [callout]… each civilization embodies the behaviors of it’s early military traditions. Bushmen and simple herders. Plain and desert raiders. Western individualist river and forest farmers, boatmen and horsemen. Eastern hierarchical farmers. And the jews, hindus and buddhists who abandoned all political pursuit (land holding) for submission and mysticism.[/callout]

    Every historian who studies the vastness of human history, for the purpose of learning what is there, rather than projecting upon it what he desires to find in it, will eventually come to the conclusion that each civilization embodies the behaviors of it’s early military traditions. Bushmen and simple herders. Plain and desert raiders. Western individualist river and forest farmers, boatmen and horsemen. Eastern hierarchical farmers. And the jews, hindus and buddhists who abandoned all political pursuit (land holding) for submission and mysticism. If you don’t know this obvious bit of human cultural development, then its only because you weren’t given any history by the same cadre of pacifists that are destroying our boys minds one package of unexercised neurons at a time.

  • The Obama “Small Business” Speech Impediment?

    I’m watching Obama talk about the new small business jobs bill on the news. And I”m struck by the observation that he has a really hard time saying ‘small business’. While any phrase with the world ‘government’ in it, simply rolls comfortably off his tongue. Freudian. Absolutely Freudian.

  • We Won’t Stop Bloggers From Telling Us Otherwise. This Isn’t A Pursuit Of Truth.

    In an essay that has attracted some interest from the blogging community, Kartik Athreya of the Richmond Fed, correctly states that there are political hacks misusing economic arguments. But she misses the point.

    Economics is Hard. Don’t Let Bloggers Tell You Otherwise “In the wake of the recent financial crisis, bloggers seem unable to resist commentating routinely about economic events. It may always have been thus, but in recent times, the manifold dimensions of the financial crisis and associated recession have given fillip to something bigger than a cottage industry. Examples include Matt Yglesias, John Stossel, Robert Samuelson, and Robert Reich. In what follows I will argue that it is exceedingly unlikely that these authors have anything interesting to say about economic policy. This sounds mean-spirited, but it’s not meant to be, and I’ll explain why.”

    [callout] Bloggers then, like everyone else, are arguing against error with error. Against sentiment with sentiment. Against bias with bias. Against foolishness with foolishness.[/callout]

    “The question is: can they provide you, the reader, with an internally consistent analysis of a dynamic system subject to random shocks populated by thoughtful actors whose collective actions must be rendered feasible? For many questions, I and my colleagues can, and for those that the profession cannot, the blogging crowd probably can’t either.” “…just below the surface of all the chatter that appears in blogs and op-ed pages, there is a vibrant, highly competitive, and transparent scientific enterprise hard at work. At this point, the public remains largely unaware of this work. In part, it is because few of the economists engaged in serious science spend any of their time connecting to the outer world (Greg Mankiw and Steve Williamson are two counterexamples that essentially prove the rule), leaving that to a group almost defined by its willingness to make exaggerated claims about economics and overrepresent its ability to determine clear answers.”

    [callout]So while I laud your ambitions, it seems, that you have fallen into the same error that you accuse of others: to pretend to possess knowledge that you do not.[/callout]

    In a polity where we have traded traditional moral principles for the abstractions of economic theory as the means of resolving differences between the ambitions of our politicians, and where at the same time, economics is a nascent, and perhaps insufficient body of knowledge to adequately inform both our polity and its leaders, both sides of any debate are required to rely upon the accumulated erroneous judgements and confirmation biases inherent in their constituents. Bloggers then, like everyone else, are arguing against error with error. Against sentiment with sentiment. Against bias with bias. Against foolishness with foolishness. Your analysis assumes that economists can be of much help in the public debate. When in fact, there is also a body of economic philosophy that states that the entire DSEM, as well as equilibrium itself, and the descriptive, probabilistic, non-causal mathematics employed in it, are insufficient methods for representing and forecasting economic interactions. In fact, the great progress of economists over the past fifty years has largely been to supply quantitative proof that confirms the traditional descriptions of the consistency of human error, bias and information asymmetry — a set of errors which only needed exposition because of the false pronouncements of the theorists who created the idealistic models suitable for simplistic mathematical modeling.

    [callout]Economics as we know it is a process of describing the past. Politics is the process of inventing the future. The difference between description and invention is infinite.[/callout]

    In other words, politics has little to do with economics. And all economic science seems to have accomplished, is to trade one set of traditional wisdoms for another set of speculations. And while you refer to economics as ‘scientific’, the political use of economic theory has been anything but scientific. And to a large degree, the immature nature of economic theory combined with the foolishness of political rhetoric, has created as much harm as good. In the comfort and support it gave to communism and socialism alone, the record of economic theory is the record of bloodshed, fraud, deception and heady murder. So while I laud your ambitions, it seems, that you have fallen into the same error that you accuse of others: to pretend to possess knowledge that you do not. The greater economists who do much of the great work, often refrain from the political discourse, largely because they possess sufficient wisdom to know that it is a pointless exercise. Economics as we know it is a process of describing the past. Politics is the process of inventing the future. The difference between description and invention is infinite.

  • A Tiff : Hoppe and Tom Fleming and My Response

    Hans Hoppe posted what I thought was a sentimental statement on the five year history of his movement on the libertarian web site VDARE. It’s titled The Property And Freedom Society—Reflections After Five Years In this article, he gives us his interpretation of the history of his organization, the Property And Freedom Society. (of which I am a member.) It describes, as all members of these political groups tend to, the reason why the conservative and liberal wings broke up at The John Randolph Club: they were based upon a relationship between Murray Rothbard, a libertarian, and Tom Fleming, a conservative. And after Rothbard’s death, the society broke apart because there was no replacement for Rothbard that could work comfortably with Fleming. There is no mystery here. This is how the partnership process works. When one partner dies, the remaining partner tends to hold onto the previous set of commitments, and the new partners want to be seen as new peers, and to write new commitments.

    [callout] I care that my waiter is pleasant. I care that my intellectuals are either correct or insightful. [/callout]

    However, Hoppe states that Tom Fleming is ‘a difficult person’. Which is not just hoppe’s opinion, but pretty much everyone else I’ve mets opinion. And I’m not sure it’s an insult. I know I’m considered difficult by plenty of people. Intellectuals are rare, and for them, the unsophisticated are often a lot of work to deal with – it’s just frustrating. Coming to terms with people who have different metaphysics from you, is awfully hard work, and very painful at times. It’s just irritating. And these petty realities are just part of the problem of being a human being. I think Tom has done good work. I think a lot of people think he’s difficult. I think a lot of people are put off by Hoppe. That doesn’t matter to me. I just want to know if they’re right or not. I care that my waiter is pleasant. I care that my intellectuals are either correct or insightful. Their manners are immaterial to me. Tom’s response only served to confirm Hoppe’s statement. The title says it all Hans Hoppe Welcomes You to his Fantasy Island Now I’ve only met Tom I think once, and I’m not sure where it was. And he seemed an intelligent and civil guy. But, I was kind of thrown by his response. You should read it. Myself, I am over-reactive on purpose. I found that as a rhetorical device, false-hostility will give your opponent incentive to invest in, and stay with a complex argument — and that when you’re done, and get to agreement it’s more satisfying. I learned it from watching Friedman, who never gave in. And I supposed I picked up some of it from Hoppe.

    [callout]false-hostility will give your opponent incentive to invest in, and stay with a complex argument[/callout]

    The comments, per usual, are more interesting than the author’s post. My Response below is visible at Chronicles Magazine here. This is a very interesting series of posts to read. I’m a supporter of both LVMI and PFS. (I have given them money.) I’m probably one of the most literate members of the faction in the private sector. And I agree that it’s a tough crowd to spend time with. Yes, it was extremely difficult to get past the doctrinal attitude and Randian cultishness that you are complaining about in order to understand and make use of the philosophical content that’s in their line of thinking. What made it worthwhile was the number of answers provided by them, and the vast amount of effort they put into educating people of all stripes that made it easy to become involved in this branch of the history of ideas.

    [callout]I have never found Hoppe’s theatre anything other than entertaining[/callout]

    First, I don’t really care about someone’s rhetorical posture. I have never found Hoppe’s theatre anything other than entertaining, and have found him helpful and a good mentor if you’re worth his time – which I can count on having received in seconds or minutes at best. And if you accepted praxeology (I don’t for technical reasons having to do with closed systems of logic – and praxeology is a subset of behavior and so it’s a falsely closed system) you’d also look at the world as Hoppe does: if you disagree you’re just wrong because it’s logically impossible to disagree. I am pretty certain he actually believes it. And I have never pressured him on any point and found anything other than honesty underneath his posture. This posture is an incredibly effective, controversial, and therefore valuable, rhetorical device. But it’s important to understand that it’s a rhetorical device. Every single TV Producer understands this, or we wouldn’t have talking-head shows to entertain ourselves with. Part of his knowledge base, (as was Friedmans and Rothbards) is this somewhat intentionally antagonistic posture. It undermines the opposite posture: opting out of the argument. Again, this is an ancient rhetorical technique in the european model. In fact, I suspect that the members of this blog, who have left comments above, do not understand the emotive rhetorical device they themselves are using. Or rather, that Hoppe is baiting in order to obtain engagement, and most of the comments above are attempting to force methodological conformity derived from assumptions of equality under the civic republican tradition – the presupposition of majority sentiment rather than superiority of ones argument. While I’m not certain, Hoppe’s method may in fact, be the only device possible to use against the method that you’re using. And I think you’re relying upon that sentiment rather than the veracity of any argument you possess. I don’t think that needs to be the case. I think that your method lacks an analytical foundation and you’re stuck between a desire for positivist solutions to unarticulated moral problems, and relying upon majority sentiment and tradition as an argument. (WHich is the default human position in any field of endeavor.)

    [callout]Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises have fallen into, or intentionally embraced, a logical Godelian trap in an effort to find a pseudo-scientific device with which to fight the pseudo-scientific positivism underlying the rationalizations of democratic socialism.[/callout]

    Unlike your majority position, I think Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises have fallen into, or intentionally embraced, a logical Godelian trap in an effort to find a pseudo-scientific device with which to fight the pseudo-scientific positivism underlying the rationalizations of democratic socialism. So while they have advanced the body of thought, they have failed to date. Hayek failed as well, at least, to make a strong enough argument, because he relied too much upon psychology rather than calculation — and the two wings of theorists failed, (Along with Talcott Parsons) to actually uncover the problem. Despite these failings, as a research program the Anarchists have proved very fruitful. While Rothbardianism is flawed, for technical reasons this group members would not understand without quite a bit of unwilling-and-skeptically-expended effort, the structure of Misesian, Rothbardian and Hoppian argument is a strong analytical foundation for discussing what have been, for all of the history of thought, undefinable abstractions. [callout]Hoppian argument is a strong analytical foundation for discussing what have been, for all of the history of thought, undefinable abstractions.[/callout] They haves provided an alternative framework (property and calculation) to the process of balance-of-powers-through-debate, which is the technology of republican government. Or rather, they have show that WITHOUT reliance on a calculative framework, that rhetorical debate devolves into either error or fraud. They see property as a moral argument rather than necessary argument – and they do so because they failed to articulate the full spectrum of human behavior by relying on the easy-epistemology allowed by the records left from the exchange of money. They did not include the invisible institutional economy of sacrifices that people make by NOT doing things with their property, their time, their bodies and their money. I suspect the Misesians make these errors because they are a little too enamored of infinite property rights — a bias which stops them from seeing and articulating the limits of property rights, and how those limits can be calculated. (Calculation being necessary when time, permutation and content are beyond human perception without such tools.) And I suspect that they intuit, if not understand, that if they did explain that full spectrum of human action, that they’d be confronted with the necessity, rationality, and morality of redistribution and public services.

    [callout]Rothbardianism and Misesianism are an attempt to create a luddite religion based upon trade, rather than a technical political order based upon land holding, trade route holding, market participation, coordination, calculation and adaptation.[/callout]

    Rothbardianism and Misesianism are an attempt to create a luddite religion based upon trade, rather than a technical political order based upon land holding, trade route holding, market participation, coordination, calculation and adaptation. I suspect that this is simply an unconscious attempt to justify the Jewish maternal minority sentiment that comes from non-land-holding disaporic people, as opposed to the european majority fraternal sentiment of land-holding soldiers. These are sentiments, derivations and residues that we rarely if ever understand of ourselves. This Misesian and Rothbardian jewish wing is in direct contrast to the Hayekian and Christian wing’s sentiments of group persistence in order to be able to defend and hold land, and in holding and defending land, hold and defend markets and trade routes. These sentiments are the underlying difference between the Jewish and Christian wings of libertarianism: jewish reliance on words and systems of though and christian reliance on the republican and militaristic models of land holding. We cannot escape our Hayekian knowledge no matter how hard we try. and in turn, these two libertarian programs are attempts to find a solution to the problem of maintaining freedom and prosperity without having to confront the reality of the necessity of using violence to retain that freedom – when that freedom originated uniquely in the west precisely because it was obtained by, and held by, violence. In other words our political dialog is distracted by the contra-rational desire to ignore the necessity of using violence to retain sufficient power to retain freedom. [callout]our political dialog is distracted by the contra-rational desire to ignore the necessity of using violence to retain sufficient power to retain freedom.[/callout] The question remains which wing of classical liberal thought, whether it be the ‘liberal’ factions or the conservative factions, have made progress in articulating a framework for political economy once the epistemological boundary conditions imposed on the republican model by hard money were broken by the adoption of fiat money. The Austrian prescription is a return to the gold standard. Which is wrong, because the insurance provided by fiat money, or at least, paper money, is too valuable to ignore. This is simply the only solution that they can think of – and since they’re economists rather than information architects, they fall into a selection bias. We must understand that Misesian and Rothbardian thinking is that of luddites, just as was Marx – they are trying to return to a technology they understand without understanding why it’s necessary and what alternatives that there may be. These regressive ideas are conservative solutions — historical solutions to a problem of increasing individual participation in a market consisting of larger and larger numbers of people with increasingly localized and fragmentary knowledge, and operating in real time, in order to exploit opportunities that present themselves because of necessary and permanent asymmetry of information in a large population engaged in diverse production. The gold standard It is not the only solution. There are others. There is a very good one in particular. But you cannot understand that solution unless you understand the value of the methodology used in the Misesian, rothbardian, and hoppian models, and the limits of knowledge brought to bear by Popper and Hayek. This information-weakness in our existing political and economic institutions is the underlying problem of political economy with the civic republican model — If you can fathom it from the few and admittedly abstract words I’ve posted here. The problem is one of practical epistemology that allows experimentation and innovation without exposing us to the risk of human hubris on one end, and corruption, theft, and slavery on the other. [callout]The problem is one of practical epistemology that allows experimentation and innovation without exposing us to the risk of human hubris on one end, and corruption, theft, and slavery on the other.[/callout] And debates like this one over form and protocol, manners and arrogance, are frankly beneath me, and should be beneath anyone who is concerned about discovering real solutions to the problem of political economy. Both sides of this dispute, from my standpoint, are simply acknowledging their failure when they rely upon ideological, methodological, or rhetorical conformity as a means of argumentative discovery of the solutions we seek. All I read into Hoppe’s piece was sentimental reflection, and tame taunting elitism. Perhaps this is one of those debates among academics that is so important precisely because the stakes are so small. And I don’t think the above retort does much to disprove hoppe’s taunt. The tactical response would be to tease him and therefore disprove him rather than reinforce his position. And the real argument here is that everyone within this absurdly minority movement, just like all desperate little academic movements, is that it’s desperate for followers. And not operating logically, but instead, using silly socio-political tricks because we’re all desperately seeking confirmation biases in the face of a problem we cannot comprehend, rather than understanding each other’s position and desperately seeking a solution to political economy. Libertarianism is a fantastic research program within the branch of conservatism. And the world needs the movement simply because conservatives have failed to muster and articulate a rational and technical alternative to encroaching socialism. Historicism is insufficient because HISTORICAL MODELS FAILED. EACH OF THEM FAILED. The Austrians and Anarchists are very close to providing a rational solution to political economy. I suspect that they (myself included perhaps) will fail for the same reasons that this silly dispute of egos and manners illustrates. Even if someone were to publish an essay with the solution in it, and the truth of it were patently obvious, I would venture that everyone in every faction would desperately seek to use whatever content was inside that essay to justify his own position in order to keep his followers or demonstrate that he was right all along. Hume told us what the problem is. Kant failed to find a solution. A legion of political economists have spent a hundred and fifty years trying to find an answer. They came closest in the 1930’s. But Mises, Hayek and Parsons failed, just as Weber and Pareto failed. And because they failed the political sector reached out to Friedman, which provided a temporary solution even if it was the wrong one, and Hayek, because his sentiment was correct even if his solutions were faulty. The conservatives hoped to get enough people into the property society that they could counteract the dependence society. But they used general liquidity (cheap money) rather than direct investment, and so the money was used for consumption not innovation and increases in productivity. The liberals, having converted us from a saving to a debt society, the conservatives hoped to alter it, but only accomplished further indebtedness. Only the libertarians have attempted to reconvert us to mans greatest innovation: the saving and investment society. [callout]Only the libertarians have attempted to reconvert us to mans greatest innovation: the saving and investment society.[/callout] But the way we solve our political problem is not debt, or even monetary policy. It is to create an innovation over the greek city state and the roman empire and the anglo mercantilist and american consumer republic. And to understand why we need to innovate beyond that model: the limits of human perception in a complex division of knowledge and labor. And that when we break with hard money, AND at the same time pool information (accumulate quantities in categories using numeric values of abstract objects we call property) we launder the necessary causal information needed to make rational decisions. And in doing so we also remove the incentive for people to obtain and hold that information, and to be disciplined and truthful in their valuations. The information needed to evaluate Property cannot be embodied in numbers. It’s a perishable not conveyed by the number. Numbers and values are subjective judgements, not objective truths. This is the error of both liberal positivists and the general political fantasy of scientific politics sought by the socialists. [callout]The information needed to evaluate Property cannot be embodied in numbers. It’s a perishable not conveyed by the number. Numbers and values are subjective judgements, not objective truths. This is the error of both liberal positivists and the general political fantasy of scientific politics sought by the socialists.[/callout] The solution is to fix our institutions of banking and accounting, so that we possess sufficient information to make rational decisions under the economically stable civic republican model. This change in institutions is a technical problem, not a philosophical, religious or cultural one. And as a technical problem, it is a solvable problem. It does not ask anyone to ‘believe’ anything. Faith is not a strategy. Hope is not a tactic. As weber said, all advancement in institutions is calculative.

    [callout]it is bureaucracy that is a danger to us, not government.[/callout]

    The second half is to understand that it is bureaucracy that is a danger to us, not government. A bureaucrat lives outside the market, as does a priest, a politician, a union laborer, or a welfare recipient. They are no different – they are class descriptions of the same behavior. But government is the means by which we concentrate all forms of capital. It is a joint stock company whose membership is paid for by respect for property rights, and frankly, whose dividends are paid for in public services and redistribution. The problem we enter into is when public services become the purpose of government, rather than the concentration of capital necessary to provide the joint stock company with competitive economic advantage so that there are returns great enough that redistribution can be performed in one form or another. Aside from the transforming from the saving society to the debt society, the transformation of government from creating wealth to consuming it is the artifact of the 20th century. It is far easier for the houses of government to debate over spoils, than it is to debate over the creation of prosperity so that it can distribute the spoils. [callout]Aside from the transforming from the saving society to the debt society, the transformation of government from creating wealth to consuming it is the artifact of the 20th century.[/callout] The anarchists are working on solving, and have largely solved, the problem of bureaucracy. And the solution is not anarchy. The solution is privatization of the bureaucracy, and the improvement of our institutions such that the knowledge that was provided by individuals THROUGH hard money, can be provided by individuals through shared investment in borrowing from the public’s future commitments in exchange for mutual gain, while retaining accountability, and with those who are willing to be accountable because they possess knowledge by which to make rational decisions. Under this model, the government may make rational decisions about investments, and we are protected from enslavement by either debt or the bureaucracy. This is too much content for a posting, too poorly articulated for the scope of the problem. But I was trying to put the different factions into a context so that we could focus on the real problem: finding an answer to providing institutions that deliver both freedom and prosperity. And for my side, I consider Hans Hoppe a gift to all of us. He’s innovative, creative, pedagogically gifted, and most of all, funny.

  • NYT On Libertarianism

    The NYT posted an article today titled The Economics of Libertarianism, Revealed. And the usual NYT crowd followed with critical comments. Which is useful. Because we get to see what the proletariat think of a subject about which they know little to nothing. This is a very odd set of comments. Heresay on one end and incompetence and error on the other. Desipte that libertarianism is the most fully articulated political philosophy we currently possess, it is both incomplete, its authors mix semi-charismatic language with reason, and they start from a convenient and erroneous premise: non-violence. And thereby simplify the problem of political economy dramatically enough that they overstate the ease of attaining their goals. As a theorist in this field, I’ll try to correct some statements made here: 1) there are a numberer of libertarian sects. They share a preference forindividual freedom and property rights. But they vary greatly from a branch of articulated classical liberalism (cato – english sentiments) to articulated conservatism (hayekians – german sentiments) to articulated radical anarchists (rothbardians – jewish sentiments). You cannot take ‘libertariansim’ as a coherent body of work. Or better stated, you cannot take the words of any thinker at face value: most if not all human debate is an attempt to find a rational explanation for sentiments. And sentiments are residues of our cognitive biases. (Pareto) 2) Libertarianism is NOT anti-government it is anti-bureaucracy. This is the issue that confuses everyone by incorrectly framimg the debate. The terms Government and Bureaucracy are not synonyms. And libertarians are both right, rational, and supported by data when they argue against bureaucracy. It says that humans in bureaucracies (whether private or public) once they become insulated from the market and prices, live by self interest without the market function that puts their self interest to good use in the service of others. It is possible to live a life outside of the market by the homeless or hippie lifestyle, by making enough money to live on your wealth alone, or by joining the bureaucracy and simply living off the efforts of others, and ignoring their signals – prices. The underlying theory of libertarianism is a) economic calculation is competitively impossible without prices and the market. b) market incentives are necessary to create a prosperous advanced society. c) our cultural institutions are economic strategies that, much like our sentiments, we do not yet fully understand and they should be treated cautiously. Most importantly, our most cherished values are often false: people are unequal, cultures are not equal in value, diversity breeds discontent not happiness, people are racist, classist and culturist, and it’s in their interest to be so, even if it is not in their interest for legislation to be so. (Really.) d) Leglislation as we understand it is infereior to credit as a means by which we can change the behavior of people in a society. We must move from the law-society to the credit society, and our government is not organized to make that change, while the private sector is. Therefore we must push our ‘bureaucracy’ into the private secctor where the market will kill off organizations once they are no longer useful. e) insurance companies taht are highly regulated will do a better job than the governmetn of regulating most market activity. But we have over-corporialized both banking, insurance and management. In simple terms, your banker should personally back your loan, and not be able to resell it. Same for insurance. This is a complex topic but we cannot abstract all accountabilty without losing the knowledge to be accountable with in the process. f) All bureaucracies are anti-market, anti-prosperity, self-serving, eventually corrupt, and stagnate the culture and prey upon the citizenry. The market puts our selfishness to better use than the bureaucracy does. It’s that simple. The libertarian strategy is to push as much of the FUNCTON of government into the private sector where iti is subject to competitive market functions so that we can prevent the bureaucracy from forming. Because it is the bureaucracy, or, the market-exiting of people within the bureaucracy that is the problem, not government. None of the libertarians is right, word for word. They are attemtping to find a solution to a perrenial problem: coordinatoin and ocoperatin in a dynamic dividsion of knowledge and labor. They intuit solutoins based upon their cultural heritage then try to articulate solutions in a long term, vast attempt, to explain what it is that we do, and why it works. We’ve had markets for a long time. Economits don’t invent anything. They just try to explain it the best they can. Libertairnism is the best, most fully articulated political philosophy we have. But that does not mean it can be implemented without an ‘event’. Because our government is not structured to replace itself. And the citizenry will always favor democratically imposed tyrrany, commonly called Bonapartism, and teh certainty of it, over freedom.

  • Hubris, Regulation, Artificial Life and Zombies

    Mariam Melikadze at Adamsmith.org references the movie 28 Days in order to criticize irrational and premature regulation.

    “And so, much like of the opening scenes of an apocalyptic movie, science has reached a great milestone, … The era of bioengineered creatures has officially begun. … But in all apocalyptic movies the great invention inevitably goes wrong. The environmentalists seem to have picked up on this: only a few days have passed since the discovery was revealed and they are already demanding a ban on synthetic biology. Enter regulation, the obvious answer to all of mankind’s problems.”

    Of course, the sentiment expressed in these movies, and our greek myths, is a warning against hubris. In science, economics, politics, and any other personal vanity we engage in. She is right that we cannot unlearn technology. She is right that civilizations who do not adopt technology are conquered by those who out-gun, out-germ, and out-steel them. She is right that these technologies once mastered, tend to deliver material benefits to the survivors. However, that doesn’t mean we should not be cautious, experimental, and cogent of our potential for hubris. And to be cautious, we need to keep that particular mythology alive, lest we invent other technologies like eugenics, complex derivatives, communism and thalidomide. Or engage in other acts of hubris, like the belief that regulation solves mankind’s problems.

  • The New York Times Is An Organized Crime Syndicate – And Misrepresenting Libertarianism Is Fraud And Theft.

    THE NYT IS AN ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE Why is the NYT an Organized Crime Syndicate? Because the NYT has committed as much journalistic fraud, at a greater scale, as any of the most controlled of state run media in modern history, and has brought to market a defective and harmful product, and profited from the sale of that defective product. And that defective product has caused harm to both the long term material economy, and the institutions and habits of the citizenry, that have been dearly paid for. We are repeatedly assailed by revelations that yet another corrupt New York Times journalist has stolen from society by creating artificial myths which they bring to the market of political discourse as fraudulently misrepresented products. We are confronted with editorial bias among most of the New York media, but systemically so by the NYT who not only editorializes, but conducts systemic hiring, encouragement of, and acceptance by those editors of authors who confirm the bias of those editors, rather than those who seek to falsify it. [callout] Falsification is the only scientific method we know of. If a news media wished to be engaged in rational and scientific discourse, each would list it’s editorial biases and ambitions and then seek to falsify them, rather than confirm them. But instead we use the MARKET for news to attempt to fix this problem, thereby subjecting the POPULATION to the problem of interpreting information that they are not equipped to qualify, and forcing them into the practical pursuit of confirmation biases rather than the pursuit of political truths simply by exhausting them.[/callout] What is the difference between a corporation that brings such a drug to market for profit, and a firm that manufactures journalism and brings it to market? They are both selling defective and harmful products into the marketplace. So what is the difference? Nothing.Organized Crime Definitions of organized crime vary according to the Mission and Scope of the organizations seeking to prosecute it. In general, organized crime is a form of organizational conspiracy for the purpose of profiting from illegal activities. Illegal activities are those that profit from theft of property or service. But there is another form of organized crime, that is within the mission and scope of another organization seeking to police and prosecute it: the citizenry. The citizenry must prevent systemic and organized theft of institutionally accumulated costs, paid for not with the currency of money, but with the currency of restraint: forgone opportunity costs. These crimes may be petty, such as those of manners, they may be material, such as those of ethics, and they are most commonly moral, as in those that undermine our institutions that assist us in saving and accumulating human capital. Free Speech Free speech is a product of the republican system of government, whereby debate is a proxy for violence. It is a means of resolving conflicts between peers. Its origins are among the strong and wealthy classes. The purpose of free speech is to create a political dialog for determining the optimum solution for the advancement of the polis among share-holding equals.

    [callout] [ It is ] the citizenry who must prevent systemic and organized theft of institutionally accumulated costs, paid for not with the currency of money, but with the currency of restraint: forgone opportunity costs. These crimes may be petty, such as those of manners, they may be material, such as those of ethics, and they are most commonly moral, as in those that undermine our institutions that assist us in saving and accumulating human capital.[/callout]

    Free speech universally degrades into the act of persuasion for pragmatic personal political and economic ends, whenever the cost of fraud becomes too low, and it becomes lowest when taken to it’s extreme under the principle of systemic non-violence. Free speech is only possible to employ without the subjective control of violence if there is a ‘science’ by which to constrain the debate. THe field of economic science is struggling to become that method of articulating moral, political action. ie: Rational debate is a proxy for violence. irrational debate simply trades violence for deception and fraud. Violence is immediate and it is of all things, HONEST, instructive and decisive. Fraud is dishonest, prolonged, confusing and indecisive. Over time we have developed a policy of tolerating errors in free speech because we assume that the truth will prevail. We assume that wise and honest men will honestly correct the course of debate. We assume that men desire the truth rather than simply victory by fraud, ad that when presented with the truth they will acquiesce. We model debate as if we are still peers in the house of lords, rather than disparate groups of common people promoting our elites to heroic status whereby they battle in public circles by allusions, deceptions, barbs and ridicule, rather than reason, logic, and facts. We are further cautious of free speech in media because of the inequality it gives to an individual’s voice, an because it gives our group heroic elites a distorted but unchecked monopolistic voice in a system of politics developed for orators in a forum.

    [callout]… conservatives desire to preserve their freedom, and keep down the cost of it, by creating institutions that meritocratically rotate the elites, and whose institutions are meritocratic and therefore privatized. Conservatives are not against change. They are against change that creates systemic corruption. [/callout]

    Conservatives are particularly cautious of these elites because the conservative’s preferred method of action is individual, functional and one of material commercial action rather than the left’s preferred method of coercion by politics, media, and anarchic violence. Or more simply stated, that conservatives desire to preserve their freedom and the cost of it, by creating institutions that meritocratic-ally rotate the elites, and whose institutions are meritocratic and therefore privatized. Conservatives are not against change. They are against change that creates systemic corruption. Perhaps, they are also cognizant of, and desirous of building a society where one is rewarded for good, honest, hard working and kind social behavior, and bureaucrats whether inside the state, or inside industry, who are not subject to market conditions are not incentivized to conform to good civic behavior as was illustrated by Adam Smith. Regardless of political spectrum, we are further skeptical of media, because media is a means for institutionalizing the act of profiteering from selling class and group conflict. JOURNALISTIC FRAUD IS ORGANIZED CRIMEThe Most Recent NYT Organized Crime Syndicate Initiative Is Against Libertarianism

    It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market.

    No, it was a set of LAWS called the “Jim Crow Laws” that the government instituted in order to create slavery, and maintain its persistence as a social and economic structure. The STATE created slavery. The state funded and protected THE SLAVE TRADE ROUTES. The state sanctioned, protected and taxed slave Markets. The state prosecuted and pursued escaped slaves. It was the STATE that created and built slavery. In fact, in all of human history, it was the a defining property of STATEHOOD that allowed one class of people to enslave another. The Israelites returned from the desert and enslaved people. The Entire egyptian and babylonian societies were enslaved or virtually so. Hellenic and Roman civilizations were slave owning. European civilization was slave owning. Almost all civilizations in agrarian history are slave owning because farming is hard labor.

    [callout]…The STATE created slavery. The state funded and protected THE SLAVE TRADE ROUTES. The state sanctioned, protected and taxed slave Markets. The state prosecuted and pursued escaped slaves. It was the STATE that created and built slavery.[/callout]

    Secondly, it is the innovations in technology by the private sector that have made slavery unprofitable. And it is the insight of libertarian economists that slavery is simply LESS PROFITABLE than turning your former slaves into consumers. Because as consumers they simply have superior incentives to be productive in the market place. No, it was not the state, it was individuals, largely Christian men, who promoted anti-slavery, because as christians they saw this as un-christian behavior. It was women who took advantage of this anti-slavery momentum as a political step in getting their own vote via the suffrage movement once the industrial revolution started to free them from home-drugery. And it was politicians in Washington and the north that promoted anti-slavery, and Lincoln in particular who promoted it as a means of forcing the north to war against the south for entirely political reasons. But these people were not anti-slavery at the outset. They were agitated by the fact that the north and south produced different market products (southern raw cotton versus northern manufactured goods) and that the south was paying the federal taxes that they funded the state. The south was consuming overseas goods, and the north wanted to decrease competition from overseas for their goods, and so the north wanted to use the STATE to force the south to ‘buy american’, and needed to overtake power. Slavery was simply a rallying cry by which the state could get the Christian population to support a war. Slavery was on it’s way out the world over because it is UNPRODUCTIVE under industrialization. Slavery was not conquered because it was immoral. It was for political and economic reasons. The anti-slavery movement only accelerated the natural process of abandonment of slavery under industrialization, for purely self-serving, economic and political motivations. Slavery would have been eliminated by the free market. It was the state that interfered with the process by prolonging it. It was the state that took credit for the dissolution of slavery that was in reality, a dissolution created by the free market. This is what the DATA SHOWS. Regardless of the ridiculous public utterances and pamphleteering in the political arena, slavery was of declining productivity.

    It was government that rescued the economy from the Depression and promoted safety and equality in the workplace.

    No that’s not true. There is a vast body of work on this topic and it is still in dispute. So no, this is not settled science. We know that the governments created the problems that led to the great depression by creating fiat money and rapid immigration. We know that the war is what got the country out of depression. We know the post-war-era prosperity was largely due to the conversion of manufacturing and construction to war-materials (panel products). But we do not know that the government got the country out of depression and there is a substantive and arguably correct body of work that states that the government both caused the rapid decline, and by it’s policies prolonged it. Just as the policies enacted during the depressionary period are the cause of the systemic crash of western economies, which despite warnings from libertarians, are the result of converting society from “cultures of saving and increasing production to inter-generational redistribution and inflationary consumption” which thereby exposed the civilization to cumulative and irreparable risk. Libertarians warned that progress was not eternal, could not be depended upon, and that our economic tools and theories could not provide us with the insights which we attributed to them. But to no avail.

    “Under this philosophy, the punishment for a lunch counter that refuses to seat black customers would be public shunning, not a court order.”

    What it means is that any group should be able to ostracize what they see as anti-social behavior. And they have the right to determine what they consider anti-social behavior to be. Libertarianism states that if you want to build a homophobic, racist little town somewhere, go ahead, because you will descend into poverty by doing so. It says, quite conversely, that if you want to create a homocentric pluralistic city, that you can do so, and that economically you will benefit by doing so. Libertarianism states that it is up to the individual to choose which of those cities to live in. And that neither fantasy has the right to oppress the other. Libertarianism CELEBRATES DIVERSITY of choice, not choice-less mandated diversity. And it does so because it advocates that markets reward and punish. (( To counter argue this position no matter what angle one took, simply would require that you argue white europeans, or some other ethnic group, are a superior race. )) And any group that does engage in such economic ostracization such as refusing to seat customers of one race or another, would accomplish one of the following things: 1) go out of business by the loss of customers and the creation of competitors who serve the rejected customers 2) increase their business by the decrease in presence of anti-social behavior In fact, this is what people DO, in reality. Except in the very RAREST of circumstances in the very largest cities, in the most wealthy shopping and business districts, people congregate with people who look, and act, and speak, as they do. While this observation is trivial to any person on the street, yet escapes the Schumpeterian (( Schumpeterian Intellectual: someone who profits from selling his services as a public intellectual by criticizing the traditions of the society that made his idleness and therefore his criticism possible, and by consequence, subsidizing the bureaucratic evolution of totalitarianism. )) intellectual class, despite the data and evidence that proves uncontrovertibly that people are racist, act racist and always will act racist, and that the will do so for rational reasons: they obtain more status in-group than out of group. And business people are not motivated by social conformity. They are motivated by profitability. And RACISM IS UNPROFITABLE. Period. On the other hand bias against anti-social behavior IS PROFITABLE. And prevents the takeover via government sanction, by the act of denying businesses the right to choose customers, of the business by a market that is detrimental to the owners. Those same owners who risked their savings, retirement, homes and safety in order to buy, build, run and operate that business. And further more, ostracization is the only means by which a group in an advanced society can enforce the INTEGRATION that makes IMMIGRATION both tolerable and economically possible. Societies never have immigration problems. They have IMMIGRATION problems, and ostracization is the most effective method of enforcing integration into the social system. Limits Of The Market Libertairanism has it’s limits, because the market has its limits. It does have limits. The market has become large, far larger than that envisioned by Classical Liberals (libertarians) and too large to solve those problems of infrastructure development at scale, where the body of citizens can be served by long term investment in nuclear power plants, roads, and the electrical power grid. Even at that scale, it is a problem of financing and competing with regulation, not of execution – the market will execute better than the sate.. Liability Libertarianism would also indicate, that the use of media to make such misrepresentations, whether they be errors or deceptions for the purpose of concentrating political power, so that the violence of law and the state could be used to oppress people who seek liberty is a form of THEFT. Freedom of speech is not common to man. It is a sanction given by the nobility in a republic for the purpose of permitting exploration of the optimum set of ideas among a fraternal order of city-defending soldiers whose military tactics and military cost structure required enfranchisement of many men. But even among these people, free speech is not an unlimited right. It has it’s limits. And if we re-instituted liability laws so that one was required to be accurate in both political (fraudulent) and personal (libelous) speech, the NYT would be forced out of business, and the author of this piece, which is a cowardly and unsigned editorial, would be subject to prosecution. And it is that solution that many libertarians (like myself) would advocate. The Fully Articulated Political Philosophy Libertarianism is the MOST FULLY ARTICULATED CAUSALLY-COMPLETE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY that has ever been created by human beings. (( It is arguable that Marxism produced a volume of literature under the erroneous tribal belief in familial bureaucracy, but it is a well understood dead political and economic philosophy, if a living moral philosophy. It can be argued that classical liberalism produced a body of literature under the principles of individualism and organized public debate. However, the contract model has proven non-durable in time against the bureaucracy’s circumvention of the constitution via the judiciary. )) Libertarianism is imperfect, because all political theory is imperfect. That’s because man continues to evolve into a greater and greater division of knowledge and labor — and as he evolves, he requires deeper understanding of what it is he does, so that he can better comprehend how to resolve the necessary conflicts that rise from the speculative but rewarding human interaction in the market. LIke any fully articulated systemic advancements in human thought, libertarianism requires comprehension before criticism can be levied against it. Because as a SYSTEM, it cannot be debated piecemeal, just as any political system cannot be implemented or discussed piecemeal. Because it is a SYSTEM of interlocking processes of coordination and epistemology. And any attempt to argue it outside of systemic comparisons rather than policy comparisons, is an attempt to compare apples and oranges, and as an attempt to compare apples and oranges it is a willful attempt at FRAUD, or a silly and vain error by the incompetent. Incompetence is not something we should tolerate among those who we grant sanctions, and whom we grant the special permission of free speech in media. Curt Doolittle The NYT article is included here for reference.

    Limits of Libertarianism By denigrating several of the signal achievements of modern American society, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act, Rand Paul has performed a useful service for voters who are angry at their elected officials. He has helped to illuminate the limits and the hazards of antigovernment sentiment. Many Americans are sputtering mad, believing that government has let them down in abetting a ruinous recession, bailing out bankers and spending wildly. But is Rand Paul really the remedy they had in mind? His views and those of other Tea Party candidates are unintentional reminders of the importance of enlightened government. In a handful of remarkably candid interviews since winning Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary this week, Mr. Paul made it clear that he does not understand the nature of racial progress in this country. As a longtime libertarian, he espouses the view that personal freedom should supersede all government intervention. Neighborhood associations should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, he has written, and private businesses ought to be able to refuse service to anyone they wish. Under this philosophy, the punishment for a lunch counter that refuses to seat black customers would be public shunning, not a court order. It is a theory of liberty with roots in America’s creation, but the succeeding centuries have shown how ineffective it was in promoting a civil society. The freedom of a few people to discriminate meant generations of less freedom for large groups of others. It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market. It was government that rescued the economy from the Depression and promoted safety and equality in the workplace. Republicans in Washington have breathlessly distanced themselves from Mr. Paul’s remarks, afraid that voters might tar them with the same extremist brush. But as they continue to fight the new health care law and oppose greater financial regulation, claiming the federal government is overstepping its bounds, they should notice that the distance is closing.

  • A Response To Arnold Kling’s: The Church Of Libertarianism

    Arnold Kling continues one of his themes by writing on one of my favorite topics, “The Churches Of Government”, where he laments the overlaps and conflicts between different conservative and libertarian philosophies.

    You see, I think that the overlap between liberals and libertarians is somewhat suspect. The libertarian thinks that government should get out of the business of regulating marijuana primarily because the libertarian believes in limited government. The liberal thinks that government should get out of the business of regulating marijuana because the liberal doesn’t think marijuana is such a problem.

    And later he explains the philosophical problem:

    Still, I believe that it ought to be possible for a conservative to be in the Church of Limited Government rather than the Church of Unlimited Government. In theory, I would think that a conservative might really care about education or health care without necessarily favoring government involvement. However, in practice many conservatives went along with President Bush when he expanded Medicare and the Federal government’s role in primary education. My sense is that his approach to conservatism has few adherents at the moment.

    To which I would respond, that the reason for confusion on this issue is the failure of the conservative, classical liberal, and libertarian movements, to provide an articulated alternative solution to socialism while at the same time, maintaining their long standing justification for taking power from the monarchy in order to implement a democratic republic managed by the capitalist class.

    [callout]… the reason for confusion .. is the failure of the conservative, classical liberal, and libertarian movements, to provide an articulated alternative solution to socialism while at the same time, maintaining their long standing justification for taking power from the monarchy.[/callout]

    And finally, a reader comments: “From a libertarian point of view, it would be inconsistent to advocate legalizing marijuana and banning trans fats.” And from there I try to use the author’s and reader’s inability to distinguish the reasons for regulating products differently as one of state intervention not of market management. Actually, the two issues are different. Marijuana The only reasons to ban marijuana are: 1) Because it impedes the mind, and therefore choice, and choice is a necessary capacity, and necessary assumption, in the libertarian model. This is a technical concept, not a practical one. 2) Because you can expose others to risk due to impaired judgement, largely while driving a vehicle. This concept is both technical and practical. Justifying the application of force must be both technical (epistemically rational) and practical (materially implementable). Epistemic applications alone are infinite and open to error. (ie: laws should be enforceable not specious.) Trans fats Foods are a voluntary health issue, not an externalized risk issue or capacity issue. The libertarian concept of freedom allows people to harm themselves. However, since it is not possible to make a rational choice over the content of goods , regulating labeling is not a question of freedom but a question of limiting fraud or accidental harm in a market. Libertarianism’s Failures Classical liberalism is an outgrowth of conservatism. Libertarianism is an outgrowth of Classical Liberalism. Rothbardian anarchism is an outgrowth of libertarianism. The only fully articulated philosophy is the Rothbardian. The Classical Liberal philosophy is analogistic, pragmatic, and contractual. But it is a practical moral philosophy, not a necessary logical philosophy. Necessity and utilitarianism are two different kinds of problems. Rothbard fully articulated his philosophy of natural law. But in doing so, by assuming the principle of non-violence, he avoided the problem of creating markets, the costs to people of having done so. And instead, by circumventing the natural law of violence ended up advocating a religion of property. Hoppe improved this line of thinking by developing private institutions that provided public goods, and reinforcing the concept of natural law, by the ARgumentation Ethic which purportedly demonstrates that property is natural to man. But these methods are flawed because they start with non-violence and trade, rather than the human capacity for violence and fraud, and the necessity of building and creating markets. In that sense, while anarchists have made innovations ( monarchic inter-temporal incentives, private insurance institutions ) they have failed to provide an answer for advances in abstract forms of property, and as such are providing solutions that are regressive as did Marx. A market is a joint stock company that was invested in by the fraternal order of soldiers who then collected fees for their service in creating that market. Merchants enter the market by registering products such that they meet the market criteria so that the shareholders experience an appreciation in value. The common people gain access to the market by respecting property, which is a material forgone opportunity cost. Everyone pays, and everyone profits from market participation. The history of economic thought is the history of demonizing monarchs for the purpose of transferring control of the market from it’s military founders, to the vendors – the middle classes. This demonization is nothing but falsehood. As it turns out, kings were kinder to their populations than are republican and democratic governments. But because of this demonization, the causal origin of civilization, of cities, of markets, of prosperity, and of western culture itself, is obscured by the rhetoric of demonizing the nobility who created this culture under which we prosper. Despite it’s variety of logical strengths, libertarian philosophy contains a number of errors, the most influential of which is in confusing the role of government as necessarily social in nature or necessarily defensive in nature, or a tool of class exploitation, versus the historical and causal origin of government as a protector and regulator of markets.

    [callout]Markets are the primary social institution of post tribal man. Governments have no reason for existence outside of Markets[/callout]

    Markets are the primary social institution of post tribal man. Governments have no reason for existence outside of Markets. Government IS a market function, because the purpose of government is determining the rules of the market which funds the government. Trade exists without government, but markets do not. Advanced markets for the trading of abstracts do not. All forms of property beyond portable personal property (several property) require registration, and rules for exchange in the market. The primary difference between the concept of trade and the concept of market is one of anonymity — whereby the market operator places some guarantee on the products offered so that the market’s shareholders can create a competitive advantage against other markets, and to reduce the cost of conflict administration within the market.

    [callout]The difference in cultures is simply in the definition of ownership of different forms of property that they permit in their markets.[/callout]

    The difference in cultures is simply in the definition of ownership of different forms of property that they permit in their markets. And these differences are material: the more granular the property the more liquidity and velocity it produces, and the greater the division of knowledge and labor that is possible. This culture of Market-Making is one of the three causal differences for western civilization versus the central and eastern models. (The other two differences being military tactics that required enfranchisement – leading to debate, reason an science, and IQ distribution mixed with resource and transport availability.). Libertarians confuse fear of abuses by the government with the necessity of constraining the government to the maintenance of the rules of the market, and the value in those rules as a means of increasing the productivity of the market and their yield from that market. Libertarians have abandoned the problem of managing the market, and therefore have become a religious institution not a political institution. That is the difference between religion and politics: the market and the absence of it. Because in large part, neither institution has been rational, only practical. Conservatives lack the ability to articulate their concepts in other than moral terms. Libertarians do significantly better. But both systems of thought are lacking in an understanding of what they argue for. Libertarians, despite being a minority selling a minority philosophy, seek to create a nation governed by a ‘religion of property’ in order to exit the influence of government. When in fact, government is responsible for making the market, and libertarians should lobby for additional rules to limit the state. Not limiting the state to social activities of dubious non-market nature, but to it’s role in regulating the market and evolutionary increases in defining the ever expanding set of objects and options we refer to as property, and which we frequently trade, so that we, as a people, maintain a competitive advantage against other markets. The problems with the anarchic movement are substantive in that they do not account for market-enhancing asymmetries, versus market-harming asymmetries. In other words, they are advocating the ‘buyer beware’ ethic of the Bazaar, rather than the ‘seller responsibility’ that is required of participants in the Market. This is not an advantage to the shareholders (citizens).

    [callout title=Trade and Market Are Different Systems][anarchists] are advocating the ‘buyer beware’ ethic of the Bazaar, rather than the ‘seller responsibility’ that is required of participants in the Market. This is not an advantage to the shareholders (citizens).[/callout]

    The problem with our institutions is that they do not separate redistributive efforts from market efforts. Libertarians (of which I am a member of the group of theorists) would be better served by abandoning our rhetoric of monarchic criticism, and instead develop a language and metaphysics such that we can provide an institutional response to an increasingly complex world in which we must register, trade and police a market of increasingly vast and complex products and services, so that we may maintain our competitive advantage over the rest of the world.

    [callout title=Separation Of Church And State]The problem with our institutions is that they do not separate redistributive efforts from market efforts.[/callout]

    And abandon luddite religions of all sorts. That includes all forms of the Church of Limited Government and Church of Unlimited Government. Instead, a rational epistemology can be applied if we simply look at the material problem of building and maintaining markets in an increasing division of knowledge and labor, where most of our inventions are abstractions that like large numbers, are beyond the ability of our perceptions. That is the one and only important function of government, after territorial defense and the policing of trade routes. And the implementation of rationalism is in separating our institutions such that redistribution is held by one house, and market regulation by another. Further, our separation of banking, including the currency, credit and interest (which has replaced both our religions and our code of laws as our primary means of maintaining social order) is insufficient for the current state of our division of knowledge and labor. That system of institutions and approach to analysis is Post-Rothbardian libertarianism. And it is the only rational alternative to encroaching socialism. Libertarianism was hijacked by Rothbard simply because Hayek, Parsons and Mises failed. And both Rothbard and Hoppe created extraordinary epistemological and institutional value with their research program. But they have failed, as did the libertarians, and the classical liberals, and the conservatives before them, to create a system of institutions capable of providing an alternative to the anti-market anti-civilization sentiments and philosophy of socialism by failing to articulate the causal purpose of government as market maker, and to create institutions that expand and evolve along with the objects that we exchange in that market. And that is your solution membership in A Church: the articulated causality of the market and it’s institutions and the purpose of government communicated by the technique which we call ‘reason’.

  • Jefferson’s Virtue Of Violence

    Today, on United Liberty, the daily Jefferson quote was:

    “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” – Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush (1800)

    Freedom is created by, and maintained by, the use of violence, and a man’s capacity for violence is his political wealth. The promise he will use his violence to create freedom, is met with the lack of his need to use it for any purpose whatsoever. It is a wealth sparely spent with high returns.