Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

ON THE FALLACY OF FREE TRADE ABSOLUTISM

(very important piece) (this will ruffle some feathers)

The three means of coercion can be used for good or ill.

1) Violence can be used to create property rights and prosperity or it can be used to conduct parasitism predation and destruction.

2) Gossip can be used to reward contributors to the commons with opportunity for cooperation and mates, or it can be used to lie, cheat, deceive, rally, shame, and justify parasitism, or instill violence.

3) Trade can be used to increase prosperity for all by accumulating genetic, knowledge, physical and institutional capital, or to destroy the either the producer’s or the consumer’s economy by causing the depreciation of genetic, knowledge, physical, and institutional capital.

Trade is no more an INTRINSIC good, than is violence or gossip.

That is the end of it. Trade is nor more a good than violence or gossip. The only determinant of the morality or immorality of trade is whether capital is accumulated or destroyed in the process of production, distribution, trade and consumption, and whether the transfers were voluntary.

***This is what I call the requirement for “full accounting” in any truthful (moral) argument. Without full accounting someone is undoubtably lying. General rules expressed without limits are used as means of suggestion by which to deceive the altruistic mind. Free Trade is as much a folly as Autarky. Free Trade is yet another cosmopolitanism by which to rely on suggestion in order to conduct parasitism.***

This argument is finished. Cosmopolitan Libertarian absolutism is finished. Libertine libertarianism is finished. It is a dead ideology. I have killed it – forever. And I have demonstrated as thoroughly as any man can, that the only possible liberty from which we obtain our prosperity is TRUTHFUL COOPERATION: The productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange of property-en-toto, free of imposition of costs by externality, wherein our statements survive tests of identity (non conflation), internal, consistency, external correspondence, existential possibility, parsimony, limits, full accounting, and voluntary exchange.

Children require virtue ethics, because they can but imitate. The young require rule ethics because they lack experience. The adult requires outcome ethics because otherwise he can use rules to obscure his frauds. Any ethical claim must hold to all THREE forms of ethic:

a) virtue: should every man do this, the outcome would be moral

b) rule: should every man obey this rule, the outcome would be moral.

c) outcome: should every man do this, the outcome would be moral.

It is not that one ethical method supersedes any other. It is that we can only expect the child to imitate, the young to obey rules, and the old to obey experience. As such we tolerate greater error from the child, than the young, and least from the experienced. It is not that any ethical method produces greater results. It is that each method requires making full use of the knowledge that each actor possesses, and that as long as he acts according to those principles, that we forgive him for his failures.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kyiv, Ukraine