Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • Sophisticated People In The World Are Not Necessarily Stupid or Selfish

    [T]he USA’s budget consists roughly of 1/3 defense, 1/3 mandatory payments (Social Security and Medicaid) and 1/3 discretionary payments (everything else).

    We finance 1/3 (the military), and inflate it away. The world pays for our military through indirect taxation on the price of oil bought in dollars. This was the invention that the Nixon administration achieved with the Petro-Dollar and it was how we were able to run up the credit to defeat world communism under Reagan.

    So technically speaking, 1/2 is discretionary, 1/2 is for redistribution, and the remainder – the military – is effectively free.
    Possessing this knowledge radically alters your perception of the world.

    It is why Iran wants nuclear weapons – to control oil, and to create a bourse, and to capture that ability to tax currency for itself.

    Sophisticated people in the world are not stupid, nor necessarily selfish. They merely take advantage of stupid people.

  • Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman and Their Anti-Science Economics

    RE: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/friedman-ideas-great-recession-by-j–bradford-delong-2015-03

    [B]rad,


    I would counter, as I have since 2009, that you and your intellectual kindred fail to grasp that politics is moral not merely empirical. That humans are tribalists not universalists. That universalism suits the interests of the academy’s revenues, but not the interests of all polities. The human morality is roughly translatable into a prohibition on free riding. And that under plenty, humans share excess in exchange for status, and under duress humans punish free riders.

    What you have seen in the great recession is a evidence of moral expression that will always exist under democratic polities that are able to express moral instincts. Under the great recession we are punishing free riders built up under the era of plenty.

    You may call this irrational. But the use of this moral intuition is doing precisely what those who carry that instinct intuit that it should: punishing free riders – even and extreme personal expense. The middle class votes against its material interests out of altruistic punishment of free riders.

    Until we find an institutional means of controlling free riding, we will continue to see this behavior in high-trust high-altruistic-punishment societies. And it is only high trust high altruistic punishment societies that matter. Because they are always the only societies with wealth to distribute. Since those societies are the only ones that produce excesses.

    I will not live long enough I think, to restore morality to economics. But at some point someone will. Because good economics is empirical. And empirically – humans do, and must, act morally. And morality is a synonym for the prohibition on free riding.

    Democracy is incompatible with your interpretation of ‘good’ economics. And economics without morality is not scientific, but ideological and dysgenic.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman and Their Anti-Science Economics

    RE: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/friedman-ideas-great-recession-by-j–bradford-delong-2015-03

    [B]rad,


    I would counter, as I have since 2009, that you and your intellectual kindred fail to grasp that politics is moral not merely empirical. That humans are tribalists not universalists. That universalism suits the interests of the academy’s revenues, but not the interests of all polities. The human morality is roughly translatable into a prohibition on free riding. And that under plenty, humans share excess in exchange for status, and under duress humans punish free riders.

    What you have seen in the great recession is a evidence of moral expression that will always exist under democratic polities that are able to express moral instincts. Under the great recession we are punishing free riders built up under the era of plenty.

    You may call this irrational. But the use of this moral intuition is doing precisely what those who carry that instinct intuit that it should: punishing free riders – even and extreme personal expense. The middle class votes against its material interests out of altruistic punishment of free riders.

    Until we find an institutional means of controlling free riding, we will continue to see this behavior in high-trust high-altruistic-punishment societies. And it is only high trust high altruistic punishment societies that matter. Because they are always the only societies with wealth to distribute. Since those societies are the only ones that produce excesses.

    I will not live long enough I think, to restore morality to economics. But at some point someone will. Because good economics is empirical. And empirically – humans do, and must, act morally. And morality is a synonym for the prohibition on free riding.

    Democracy is incompatible with your interpretation of ‘good’ economics. And economics without morality is not scientific, but ideological and dysgenic.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • “We’ve closed a number of tax loopholes. We’ve increased communal tariffs by six

    —“We’ve closed a number of tax loopholes. We’ve increased communal tariffs by six times. We’ve fired 10 percent of public servants,” he said, sighing heavily.

    Yatsenyuk said the ultimate goal of enduring the financial pain was to create a country with a clear sense of national purpose.

    “A few years ago we had the territory. Today, we have the country. An independent country that is fighting for freedoms and liberties,” he said.”—

    Ukrainian PM Yatsenyuk

    Source date (UTC): 2015-03-29 05:41:00 UTC

  • My @Quora answer to What is peak capitalism?

    My @Quora answer to What is peak capitalism? http://qr.ae/QUUAd

    Source date (UTC): 2015-03-26 11:38:37 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/581057665742311425

  • Untitled

    http://www.quora.com/What-is-peak-capitalism/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=1

    Source date (UTC): 2015-03-26 07:38:00 UTC

  • What Are The Pros And Cons Of Us Humans Building A Global Utopia?

    We are all competing.  Economic competition merely allows us to compete toward mutually productive ends, instead of randomly destructive ends.  A utopia is only desirable by the losers.

    https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-us-humans-building-a-global-Utopia

  • What Is Peak Capitalism?

    A leftist dogma. A new name for regurgitated Marx.  And just as fallacious as his. 

    The entire world has adopted capitalism.  Because innovation, adaptation, production, distribution and trade are not possible without it. 

    The current argument is that low trust, traditional-family, and tribal-family  polities, particularly those that practice cousin-marriage, cannot operate without a dominant state, and that high trust, absolute nuclear families are uniquely able to operate without a dominant state – relying entirely on common law.  And that the unique circumstances that allowed northern europeans to develop the high trust society cannot be repeated without returning to manorial era suppression of the reproduction of the underclasses.  And certainly cannot survive the immigration of new castes of underclasses. 

    So when we refer to peak capitalism we refer to the expansion of the world’s low trust demographic distribution evolving into the majority – both in absolute numbers, and in aggregate economic and political influence.

    Capitalist meritocracy is only tolerable to the upper classes.  When europeans were the worlds dominant upper class, others tried to imitate it. Now that we have been displaced through reproduction and immigration, that meritocracy is no longer advantageous to the remainder of the planet.

    That is the most honest, probably most scientific, and most probably answer to the question.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-peak-capitalism

  • What Are The Pros And Cons Of Us Humans Building A Global Utopia?

    We are all competing.  Economic competition merely allows us to compete toward mutually productive ends, instead of randomly destructive ends.  A utopia is only desirable by the losers.

    https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-us-humans-building-a-global-Utopia

  • What Is Peak Capitalism?

    A leftist dogma. A new name for regurgitated Marx.  And just as fallacious as his. 

    The entire world has adopted capitalism.  Because innovation, adaptation, production, distribution and trade are not possible without it. 

    The current argument is that low trust, traditional-family, and tribal-family  polities, particularly those that practice cousin-marriage, cannot operate without a dominant state, and that high trust, absolute nuclear families are uniquely able to operate without a dominant state – relying entirely on common law.  And that the unique circumstances that allowed northern europeans to develop the high trust society cannot be repeated without returning to manorial era suppression of the reproduction of the underclasses.  And certainly cannot survive the immigration of new castes of underclasses. 

    So when we refer to peak capitalism we refer to the expansion of the world’s low trust demographic distribution evolving into the majority – both in absolute numbers, and in aggregate economic and political influence.

    Capitalist meritocracy is only tolerable to the upper classes.  When europeans were the worlds dominant upper class, others tried to imitate it. Now that we have been displaced through reproduction and immigration, that meritocracy is no longer advantageous to the remainder of the planet.

    That is the most honest, probably most scientific, and most probably answer to the question.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-peak-capitalism