Is nearly all of philosophy then, outside of logic, an artful construct for the purpose of justifying theft? One can justify suppression of, prevention of, and restitution for, the taking of discounts. (thefts) One can justify the selection of one priority of investment over another. But one cannot argue for the necessity of a monopoly of investments. Nor the mandatory enforcement of participation in investments, other than the suppression of free riding. One can argue the necessity for a homogeneity – monopoly – of property rights for the purpose of logically resolving disputes over property and contract – albeit, private property solves that problem, and articulated shareholder rights, retains that ability even under complexity. But once a monopoly of property rights exists, one cannot argue the necessity for a monopoly of law making. In fact, logic and evidence suggest precisely the opposite is true: that laws evolve and evolve best under the common law, since they must be interpreted by ordinary citizens, and are open to constant revision without external approval as the world evolves. The failure of the common law was (a) its usurpation by the state, and (b) failure to define property rights sufficiently in the face of industrialization. (c) its use by the middle class to dispossess the aristocracy, and consequential use by the proletarians and feminists to dispossess the middle classes. Philosophy is quite simple really. It’s only complicated if you’re trying to lie. And theft requires lying. And lying is best covered by obscurity. Cheers.
Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy
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CRUSOE ECONOMICS AS THE NON-LOGIC OF THE GHETTO I suppose I can’t say this enoug
CRUSOE ECONOMICS AS THE NON-LOGIC OF THE GHETTO
I suppose I can’t say this enough, but Crusoe economics is useful for the analysis of economics between states, but is entirely useless for the deduction of the properties of a social order.
It should be obvious by now that Crusoe’s island is an analogy to the medieval ghetto, of a state within a state. The sea constructs the borders and walls of the ghetto.
Crusoe ethics aren’t ethical at all.
They’re another form of obscurantist fraud that white people seem to just soak up like every other form of pseudoscience: Marxism, Socialism, Freudianism, Feminism, Cantor’s infinities, and Postmodernism.
Only white people can be this stupid.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-12 03:27:00 UTC
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WELL MR FULLER. YOU’RE WRONG. ITS THAT WE DONT NEED A JOB IN PRODUCTION- BUT WE
WELL MR FULLER. YOU’RE WRONG. ITS THAT WE DONT NEED A JOB IN PRODUCTION- BUT WE DO NEED A JOB. EVERYONE DOES.
Everyone has to earn a living. Everyone has to have a job. But the compensation for that job, and the job itself may not require that we engage in PRODUCTION in the marketplace. But instead, that we police all society against free riding, we care for and maintain the commons, and provide emergency care and support for one another.
If one performs these duties then of course, one is due compensation for them.If one does not perform these duties, or worse, violates them, then one does not earn compensation on the backs of those who do police, care for, support and provide production. Production is not the only valuable activity in society. In fact, it appears, that labor and clerical work are of near zero productive value. As such, we are all of us due compensation for our policing and maintenance of the commons, including the criminal, moral, ethical and material commons.
There are ‘negative jobs’. The negative job is to actively police yourself and others against free riding on the backs of others. This is a full time occupation without vacation, days off, or commissions. It does not require that you learn a skill other than moral behavior, and it does not require that you engage in production. It does require that you deny others the ability to engage in criminal, unethical, immoral behavior, or lax or destructive treatment of the commons.
Fuller is wrong. We all must have a job. We must be paid for our jobs. But the job of production is increasingly limited to minority of highly productive people. While the job of preventing criminal, unethical, immoral, and destructive behavior is increasingly abandoned by those who suggest that they are due compensation for merely existing. Which simply means that the most degenerate among us have the greatest claim to the productive efforts of others. That cannot be, in an rational or scientific world, considered moral by any stretch of the imagination.
Labor has no value in production. But labor has enormous value in the defense of life, liberty and property via the suppression of all criminal, ethical, immoral, conspiratorial, corrupt behavior.
Profit from production is a luxury good earned by those with greater talents and ambitions. But that luxury good requires the active suppression of free riding in all its multitude of forms in every part of society: criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, and corrupt behavior.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-11 07:24:00 UTC
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THE BLEEDING HEART LIBERTARIANS, THE PRINCIPLE OF CALCULABILITY, THE SOLUTION TO
THE BLEEDING HEART LIBERTARIANS, THE PRINCIPLE OF CALCULABILITY, THE SOLUTION TO DIRECT REDISTRIBUTION (Part 1)
POSITIONING LIBERTARIAN ETHICS BY PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL
1) CLASSICAL “PSYCHOLOGICAL” (Smith,Hume,Locke,Burke)(BHL’s)
2) GHETTO COSMOPOLITAN (Rothbard),
3) CONTINENTAL RATIONAL (Hoppe),
4) ANGLO ANALYTIC (Doolitte),
I keep intuitively wanting to classify the Bleeding Heart Libertarians led by Matt Zwolinski as right-continental rationals, but it’s pretty clear if you go through the past two years of articles on BHL, that their arguments are consistent with the classical psychological while borrowing arguments from everyone else where helpful.
I pretty much agree with the BHL’s sentiments. But formal institutions that depend on psychological (and normative) moral intuition and belief, cannot possibly survive postmodern, obscurant, and pseudoscientific propaganda.
Worse, they cannot survive the dissolution of the nuclear family. And it’s the nuclear family, or the Absolute Nuclear Family of the anglo tradition that is the primary source of our anglo american moral code. And in a world where immigrants no longer practice that family structure, where single mothers produce 40% of the population, and where ‘alternative marriages’ and ready divorce undermine the institution of the nuclear family, the moral intuitions upon which the Psychological School depends are statistically irrelevant.
The family structure is the constructor of moral intuitions which merely direct and modify genetic and gender driven differences in moral sensitivity. Period. Conservatives were correct about the family and norms and we were not. In a democratic polity, where the majority can implement policy, the family structure of the majority will determine morality. And since morality determines property rights, no such property rights can exist within a democracy.
We are in our current crisis because the American founders did not grasp the necessity and utility of the principle of calculability (no did any one until Weber). Had they for example, required original intent, and strict construction, and placed explicit authority in the common law, our world might be a very different place. At that time, given the state of science, and the prevalence of religious and poetic phrasing, it was impossible for them to grasp the concept of operational language as a necessary structure of all calculable statements.
The BHL’s are not able to innovate per se, because they have no calculable and rational argumentative structure to rely upon. And so their arguments are victim to the moral predisposition their audience. But instead they are positioning libertarian arguments through sympathetic psychological contrasts and advocacy. Which is excellent marketing. And given the damage done by Rothbard’s morally reprehensible parasitic Ghetto Ethics to the cause of liberty, we certainly need good marketing.
Propertarianism is not morally loaded. It’s analytic and calculable. In propertarian ethics I’ve placed the formal requirement for operational language. For that reason it isn’t morally aspirational – like most scientific argument it’s a little unsatisfying to reduce all human behavior to it’s physical properties – but it’s factually moral and defensible by science and reason. Whereas the Psychological model may advocate the correct ideas but they are not argumentatively powerful unless one is predisposed to agree with them. As such they are not arguments, but statements of confirmation bias.
I have tried to provide the BHL’s with a Propertarian argument for redistribution. My argument requires full calculability from start to finish. And it fully warrants, justifies, explains in causal terms, why direct redistribution to consumers is necessary compensation mandated by respect for property rights.
My criticism of the BHL’s to date has been limited (as my autistic arguments often are) to the fact that they are not contributing to innovation in libertarian theory, only to libertarian propaganda. Because I don’t disagree with their sentiments. I disagree with their Psychological School arguments.
My hope is that at some point they will grasp that the formal logic of property is sufficient to justify their psychologically argued, and morally intuited ends. And they can back their good marketing with good science, reason, and institutional solutions that are calculable and therefore impervious to the multitudinous forms of fraud that are used by the obscurantist left both socialist, Postmodern, Feminist and whatever else they manage to invent.
Property under Propertarianism is a scientifically moral, not rationally moral, or psychologically moral construct.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-11 03:52:00 UTC
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TIM HARFORD ON ASSORTATIVE MATING AND INEQUALITY ‘While it may be natural and fa
TIM HARFORD ON ASSORTATIVE MATING AND INEQUALITY
‘While it may be natural and familiar, assortative mating also breeds inequality’
Those of you out courting next Friday, do enjoy yourselves – but with a twinge of guilt. Inequality has been rising for a generation in many places, especially the Anglophone countries. Let’s be honest: you and your romantic pursuits are part of the problem.
The issue here is something economists call “positive assortative mating”, a charming phrase that we blame on the evolutionary biologists. It describes the process of similar people pairing off with each other: beautiful people dating beautiful people, smokers dating smokers, nerds dating nerds. All perfectly natural, you might think.
While it may be natural and familiar, assortative mating also breeds inequality. Economists often look at sorting by education level, which is common and easy to measure. If the MBAs and PhDs were sprinkled randomly throughout the population that would spread the wealth around. But, of course, they tend to pair up with other MBAs and PhDs; meanwhile the high-school dropouts tend to end up with other high-school dropouts. Already prosperous people are made more prosperous yet by their marriages.
This is an interesting idea in theory but does it have any practical significance? A recent paper by Jeremy Greenwood and others looks at a large data set from the US Census Bureau through the lens of the Gini coefficient, which is a measure of inequality. It’s 63 in highly unequal South Africa, 40 in the UK and 23 in egalitarian Sweden. It’s 43 in the US Census data set; but if the couples in the data set were randomly paired off, the Gini coefficient would be a mere 34. Assortative mating increases inequality.
But does this pairing-off process matter more than it used to? Does it explain any part of the rise in inequality we’ve seen since the 1970s? The answer, again, is yes – but a guarded yes. Marriage patterns have little or nothing to do with the concentration of earning power in the hands of the richest 1 per cent and 0.1 per cent: women are major breadwinners in the top quarter of the distribution but less so right at the very top – not yet, at any rate.
But assortative mating is having an impact on inequality more broadly. It’s not so much that well-educated people are more likely to pair off – although they are – but that educated women are more likely to earn serious money than a generation ago.
Consider my own mother: she was well on the way to a PhD in biochemistry when I arrived on the scene in the early 1970s. She then dropped out of education and spent most of her time looking after her children. Her academic qualifications had no impact on our household income. Assortative mating has always been with us but it’s only in a world of two-income households that it increases income inequality.
The sociologist Christine Schwartz showed in 2010 that the incomes of husbands and wives in the US are far more closely correlated than they were in the 1960s, and that this explained about one-third of the increase in income inequality between married couples. John Ermisch and colleagues have shown other consequences: in both the UK and Germany, assortative mating substantially explains low social mobility because the children of prosperous parents marry each other.
We should not place too much emphasis on all this. Assortative mating explains only part of the rise of inequality, and perhaps very little at the top of the income scale. The usual remedies for inequality – unionisation, redistributive taxes, minimum wages – still have the same advantages and limitations as ever, even if they need to reflect the reality of the two-income household. It’s a reminder that the most welcome social trends can have unwelcome side-effects.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-09 11:52:00 UTC
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DOES “HIGH TRUST” MEAN? HIGH TRUST = LOW TRANSACTION COSTS = HIGH QUANTITY AND V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_SocietyWHAT DOES “HIGH TRUST” MEAN?
HIGH TRUST = LOW TRANSACTION COSTS = HIGH QUANTITY AND VELOCITY OF EXCHANGE = GREATER WEATH AT LOWER RISK.
(the not so obvious but obvious)
When we say ‘high trust’ and ‘low trust’ what we mean, is the willingness that one has to conduct a contract, whether formal or informal, with a random party that is not a member of your friends or family.
In a low trust society you can only really trust personal relations. In a very low trust society you can only really trust family members. In a high trust society you can trust the average person on the street as thoroughly as you can a friend or family member. (Often more so than family members.)
And given that politicians are universally corrupt, and that we depend upon judges and juries enforce this universal trust, and that judges and juries consist of people from the community, then the community must consist of high trust members for the system to perpetuate itself. So how does one construct a high trust society? Well, western europeans did it with property rights, prohibition on inbreeding and cousin marriage, and prohibition on marriage and child rearing until one had home and hearth.
Other than hiring a legion of northern european jurists, adopting the common law, requiring wills, granting universal private property rights, prohibiting cousin marriage out to four or six generations, prohibiting cohabitation between generations, it’s pretty much impossible.
And feminists and socialists are doing everything in their power to dismantle the total prohibition on free riding that the northern european people have created over five thousand years, but most importantly in the past 1500.
Those of us who claim to be ‘gentlemen’, will often do business on a handshake. Doing business by handshake is a status symbol. For me, I have always said that “I made a deal, we stick to the deal” because this preserves your ability to make deals with high trust. Sometimes we fail.
One of my long time business partners was notorious for constantly revising deals for his own convenience. Which makes me a bit nuts. But people put up with it from him because he always appears to be so honest. But the truth is, it’s an act. He’s always acting in his own pragmatic interest.
Using rural Italy as the example, the first and best work is the Moral Basis of a Backward Society by Edward Banfield.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-05 13:41:00 UTC
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INSTITUTIONS IN A NUTSHELL (elegance from Peter Boettke) “I argue that in assess
INSTITUTIONS IN A NUTSHELL
(elegance from Peter Boettke)
“I argue that in assessing the workability of utopian schemes we must first subject them to a coherence test, and then a test of their vulnerability to opportunism. Schemes that are incoherent are deemed impossible; schemes that are coherent but vulnerable are impractical; and only schemes that are both coherent and invulnerable should be considered in the feasible set of workable utopias.”– Peter Boettke
I’ll translate that into propertarian language as: the minimum requirement for any theory of cooperation requires internal consistency, and external correspondence, where external correspondence is defined as increasing cooperation without increasing the potential for criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, corrupt and conquest behaviors.
In practice I suspect that Peter would argue that he covers all forms of free riding in his definition of opportunism, But I think it is possible to constrain criminal, unethical, and immoral behavior while preserving conspiratorial behavior (corruption. ie:statism)
So, given the permissiveness that socialists grant to bureaucrats a more granular definition is required in order to address both private and public actors with an equally pejorative prohibition.
At the very worst, my definition educates the reader with a more rigid test.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-05 12:09:00 UTC
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IF LABOR IS NO LONGER VALUABLE THEN WHAT DO THE LOWER CLASSES HAVE TO TRADE? SUP
IF LABOR IS NO LONGER VALUABLE THEN WHAT DO THE LOWER CLASSES HAVE TO TRADE? SUPPRESSION OF FREE RIDING: PROPERTY RIGHTS.
(a couple of profound ideas here)
If labor is no longer valuable – at all, then what do the underclasses have to trade?
Nothing? Well, that’s making a lot of assumptions about the structure of society as if it’s governed by some equivalent of the law of gravity. 😉 So, rather than
They have suppression of all free riding to trade: obedience to norms; manners, ethics, morals and laws: respect for property rights, and voting to reduce the state, and their utility as consumers to trade.
But how do we capture those things into something tangible?
With tokens, so that they exchange their consumption for the production of others. We dont need to distribute money through the financial system any longer. There isnt any need for it. We can directly distribute liquidity to consumers, and bypass the financial system. We can give consumers fiat money or digital currency, and pretty much keep them out of the credit system. This number would need to be a percentage of some revenues such that the citizens possess equal interest in the efficiency of the government, and the need to expand productivity in the economy. Otherwise we create malincentive. But at this point, minimum wage labor is preference not a necessity, and we need not interfere with prices for labor.
The distribution to citizens is their payment for suppressing free riding in all its forms. If they agree to suppress free riding in all its forms, then they have earned that distribution. If they fail to suppress free riding in all its forms, then they do not earn that payment. This is sufficient incentive both positive and negative to prevent crimes not of passion. And as an incentive, the threat of losing one’s means of sustenance is pretty hard to improve upon. It is better than physical punishment.
The accumulation of profits is payment for contributing to productivity – for organizing production – now that we know labor is of no value in production, even if problem solving is of value.
This system of compensating people for their actions is simply transforming the moral code for non-anonymous members engaged in equal production and consumption, into a calculable system for anonymous members engaged in equal suppression of free riding, but unequal organization of production.
And to do otherwise is to attempt to obtain property rights for free.
You can’t every achieve equality by any means, but you can certainly pay people from what they earn without cheating them of payment for it. If all of us are producers then we have our production to exchange and equal interest in respect for the necessary properties of production. But if only a few of us are productive (and that is the current state of affairs) why should those people respect the rules of production if they aren’t compensated for it? That’s purely irrational.
THE OPEN PROBLEM
Now, the only problem we face is bearing a child that you cannot support is free riding on the backs of others. Immigration is free riding unless you bring your skills with you. The problem of the female obsession with free riding must be solved. And we must have the moral courage to solve it through aggressive punishment of women who bear children that they cannot support, to the same degree we punish males who resort to violence for the purpose of obtaining what they want. A woman who bears a child that she cannot support is, under all conditions, without exception, is blackmail: the choice between an paying a woman for her immoral action, or the harm that will come to an innocent child.
If we can agree that bearing a child you cannot support is blackmail, or at least a new crime of the same sort. Then it is possible to unite all people in a country with the same interests. Because large scale democratic government simply creates a vehicle for systematic generation of internal conflict given the dissimilarity of ability and interest.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 03:13:00 UTC
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you give things away free, people able to work, will stop working….[but], Here
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/01/schiff-vs-ritholtz-political.html#SiFXioyDzMTQS8k6.99″…if you give things away free, people able to work, will stop working….[but], Here’s an important corollary: If you make people work, you end up with work that has no economic justification.”
I think we can solve this problem finally. Its not so much a conflict as it is an opportunity for the application of technology.
And ill add a third corollary, that is, that respecting property rights and policing against free riding is in fact Work.
And while AnCaps argue that access to society and the market is sufficient compensation, clearly the market for political rents demonstrates that it is not.
There is value in compensating people for respecting property, commons, manners, ethics and morals, law and the rule of law.
Not the least of which is that their incentives then will match those in the productive sector rather than those of the predators un the public sector.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-01 09:18:00 UTC
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THIS IS WHAT GIVES CAPITALISTS A DIRTY NAME
THIS IS WHAT GIVES CAPITALISTS A DIRTY NAME
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/01/31/a-look-at-nine-goldman-trades-that-lost-libya-1-billion-in-one-year/
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-31 18:36:00 UTC