Curt Doolittle

Category: Law, Constitution, and Jurisprudence

  • CHEAPER FOR THE STRONG TO GIVE PEOPLE PROPERTY RIGHTS Property exists prior to c

    CHEAPER FOR THE STRONG TO GIVE PEOPLE PROPERTY RIGHTS

    Property exists prior to codification in a constitution. So does promise, prior to the institution of contract. A constitution is merely an agreement for reciprocal insurance of the terms of property and contract.

    It so happens that allocation of property rights determines the incentives possible, and the incentives determine the degree of market participation – how many hands make the work light – and therefore the cost of providing individuals with incentives.

    It’s just cheaper for the strong to give everyone property rights – so long as none of the weak band together to extract from the strong under platonic justification via those self-same rules.

    This is the same reason that Slavery is illogical as well as immoral: assuming the prior slaves respect property rights and do not form a government of extraction, then it is merely cheaper and easier to have one’s slaves as vendors and customers.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-03 12:55:00 UTC

  • PROTECTING THE TRIBE —“The “authorities” have proven they will not protect pri

    PROTECTING THE TRIBE

    —“The “authorities” have proven they will not protect private property or civilian lives (Ferguson being just the latest example) while the US Supreme Court has ruled police have no fiduciary duty or obligation to do you/us. The natural state is Hobbes’ Leviathan. A Social Contract must be created and once created it is maintained by the Carrot and Stick. For those that attempt to burn, loot and kill, they must be summarily dispatched either to their Maker or if they are Atheists to the Worm-ridden Compost Pile. I’m not here to judge them on their religion or spirituality just to protect myself, my family, my assets and production. No one questions a Lion, Gorilla or Bull protecting their pride, troop or herd. No one should question a human for doing the same.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-26 00:24:00 UTC

  • THE INSTITUTIONAL SOLUTION IS THE JURY AND THE MARKET We know how to build liber

    THE INSTITUTIONAL SOLUTION IS THE JURY AND THE MARKET

    We know how to build libertarian government across heterogeneous moral codes: universal standing (proposals) before the jury (of our peers), in which we propose fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchanges, free of negative externality.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-22 02:49:00 UTC

  • “I should hasten to remind the court that we are here, in the presence of the co

    —“I should hasten to remind the court that we are here, in the presence of the court, because someone must decide that which is difficult to decide – not because the court is particularly skilled at such decisions, not that the court is better at such decisions than I, and certainly not because the court’s time is more precious than mine.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-21 20:10:00 UTC

  • Well, rothbard’s pretense of a solution is ridiculous really. Hoppe tells us tha

    Well, rothbard’s pretense of a solution is ridiculous really. Hoppe tells us that the bureaucracy can’t work but not that government of voluntary contract like homeowners associations can’t work. But I think I explained why MAJORITY RULE DEMOCRACY can’t work. And I am not sure anyone has made that argument before. It’s possible, but I don’t think so.

    But I think I am the only person to both state why democracy can’t work (majority rule that is) and HOW TO FIX IT if we want governments of any scale over heterogeneous peoples.

    I just don’t think anyone’s every made this argument before.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-21 11:58:00 UTC

  • Liberarian Requirements for Legal Decidability

    [W]e can construct libertarianism as a (a) sentimental, (b) ratio-moral, or (c) ratio-legal, or (d) legal-empirical framework – a body of interdependent arguments.

    But if we rely upon sentimental, and ratio-moral construction, then statements are not decidable, and opinion still influences the decision – we leave open not only the possibility of, but the preference for the addition of subjective preference into any decision. That is why we cannot construct rule of law upon ratio-moral arguments – revisionism and evolutionary corruption. 

    This is why libertarianism in the anglo tradition has been constructed as a legal framework rather than moral framework of the cosmopolitan and continental traditions – by using strict construction and original intent. 

    However, while this construction – as a system of calculation, which prohibits, unlike rationalism, the introduction of information not present in the original construction – still leaves open the question as to what determines the scope and limits to property upon which a ratio-legal law is calculated. 

    Empirical-legal evidence tells us that if we wish to construct a libertarian society, that we must define property as that which people treat as property by defense of it, and retaliation for violations of it. 

    Without this knowledge we cannot eliminate demand for the state as an imposer of arbitrary norms, and suppressor of retaliation for violations of property that humans demonstrate they intuit as their property. 

    There is only one way to eliminate the state, and that is to eliminate demand for it, by providing a sufficient body of property rights law, that all disputes are rationally decidable without the addition of subjective information.

  • Liberarian Requirements for Legal Decidability

    [W]e can construct libertarianism as a (a) sentimental, (b) ratio-moral, or (c) ratio-legal, or (d) legal-empirical framework – a body of interdependent arguments.

    But if we rely upon sentimental, and ratio-moral construction, then statements are not decidable, and opinion still influences the decision – we leave open not only the possibility of, but the preference for the addition of subjective preference into any decision. That is why we cannot construct rule of law upon ratio-moral arguments – revisionism and evolutionary corruption. 

    This is why libertarianism in the anglo tradition has been constructed as a legal framework rather than moral framework of the cosmopolitan and continental traditions – by using strict construction and original intent. 

    However, while this construction – as a system of calculation, which prohibits, unlike rationalism, the introduction of information not present in the original construction – still leaves open the question as to what determines the scope and limits to property upon which a ratio-legal law is calculated. 

    Empirical-legal evidence tells us that if we wish to construct a libertarian society, that we must define property as that which people treat as property by defense of it, and retaliation for violations of it. 

    Without this knowledge we cannot eliminate demand for the state as an imposer of arbitrary norms, and suppressor of retaliation for violations of property that humans demonstrate they intuit as their property. 

    There is only one way to eliminate the state, and that is to eliminate demand for it, by providing a sufficient body of property rights law, that all disputes are rationally decidable without the addition of subjective information.

  • SENTIMENTAL, MORAL, RATIONAL, EMPIRICAL: LEGAL DECIDABILITY We can construct lib

    SENTIMENTAL, MORAL, RATIONAL, EMPIRICAL: LEGAL DECIDABILITY

    We can construct libertarianism as a sentimental, ratio-moral, or ratio-legal, or legal-empirical framework. But if we rely upon sentimental, and ratio-moral construction, then statements are not decidable, and opinion still influences the decision – we leave open not only the possibility of, but the preference for the addition of subjective preference into any decision. That is why we cannot construct rule of law upon ratio-moral arguments – revisionism and evolutionary corruption. This is why libertarianism in the anglo tradition has been constructed as a legal framework rather than moral framework of the cosmopolitan and continental traditions – by using strict construction and original intent. However, while this construction – as a system of calculation, which prohibits, unlike rationalism, the introduction of information not present in the original construction – still leaves open the question as to what determines the scope and limits to property upon which a that ratio-legal law is calculated. Empirical-legal evidence tells us that if we wish to construct a libertarian society, that we must define property as that which people treat as property by defense of it, and retaliation for violations of it. Without this knowledge we cannot eliminate demand for the state as an imposer of arbitrary norms, and suppressor of retaliation for violations of property that humans demonstrate they intuit as their property. There is only one way to eliminate the state, and that is to eliminate demand for it, by providing a sufficient body of property rights law, that all disputes are rationally decidable without the addition of subjective information.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-18 10:35:00 UTC

  • ALL FULL OF SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING NOTHING. How can you state that liberty –

    ALL FULL OF SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING NOTHING.

    How can you state that liberty – defined as absence of loss of satisfaction caused by the actions others – can be implemented via formal institutions that will allow the formation of a voluntary polity?

    If liberty is synonymous with the absence of such dissatisfying experiences as satisfaction, then what actions can bring about a state of liberty without those undesirable experiences?

    Why is your theory of liberty not merely a description of the experiential state of liberty, and while a true statement, just a restatement of subjective value, expressed from the subjective rather than objective point of view – and therefore not just tautological hand waving without consequence?

    You can claim that your theory of experiential liberty is a solution to the arguments positioned in your paper followed by a criticism of libertarians who are describing institutional rules for construction of liberty, instead of the experience of liberty – but you have not demonstrated either that you have solved the problem of determining the scope of actions that we MUST consider a violation of liberty and those that do not, or why the experiential point of view adds value to the extant proposition that value is subjective, and that the institutional question we are debating is that of the scope of property that we agree to resolve conflicts over, under law?

    The question libertarians ask is how to eradicate need for the state. The problem is that we debate the scope of property rights because we have no non-arbitrary, rationally derived means of knowing the answer. What scope of violation constitutes a lack of imposition of costs?

    Because such violations can include those that are observable and those are not; those that are tolerable and those that are not; those that are errors and those that are not. All libertarians make the same argument that you do, but the contention remains one of how we judge the truth of a claim that one has experienced such a subjective experience of dissatisfaction, so that disputes can be resolved?

    Aren’t you just hand-waving? Isn’t your work irrelevant because it is both obvious, and because it does not solve the problem which you claim that it does? Isn’t your ridicule of libertarians in itself an absurdity? Your definition of, or “theory” of, experiential liberty tells us nothing about resolving the conflict over what actions are and are not permissible, under your self-stated assumption that a state of liberty is that in which we maximize liberty, assuming a state of subjectively maximized liberty is desirable. Isn’t the problem how we maximize liberty? And how does subjective value (an increase or decrease in satisfaction resulting from action) differ from your restatement?

    How does the meaningless term ‘maximizing liberty’ help solve the problem of determining what scope we implement in the rule of law? And how is that any different from the evolutionary progress of the common law ‘s constant discovery of new means of criminal, unethical and immoral conduct?

    Hoppe is correct. The only question we must answer in order to construct a condition of liberty is the scope of property we define as adjudicable under law. His argument (as I believe I understand it), is that intersubjectively verifiable property (prohibition on criminal offenses against extant entities), is the minimum universal scope of property necessary for liberty, and that above that scope, all other possible forms of property so covered under the law are a matter of contractual choice by the polity – not a logical necessity. This limit mirrors Rothbard’s Non-Aggression Principle and the scope of property he defines in The Ethics Of Liberty.

    My criticism of Hoppe’s argument (and of Rothbard’s ethics, and of the fallacy of Non-Aggression reflects a moral proposition), is that the local transaction costs of daily life under intersubjectively verifiable property (mere criminal prohibitions), are sufficiently high that people will prefer an authoritarian state that either imposes additional rules, and/or which suppresses retaliation, because people ACT as if their property has been violated whenever they experience criminal, unethical, immoral or conspiratorial actions. And they will retaliate against them unless the law provides an organized means of restitution, or the state aggressively suppresses retributions. As such only high trust polities that suppress nearly all violations of property as defined by demonstrated human actions. And therefore that non-aggression, and intersubjectively verifiable property are irrelevant because they are insufficient to construct a condition of liberty.

    As such, the definition of property articulated in law must mirror the violations of criminal, ethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions that people will retaliate against. And a low trust, Rothbardian polity where the minimum scope of property rights is defined as that which is intersubjectively verifiable, is impossible. And that the minimum scope of property is that which people will not desire to retaliate against its violation. That minimum scope of property appears to include not only the intersubjectively verifiable that can be transgressed against, but also unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions.

    So your position your theory as a solution to libertarian confusion – however it is merely a restatement of the obvious and already extant: of the invisibly subjective and experiential rather than the observable, objective, and institutional; when subjective value has been stated for a century, and the question remains one of the scope of observable criteria for dispute resolution necessary for the formation of a polity that does not demonstrate demand for a state. We cannot agree on the scope of property and the means of violating it.

    In other words, in your paper “The main philosophical problem with libertarian liberty” (a) you incorrectly state the cause of libertarian confusion as merely a linguistic problem of meaning, (b) and your proposed solution is a mere verbalism: restating the objective description of subjective value as subjective experience, (c) and you have not added clarity nor justified your ridicule, (d) and that the cause of confusion remains: what scope and conditions are permissible and not. 🙂

    I conjecture that (a) the solution to the problem is empirically measurable, (b) that measure will prohibit unethical and immoral impositions, in addition to merely criminal impositions, and (c) the possibility of a condition of liberty increases with normative homogeneity of the polity, and (d) likewise that possibility increases the smaller the family size (the closer to the absolute nuclear family).

    I make this conjecture because (e) transaction costs make liberty non-rational unless nearly equal to kinship transaction costs (trust), (f) tolerance for free riding decrease with kinship distance, and (g) shared norms are perceived as kinship signals.

    It is possible to empirically falsify this argument. And I think that given the evidence it will be very hard to do that.

    I will save my criticism of your misunderstanding of, and abuse of critical rationalism for a later date.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-13 08:48:00 UTC

  • I forgot to add to my list for 2914, the concept that law must be constructed fo

    I forgot to add to my list for 2914, the concept that law must be constructed for individuals, yet state policy for families.

    This is something I will ask Roman to do a video on.

    Cheers.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-13 02:44:00 UTC