Lies are lies, even if they are comforting lies. Falsehoods are falsehoods even if they are comforting falsehoods. In my work, I have to deal with facts, if I want to find new solutions to the failings of western social democracy. I can’t do that if people believe falsehoods.
THE NECESSITY OF RATIONAL ACTION
Justice must be blind, but the rest of us must not be.
“…The problem is that profiling is an indispensable part of a living a safe, rational life…. ” – Taki’s Blog
Author John Derbyshire said exactly the same thing last year, and lost his job for it.
His job, in the dark enlightenment movement, is to point out the failings of enlightenment and postmodern thought. He tries to do it with british humor. Which may work or not. But that’s his work, just like most people in the dark enlightenment.
I defended him, and the Village Voice called me a member of the ‘hard right’. I’m actually a left-leaning libertarian by most accounts, making me a classical liberal on most things. But a conservative on the nature of man. That is because both left liberalism and right morality appear to consist largely of correct propositions – even if they are poorly stated in archaic or silly language.
HARD FACTS AND UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS
That the law must treat all of us equally for it to be a just law, the fact is that we are not equal as individuals, and as groups we exaggerate those inequalities. And while the law MUST treat us equally to function justly, we CANNOT treat each other equally and function safely.
“…There actually are huge statistical differences in behavior by demographic groups. For example, an obscure Obama Administration report admitted:
“…While young [age 14 to 24] black males have accounted for about 1% of the population from 1980 to 2008…(b)y 2008, young black males made up about a quarter of all homicide offenders (27%).
“…Yet to many Americans these days, the thought of noticing giant facts such as this 27-to-1 ratio seems like blasphemy against the Declaration of Independence’s “proposition” that “all men are created equal.”
POSTMODERN RELIGION HAS NO PLACE IN LAW
It is as irrational to attempt to preserve the falsehood of equality, as it is to preserve any other RELIGIOUS FALSEHOOD. This falsehood alone is enough to convict Postmodernism as a civic RELIGION, and therefore ban it from inclusion and support of state action.
Law must consist of truth, or it cannot be just.
http://takimag.com/article/the_failure_of_profiling_racists_steve_sailer/printTHE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEGAL EQUALITY AND CIVIL INEQUALITY: PROFILING AND 27-1 RATIOS
Lies are lies, even if they are comforting lies. Falsehoods are falsehoods even if they are comforting falsehoods. In my work, I have to deal with facts, if I want to find new solutions to the failings of western social democracy. I can’t do that if people believe falsehoods.
THE NECESSITY OF RATIONAL ACTION
Justice must be blind, but the rest of us must not be.
“…The problem is that profiling is an indispensable part of a living a safe, rational life…. ” – Taki’s Blog
Author John Derbyshire said exactly the same thing last year, and lost his job for it.
His job, in the dark enlightenment movement, is to point out the failings of enlightenment and postmodern thought. He tries to do it with british humor. Which may work or not. But that’s his work, just like most people in the dark enlightenment.
I defended him, and the Village Voice called me a member of the ‘hard right’. I’m actually a left-leaning libertarian by most accounts, making me a classical liberal on most things. But a conservative on the nature of man. That is because both left liberalism and right morality appear to consist largely of correct propositions – even if they are poorly stated in archaic or silly language.
HARD FACTS AND UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS
That the law must treat all of us equally for it to be a just law, the fact is that we are not equal as individuals, and as groups we exaggerate those inequalities. And while the law MUST treat us equally to function justly, we CANNOT treat each other equally and function safely.
“…There actually are huge statistical differences in behavior by demographic groups. For example, an obscure Obama Administration report admitted:
“…While young [age 14 to 24] black males have accounted for about 1% of the population from 1980 to 2008…(b)y 2008, young black males made up about a quarter of all homicide offenders (27%).
“…Yet to many Americans these days, the thought of noticing giant facts such as this 27-to-1 ratio seems like blasphemy against the Declaration of Independence’s “proposition” that “all men are created equal.”
POSTMODERN RELIGION HAS NO PLACE IN LAW
It is as irrational to attempt to preserve the falsehood of equality, as it is to preserve any other RELIGIOUS FALSEHOOD. This falsehood alone is enough to convict Postmodernism as a civic RELIGION, and therefore ban it from inclusion and support of state action.
I assume that I don’t understand something. But, if you live in a neighborhood that has gone from largely homeowners to a significant number of renters, and experienced a proportional increase in crime, and you form a block watch, and you follow someone, and he smacks you for it, and you shoot him for smacking you for just watching him, I don’t see the issue.
If I make someone nervous who doesn’t know me my reaction is to introduce myself, state why I am there, and make them comfortable, which is what I’d want someone to do for me in the same circumstances. Its just civic duty.
I mean, why is it ok to smack someone who is out trying to protect the neighborhood, and following you? Objecting to that is sort of an admission that you are up to something.
Watching a person in public is not a violation of any right I’ve ever heard of. But smacking someone for watching you certainly is. And shooting someone who is smacking you for watching them seems entirely rational, since you violated his body by initiating violence.
(Contrary to Searle’s nonsense. More in line with Bentham’s nonsense. Minor improvement to Hoppe. )
[Y]ou DEMAND contractual RIGHTS in EXCHANGE for entering into a CONTRACT with others for some specific terms – and in the libertarian bias we demand absolute private property rights, and the right of first possession by transformation and homesteading.
Other people agree to NONE, SOME or ALL of those demands, in exchange for their specific terms. Non-aggressing on some terms, and preserving the opportunity to aggress on others.
One cannot ‘have rights’ without the presence of others to grant them in exchange.
But without the consent of others, one cannot ‘have or possess’ them.
[T]he majority of the world cultures and subcultures evolved an allocation of each’s portfolio of property rights between the private and the commons on one axis, and between a) normative (habits, manners, ethics and morals), b) real (land, built capital, portable property, and c) artificial (intellectual property, limited monopoly privileges) on the other axis.
Those DEMANDS do you very little good without the ability to enforce your demands. In the case of private property, the coalition of statists is powerful enough to deny you demands, and force you to adhere to THEIR definition of property rights.
Might doesn’t make best.
Might doesn’t make right.
Might makes possible whatever property rights you have demanded.
So you must possess the might to institute the property rights you desire.
“…the fatal tendency that exists in the heart of man to satisfy his wants with the least possible effort, explains the almost universal perversion of the law.” – Bastiat. The Law.
[C]an you imagine commercial trade and the market without the abstract entity we call the corporation? Sure you can. The corporation is just a partnership that the government has granted limited liability to in order to increase tax revenues from ventures that are both expensive and high risk. THink of it as off-book investment in research and development.
If you can imagine commerce without corporations, then you can imagine government without the state. The state is just a corporation – a collection of people who are insulated from liability for their actions.
The common law, and the rule of law under the common law, with private property, and a government that is a contract, wherein the governors have no right to issue law, only to facilitate contracts between groups, which are then enforceable by the courts.
Under such a common law system, (the anarchic system), people in corporations and in government are not protected from you suing them for violating our contracts -the most important contract being our constitution.
[A]narchy as we describe it, isn’t the absence of organization, of commons, or of law. It’s the absence of the state and the state bureaucracy that through the violence of law, forces us to do what we do not wish to, and its members profit from doing so.
We can have all the government we want. but we do not need the state, the bureaucracy, legislation, and majority rule to accomplish it. Our government needs only to facilitate contracts and to forbid all parties, whether parties to the contract or not, from free riding, rent seeking, privatization, socialization, corruption, theft, and violence involving those contracts.
[T]he common law depends upon experience (scientific evidence), not logic or reason (untested theory), and is relatively impervious to authoritarian influence.
In any reading list on Law, I don’t necessarily want to communicate the history of law, so much as emphasize the pervasive problems of the social cognitive biases: a) False Consensus bias, b) the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight, c) Projection Bias, d) Trait Ascription Bias, e) the Illusion of Transparency, that are largely the product of the introduction of women into the voting pool, and their alliance with, and support of, marginal male groups who can obtain power by the use of the near universalism of these female cognitive biases, because these cognitive biases suit the reproductive strategies of females in our prehistoric, pre-agrarian phase of development.
1) Bastiat’s The Law
2) Epstein’s Simple Rules For A Complex World
3) Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (as well as Hayek and Popper on knowledge)
4) Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Common Law
4) Milsen’s A Natural History of The Common Law
CLUES TO ADAPTING TO THE 21ST CENTURY
1) Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (Believe it or not), my interpretation of Johnson’s Three Methods Of Coercion (see my site), and Perhaps Arnold’ Kling’s pamphlet “The Tree Languages Of Politics”. In particular I love kling’s metaphors both in the Three Languages, and in his “Recalculation” description of recessions. These are both accurate categorical descriptions but they are not sufficiently causally descriptions. Haidt solves the problem of the three languages. I think in my works I’ve sufficiently combined these different perspectives and using Haidt and property rights, I’ve unified these systems into causal relations. (Which new, and is why people have trouble understanding what I’m trying to get across at present.)
2/2) I want to add here Rothbard’s Ethics of Private Property. But since his moral code is incomplete (and therefore false), and his definition of property incomplete, because he was creating an ethic of rebellion not one of civilization, I’ll just have to wait until I finish my own work on propertarianism which corrects those errors. Without this understanding of the relationship between group size (individualism), reproductive strategy, morality, and property it is impossible to adapt the common law to the complex heterogeneous society, because it relies, at least in the arguments of Melvin Eisenberg and perhaps Holmes, relies on assumptions about society, and norms that cannot survive moral scrutiny in our heterogeneous social order.
3) Epstein’s How the Progressives Rewrote the Constitution. The canonical history of how the feminist, progressive, liberal, socialist, and communist movement was able to effectively destroy the rule of law under the constitution.
4) Barnett’s Restoring The Lost Constitution (I don’t believe that this is possible or advisable, and instead that we must create an institutional framework that supports a diversity of genetic strategies. But his analysis of what the constitution actually said, is exceptional, and therefore it is a prescription for how to articulate the rules of future institutions.)
CAVEAT
[I] don’t really want to spend a lot of my time with the law. I always feel that I’m slumming and need a shower afterward. But as an institution that we both require for calculative purposes, and an institution that must adapt to contemporary diversity and heterogeneity by expanding the concepts of morality and property. To do so, it’s necessary to articulate the impact on the system of common law, which shall remain the means of contract-making and dispute resolution under any more diverse propertarian model.
FALURE OF CALCULATIVE INSTITUTIONS TO FACILITATE DIVERSITY OF INTERESTS, AND THEREFORE INCENTIVES AND CALCULATION
Civilizations fail because their institutions can no longer calculate cooperation and the user of resources. (ie: Jarred Diamond is wrong. and I’m not so sure about Fukuyama’s and Acemoglu’s analyses have identified this problem correctly as one of property rights.)
MORE DETAIL
For more detail see Kinsella’s excellent list at mises.org which also addresses the historical development of the common law. In particular Tulluck’s criticism of the method of dispute resolution. A criticism I think is solved by Hoppe’s privatization and insurance model.
Hopefully this was helpful to others.
Cheers
STATISM AND CORPORATISM VS PARTNERSHIPS AND THE COMMON LAW
Can you imagine commercial trade and the market without the abstract entity we call the corporation? Sure you can. The corporation is just a partnership that the government has granted limited liability to in order to increase tax revenues from ventures that are both expensive and high risk. THink of it as off-book investment in research and development.
If you can imagine commerce without corporations, then you can imagine government without the state. The state is just a corporation – a collection of people who are insulated from liability for their actions.
The common law, and the rule of law under the common law, with private property, and a government that is a contract, wherein the governors have no right to issue law, only to facilitate contracts between groups, which are then enforceable by the courts.
Under such a common law system, (the anarchic system), people in corporations and in government are not protected from you suing them for violating our contracts -the most important contract being our constitution.
Anarchy as we describe it, isn’t the absence of organization, of commons, or of law. It’s the absence of the state and the state bureaucracy that through the violence of law, forces us to do what we do not wish to, and its members profit from doing so.
We can have all the government we want. but we do not need the state, the bureaucracy, legislation, and majority rule to accomplish it. Our government needs only to facilitate contracts and to forbid all parties, whether parties to the contract or not, from free riding, rent seeking, privatization, socialization, corruption, theft, and violence involving those contracts.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/13/texas-gov-rick-perry-americans-have-no-right-to-freedom-from-religion/WHAT THE CONSTITUTION ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT RELIGION, AND HOW THE STATE HAS CREATED A STATE RELIGION IN SPITE OF THE CONSTITUTION.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; “
WHAT THAT MEANS
It means what it says. It doesn’t say freedom of religion, or freedom from religion. As a libertarian of course, I would prefer that it did say what we libertarians desire it said. Just like every other faction desires it to say one thing or another. But that’s what it says and all it says. It means only that the congress may not pass a law establishing an official single monopoly religion, or inhibiting the practice of religion by those who desire to.
WHAT THE FOUNDERS INTENDED
1) The founders intended that the state not take control of the christian church as it had in France and England, because the state would abuse the church, which was the source of moral teaching, and use the church for immoral ends. However, in practice, the state has made the education system it’s ‘church’ and the source of moral teaching, thereby creating its own religion.
2) The founders intended that the church retain it’s position as the source of moral teaching. They stated repeatedly that the constitution was an inferior protector of our liberty – that the only material protection of liberty was the moral code of the citizenry itself. In practice, through public education, the state has created its own moral code against the wishes of the majority. We call this code socialism, or the more recent incarnation of socialism: “postmodernism”, or in colloquial terms “liberalism’, or in institutional and political terms ‘social democracy’. But whatever we call it, the state has adopted and sponsored a religion, and not agnosticism, and not atheism, and the state does not practice atheism or agnosticism, or even neutrality – it practices postmodernism, and an intentional attack on christianity, while supporting all other monotheistic religions.
BUT OUR CONSTITUTION DOESN’T CONSTRAIN THE STATE ANY LONGER
Political debates that rely upon some set of rights make no sense today. Thanks to the destruction of the constitution by liberals by abusing the 14th amendment as a ruse, and in particular under the threat of stacking the court imposed by FDR, the constitution no longer constrains the state, because other than by the untested principle of nullification, the federal government is now in practice a dictator to the states. WIthout state opposition to the federal government, groups of individuals have no institutional means of cooperating en masse to oppose expansion of the government.
RECOMMENDED READING (This is really all you need to know)
Nullification, by Thomas Woods. (The least expensive and least disruptive means of regaining our rights: move, and vote for nullification.)
How Liberals Rewrote the Constitution, by Richard Epstein. (A detailed history of the project to undermined the constitution so that socialism could be adopted.)
The Constitution Of Liberty, by Friedrich Hayek. (Freedom is synonymous with property rights and rule of law. That’s it.)
