Curt Doolittle

Category: Law, Constitution, and Jurisprudence

  • Do Convicted Criminals Deserve Human Rights Since They Willingly Deprived Someone Else Of Theirs?

    When someone violates NATURAL RIGHTS (life, liberty, property, by fraud, theft or violence) we punish them by removing their NATURAL RIGHTS, by  imprisoning them.   Natural rights are NECESSARY RIGHTS to engage in cooperation via exchanges within society: life, liberty, and property.

    We pay for our natural rights by forgoing our opportunity for fraud, theft and violence. 

    We also pay for access to opportunities to interact with others by paying the cost of effort to deonstrate manners, and the cost of forgone opportunities for stealing from others by respecting ethics and morals. 

    For violations of normative laws, we are ostracized from opportunity (boycotted) rather than punished or incarcerated. But we retain our natural rights as long as we can find someone to voluntarily exchange with us who does not refuse to boycott us because of our manners, ethics and morals.

    However, we do not remove anyone’s HUMAN RIGHTS any longer for any reason.  This is in no small part, because we are wealthy enough that deprivation from society and consumption alone are enough to coerce people into respecting both natural laws, and for normative laws.

    The international declaration of human rights was created in no small part to control the abuse of individuals by communist countries. It is a DESIRED list of rights.  This DESIRED list of rights is a CONTRACT between GOVERNMENTS. This contract is a TREATY.  This treaty demands that member countries hold governments accountable for the treatment of individuals, and to sanction those countries if they do not. Even to the point of replacing a government for their abuses of their individuals.

    It is important that we understad that this charter is a treaty by governments that like a treaty for the promise of mutual defense, binds other countries such that they are required to use legal, financial and economic sanctions against countries that violate the rights that the charter agrees all people in all countries, regardless of government, possess.

    In effect, as a worldwide treaty, it is a worldwide constitution for that limits the powers of governemnts.  This is waht RULE OF LAW means: it means that governemtns, and the people in them,  are limited to the actions that are allowed in their constitutions.  Rule of law does not mean that there are laws. It means that the government itself is bound by law.

    The Charter of human rights is a very simple document. It is vaguely divided into sections. The first few are restatements of NATURAL LAW. After that there are a variety of prohibitions against the government, that require that all people in society must be treated equally before the law.  That they have the right to live ordinary lives, marry,  have a family, make friends, earn a living, 

    Articles 23, 24, 25, and 26, were necessary to gain the support of the socialist and communist countries, in the same way that the north was required to allow slavery in order to gain the signatures of the south during the american civil war.  This is the primary problem with the declaration of human rights: is that these are not possible, not testable, and not achievable except in rare circumstances and for short periods of time – and they create a moral hazard as well as perverse incentives.  These are POSITIVE rights. And positive rights can only exist as preferences, not rights. 

    Article 29 specifies how you PAY FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, and that is by granting them to other people equally.  Rights require exchange. Without exchange the term ‘rights’ is meaningless.  One does not HAVE human rights as if they fall from heavens. One is granted them by others, and pays for them over one’s lifetime by granting the same rights to others.

    Otherwise the document is not terribly different from the American Bill of Rights.

    What I hope to get accross here is that these are not divine rights, nor necesary and therefore natural rights, they are human rights, and human rights are those that we choose to require, by threat of force and economic punishment, that all governments must hold to.

    https://www.quora.com/Do-convicted-criminals-deserve-human-rights-since-they-willingly-deprived-someone-else-of-theirs

  • If We Ever Cloned Hominids, Would They Have Human Rights?

    Rights are the product of an exchange where terms are specified in a contract. For rights to exist a contract must exist – stated or written, or assumed.

    If we cloned hominids, and cloned them sufficiently well that they could negotiate agreements with us, it is very likely that we would have to grant them NATURAL rights – because we cannot create contracts without natural rights. 

    The definntion of human right is fungible.  They are a preference.  Meaning, they are not necessary right, and as such not natural rights.  They are aspirational rights, or desired rights, that while not necessary we have asked all other people to respect.  If these clones were able to understand those rights, and consent to them, then we could grant them rights if they would grant them to us. This would be a contract for exchange, and therefore each side would have rights.  Even if these rights are not written or spoken, but just understood and adhered to.

    Animals cannot have rights because they cannot conduct an exchange with us. We treat animals as if they have rights, because we have an agreement with others to treat animals as if they have rights.  But they do not have rights.  We simply have obligations to other people to treat animals as if they have rights. Our obligation is to other humans, not to animals.

    Animals only have rights by analogy.  But human beings like to feel that rights come from somewhere supernatural, and others don’t understand the construct of rights, so they anthropomorphize animals.  This is a simple mistake, but the majority of people make it either out of ignorance or for ideological reasons.

    I hope this helps.

    https://www.quora.com/If-we-ever-cloned-hominids-would-they-have-human-rights

  • Libertarianism: In A Stateless Society Based On Private Property Rights, How Would You Avoid Imprisonment By Another Individual Purchasing All The Property Surrounding Your Property?

    A stateless society based upon property rights is a broader definition than Rothbardian Libertarianism, which would argue that you must compete via price for access to your land.

    But that is a relatively silly thing to say given the logic at hand:

    The questoin is, if you have property and it’s capable of being locked, then how did you get there? Were  you stealing access already?   Did you sell your land to someone without thinking of preserving that access?  Or lastly, did someone buy your access somehow and now desire to charge you for it?

    The problem is, that this circumstance actually doesn’t arise, unless you were committing an act of theft or rent in the first place.  And if that is the case, then you have obtained access to your property at a discount and as such must now pay full price for access, and pay the cost of your discount.

    I am not really sure this is a libertarian argument. it’s pretty ancient common law. Generally speaking most societies allow free passage on land boundaries just to avoid this problem.

    The libertarian argument doesn’t make instinctual moral sense to people because it sounds like an involuntary transfer without added value or compensation.  But the truth is that the circumstance can’t really occur unless you were obtaining access at a discount in the first place.

    https://www.quora.com/Libertarianism-In-a-stateless-society-based-on-private-property-rights-how-would-you-avoid-imprisonment-by-another-individual-purchasing-all-the-property-surrounding-your-property

  • Would Creating A World Citizen Help Or Make Sense?

    Who is your insurer of last resort?  THat’s what citizenship is.

    https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Would-creating-a-world-citizen-help-or-make-sense

  • If Democracy Is Forcefully Enforced In A Country By Another, Wouldn’t It Be Called Dictatorship On The Enforcer’s Part?

    It is not dictatorship it is conquest.  Conquest is any alteration of the current allocation of property rights, property allocation  and norms, by force, whether that force be direct (violence and theft) or indirect (the promise of violence or theft in the event of non-compliance.)

    The justifying argument is generally that all other forms of government are even more corrupt that democracy.  This is questionable in practice as democracy seems to be a peculiarity of western civlization, and doesn’t seem to work very well elsewhere.  In india for example, corruption is so pervasive that the country stagnates. Whereas in China where the government is very strong, and now an oligarchy, the government managed to make everyone literate and move the economy much faster than India.

    Consumer capitalism and property rights are meaningful exports. THe tradition of democracy looks as though it has proven to be a failure outside of western Europe – where corruption is simply very naturally low due to ancient cultural reasons.

    https://www.quora.com/If-democracy-is-forcefully-enforced-in-a-country-by-another-wouldnt-it-be-called-dictatorship-on-the-enforcers-part

  • ORGANIZED VIOLENCE We can use organized violence to create government. We can us

    ORGANIZED VIOLENCE

    We can use organized violence to create government.

    We can use organized violence to create property rights.

    We can use organized violence to enforce property rights.

    We can use organized violence to destroy property rights.

    But you can have neither government nor property rights without violence.

    The source of freedom is violence.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-18 01:48:00 UTC

  • Kinsella’s Criticism of Locke, and My Explanation of Locke’s Reasonable Mistake, and What To Do About It.

    [T]hanks to Stephan Kinsella for giving me the opportunity to explain why Locke accidentally created the Labor theory of value. (From a FB post)

    I’m starting to think one of the costliest intellectual mistakes of all human history was Locke’s ridiculous idea that we own the fruits of our labor (or that we own our labor). This labor theory of property has led to all kinds of mischief, not to mention the labor theory of value and communism and hundreds of millions of deaths, plus the horrible IP system which also literally kills people and retards progress and imposes relative impoverishment. PLus, Locke anchored his theory in God-owns-us stuff, instead of rational argument, and he was a racist and pro-slaver. Meh. Lockean homesteading is correct, but not for Locke’s reasons. I’m going to do a long blog post about this.

    He needed to justify the middle class takeover of property from the aristocracy. To put a fork in feudalism. In the church. In the feudal commons. And to do that he had to justify ACTION as the source of property ownership. And he made the obvious logical leap that confused ownership with (a) subjective value, (b) exchange value and (c) market value. Which to us, is absurd, because we work to expose properties of the market in order to illustrate the evils of the middle class and proletarian states. Each of which attempts to reconstruct that aristocratic commons under different administrative ownership – full of sound and fury but changing nothing. But he wasn’t trying to do [what we are – expose the problem of the middle class and proletarian states]. So he didn’t have the need to disentangle the spectrum that we call ‘value’. (a,b and c above.) You’re right that he was imperfect and that there have been consequences to that imperfection. [B]ut to some degree, our emphasis on subjective value alone creates a similar problem. 1) Subjective value is immeasureable. (psychological) 2) Exchange value is incomensurable (barter: visible but incommensurable )) 3) Market value is calculable. (prices: visible, commensurable) I think, that when we libertarians use imprecise language that we make Hume’s mistake. We dont go deep enough and create confusion: political externalities. Just like he did. Because we do not illustrate the problems that the market solves by commensurability. Instead we think subjective value is self evident. And it may be. But it is incomplete. And therefore insufficient to support our claims. This is the same problem we have with Rothbardian ethics and Misesian Praxeology. Theyre incomplete as stated. And if incomplete they cannot be apodeictically certain as we claim. Too deep perhaps. More simply: There is more to value than subjectivity. [Subjectivity is but one point on a spectrum.]

  • REVOLUTION (Expensive and destructive) SECESSION (Expensive) NULLIFICATION (dirt

    REVOLUTION (Expensive and destructive)

    SECESSION (Expensive)

    NULLIFICATION (dirt cheap.)

    Nullification is the least expensive and least procedurally complex means of weakening the central government.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-08 11:40:00 UTC

  • WRONG WITH UKRAINE : ABSENCE OF THE RULE OF LAW Absence of the rule of law, is t

    http://www.chadbourne.com/files/upload/Ukraine_GeneralLegalConsiderations_BusinessUkraine_2011.pdfWHAT’S WRONG WITH UKRAINE : ABSENCE OF THE RULE OF LAW

    Absence of the rule of law, is the absence of property rights.

    “In short, Ukraine, like other former Soviet countries, suffers not only from a lack of suitable legislation and regulation and from considerable doubt as to how the courts will interpret the existing laws and rules, but from the concomitant absence of a belief in and respect for a “rule of law.” – Chadbourne, Kiev.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-15 12:53:00 UTC

  • NULLIFICATION IS CHEAPER THAN REVOLUTION OR SECESSION 1) Nullification. Inexpens

    NULLIFICATION IS CHEAPER THAN REVOLUTION OR SECESSION

    1) Nullification.

    Inexpensive. Weakens tyranny, allows greater social experimentation, preserves existing economy, promotes local opportunity while preserving federated trade, credit, insurance and military assets.

    2) Secession.

    Expensive. Eliminates tyranny, allows greater social experimentation. Creates opportunity, improves the economy, and autonomy. Allows adaptation of institutions. *Can* weaken credit, insurance, and military assets. Can also improve them.

    3) Revolution.

    Devastatingly expensive. Damages the economy, social capital, institutional capital, trade, credit, insurance, and military assets.

    Revolution carries a very high cost. The choice between Nullification and Secession is simply whether the value of the federated services of insurance, trade, credit and military are more or less valuable. Assuming that the federated system is anywhere near solvent, nullifying LAWS while retaining legitimate functions of a federal system – largely as insurer of last resort – inexpensively reduces the state to it’s only beneficial function.

    We needed a federal government because we had a vast continent that could be occupied by competitive international powers. This federated system allowed us to conquer that territory, and insure no foreign power did so instead. This strategy worked.

    But that was the ONLY REASON for the federal government at the time.

    At present, the federal government has only one redeeming value, and that is as insurer of last resort, and provider of military services too costly for independent states to field on their own.

    Nullification is the systematic means by which to devolve the united states federal government from a law-making body to a body that does nothing but provide insurer of last resort services.

    (Originally under Dave Quick’s excellent post on nullification – Here for record purposes.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-15 04:27:00 UTC