Curt Doolittle

Category: Natural Law and Reciprocity

  • REFORMING LIBERTARIANISM: IT’S PRETTY SIMPLE REALLY —“I think it’s pretty simp

    REFORMING LIBERTARIANISM: IT’S PRETTY SIMPLE REALLY

    —“I think it’s pretty simple: the NAP has proven to be demonstrably insufficient to use as the basis of the common law, because it preserves and licenses immoral and unethical behavior, which impose high transaction costs on in-group members. As such, no such polity is possible, and that is evidenced by the fact that no such polity has ever existed. … Rothbard’s ethics license parasitism, and the high trust society that created liberty requires contribution to production. It’s not complicated. Rothbard was wrong. Its impossible to form a polity on rothbardian ethics. Period.”–

    In-group ethics necessary for the formation of a voluntary polity require the standard of moral action be based upon a requirement for contribution, which mirrors the human moral instincts for cooperation.

    if you want an involuntary polity then you can choose any property rights (or lack of) that you want.

    If you want a high trust polity that organizes voluntarily, and in which production is voluntarily organized, then you must find an institutional means of resolving ethical and moral conflicts as well as criminal conflicts.

    The only institution that we have yet developed that is capable of providing dispute resolution without the presence of a central authority is independent courts under the common law, with articulated property rights.

    If property is well defined such that it mirrors ethical and moral prohibitions on free riding in all its forms, all that remains is the voluntary, fully informed, warrantied, productive voluntary exchange free of negative externalities.

    You may choose a less moral and ethical society. And I am not sure at what point all humans will demand the state, or a sufficient number to form a voluntary polity will prefer anarchy, but I do know that regardless of that point of inflection, this is the means by which to achieve it that we know of.

    Cheers. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-20 18:08:00 UTC

  • REPOSITIONING ROTHBARD 1) “Rothbard was a great historian but a terrible philoso

    REPOSITIONING ROTHBARD

    1) “Rothbard was a great historian but a terrible philosopher.”

    2) “Property evolved first as a means of preventing free riding, second as a means of inheritance, and only last as a necessary institution for the division of knowledge and labor..”

    3) “We can still use the NAP, but we must redefine property such that it reflects human moral instincts: as an ongoing preventino of free riding by every creative means that come up with”

    (More to come)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-20 11:36:00 UTC

  • ON COMPREHENSION OF PROPERTARIANISM I’m trying to put my arms around who underst

    ON COMPREHENSION OF PROPERTARIANISM

    I’m trying to put my arms around who understands what, and why. Because I can test pretty clearly each individual, and I see patterns between individuals.

    LEVEL 1) POLITICS – Can you understand politics?

    (a) The informal and formal institutions of cooperation and coercion, and the ability to model changes to those institutions, and to forecast the results.

    (b) Can you distinguish the difference between personal philosophy, informal institutions and moral norms, and formal political institutions. And can you distinguish between making arguments of personal philosophy, moral norms, and political institutions?

    The problem I encounter is the inability for individuals to model all three at once, since all three do function at once in any polity.

    Eli Harman, Paul Bakhmut, and an increasing number of people who have conservative libertarian intuitions, seem to grasp these matters quickly. Although I think Eli may be a better communicator than I am.

    LEVEL 2) ETHICS – Can you understand ethics?

    The moral rules necessary for cooperation, and the ability to model changes to those rules given a heterogeneous polity whose incentives vary significantly.

    The problem I encounter is moral blindness. Moral blindness combined with the inability to model ethics, or distinguish between philosophy, informal institutions and formal institutions. Or the selective choice of one rather than all three.

    Roman Skaskiw grasps these matters immediately.

    LEVEL 3) EPISTEMOLOGY – Can you understand epistemology?

    The methods by which we ascertain the quality of our understanding of the correspondence between our ideas, our actions that result from our ideas, and the natural world.

    I seem to be able to get pretty far with a few Critical Rationalists ( Frank Lovell for example. Ayelam Valentine Agaliba clearly can manage these issues. Better than I can I think.) But even CR’s are locked into pervasive platonism. A platonism they protect with religious zeal.

    Philosophy is largely a Platonist discipline. So it’s actually pretty hard to find people with both scientific and economic backgrounds sufficient to grasp the differences between reason, exchange, and science.

    I seem to get pretty far with a few mathematical philosophers and professors who were educated before the ‘mystical’ sixties and later.

    If I can find mathematicians who have some experience with the problems of mathematical philosophy I seem to have no problem showing them the parallel of their problem in logic, ethics and science. But otherwise, epistemology is simply a pretty hard topic for most people to manage.

    We certainly have a problem in libertarianism because of jewish pseudoscientific rationals. And we have a pervasive and crippling problem of german continental platonism. We have a problem of mathematical and logical platonism in anglo analytic philosophy.

    LEVEL 4) Can you understand metaphysics?

    I cant really get very far with anyone on metaphysics. Skye Stewart is better than I am at grasping different philosophical points of view. But in general, my view of metaphysics is on of absolute Scientific Realism, just as my view of ethics is one of absolute Ethical Realism.

    This is not terribly difficult terrain for professional philosophers. But there are not a lot of professional philosophers with libertarian leanings.

    SUMMARY

    This is a ladder from the least to the most complex problems in political philsophy. And while I may engage some at the lowest level, by the time I reach the highest there are just very few people to converse with.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-17 18:51:00 UTC

  • SYNONYMS ACROSS DISCIPLINES: BUT IT’S ALL JUST THEFT Murder, violence, destructi

    SYNONYMS ACROSS DISCIPLINES: BUT IT’S ALL JUST THEFT

    Murder, violence, destruction, theft by physical appropriation, theft by fraud, theft by fraud using omission, free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses, conspiracy, invasion, conquest – all deprive others of that which they have acted to obtain an interest in, against their will. ie: theft. the taking of that which is not obtained by voluntary exchange or first-use.

    Humans reject, universally, and punish, universally, “theft”. But when we talk about ‘theft’, each discipline uses slightly different language

    1) In legal terms resolvable under the common law, the word we use for involuntary transfer is ‘theft’. That is the most general categorical name we have available to us.

    2) Now, the PROBLEM that arises with cooperation is called ‘free riding’. The “problem of free riding’ is how it is discussed in the literature. In the context of social science, and in the context of economics, the term ‘free riding’ refers to that category of involuntary transfers (thefts).

    3) In moral philosophy we must identify first causes. I have borrowed the term ‘involuntary transfer’ from law, in which title is forcibly transferred by the state without consent of its owner. This was the most general and unloaded term I could find. (I should note that Jan Lester uses ‘forced costs” or something of that nature, for the same purpose.)

    I do not need to get into a semantic debate on normative terminology. I need only define my terms. “Free riding” is the broadest category I can use in the context of cooperation. While “involuntary transfer” is the broadest categorical term I can use in the context of moral philosophy. And “theft” is the broadest categorical term that I can use in the context of dispute resolution (law).

    However, whether talking about cooperation (free riding), morality (involuntary transfer), or dispute resolution (theft), the human action they all refer to, is that act which transfers that which one has acted to accumulate or acquire without his informed consent.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-17 03:46:00 UTC

  • TRANSNATIONAL INSURGENCIES Aristocratic Egalitarianism, in which we obtain prope

    TRANSNATIONAL INSURGENCIES

    Aristocratic Egalitarianism, in which we obtain property rights in exchange with others, to whom we grant them, under the agreement that we will defend each other’s rights, can or cannot know boundaries. I cannot understand how it can consider boundaries.

    It should be just as easy for a dedicated minority of insurgents to influence western property rights as it has been for a dedicated minority of insurgents in other cultures to attempt to alter their allocations of property and property rights – albeit, they don’t use that conceptualization or terminology.

    Knights of just as important today as they were in the past.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-13 00:05:00 UTC

  • JUSTIFICATION VS EXPLANATION (ethics) 1) Rothbardian ethics: How to justify both

    JUSTIFICATION VS EXPLANATION

    (ethics)

    1) Rothbardian ethics: How to justify both private property, and private theft by deception and parasitism.

    2) Public Choice Theory (Social Democracy) : How to justify public theft by pseudoscience and parasitism.

    3) Hoppe’s Anarcho Capitalism : How to justify private property, and eliminate the monopoly bureaucracy and the state.

    4) Aristocratic Egalitarianism : How to resolve all *possible* conflicts via the common law, and eliminate all demand for the state – no justification is needed.

    All I did was base Hoppe’s deductions made from Argumentation on science and reason, rather than pseudoscience (praxeology) and rationalism.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-10 11:06:00 UTC

  • HUMANS WILL INVENT INSTITUTIONS TO FILL ETHICAL AND MORAL VACUUMS. (important)(i

    HUMANS WILL INVENT INSTITUTIONS TO FILL ETHICAL AND MORAL VACUUMS.

    (important)(insight)(parsimony)

    The trick is to fill moral and ethical vacuums with rationally adjudicable property rights rather than the state, religious authority, superstition, or some other rule or taboo.

    The rothbardian definition of property will not produce rational incentives sufficient for the formation of a voluntary polity. Definitions of property, like rules of common law, must evolve with the complexity of the society to reflect all possible ethical and moral constraints such that ALTERNATIVE ethical and moral constraints – of which the state is only one form – do not evolve to take the place of missing moral and ethical constraints. Humans will find a way to fill a moral or ethical vacuum because transaction costs of the moral and ethical vacuum are simply prohibitively high. That is why societies have eccentric moral codes, laws, rules and rituals: they have no method – like the common law – of advancing property rights by rational means. Property is our only rational means of advancing prohibition on unethical and immoral behavior and thereby driving out the high transaction costs they create.

    For libertarianism to be palatable and rationally preferable for other than a marginally indifferent minority, we must repair the definition of property that is adjudicable under the common law, to reflect the entire scope of moral and ethical constraints. Moral intuitions do vary in amplitude and priority but those that apply to cooperation are instinctual prohibitions on in-group free riding: violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by negative externality, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of gains, corruption and conspiracy – and every permutation and possibility in between.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-08 04:14:00 UTC

  • COME HOME TO ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIANISM – LEAVE THE GHETTO. I’m an aristocratic

    COME HOME TO ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIANISM – LEAVE THE GHETTO.

    I’m an aristocratic egalitarian. I am willing to grant full spectrum Propertarian property rights to all who are equally willing to fight for it in word and deed to the best of their ability.

    That is the ancient source of liberty: the aristocratic egalitarianism of the indo-europeans.

    Libertarians from the Rothbardian movement are largely a collection of ‘pussy-tarians’, ‘coward-tarians’, ‘stupid-tarians’, ‘aspie-tarians’, ‘libertines’, and ‘dishonest-cheat-itarians’ who can be divided into two camps: those fooled by obscurantism, and those who are naturally liars, cheats, and dishonest.

    Ditch ghetto libertarianism as the immoral dishonest scheme that it is.

    Come home to aristocratic egalitarianism.

    Take liberty by force, for moral reasons, rather than beg for it for immoral reasons.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-06 05:19:00 UTC

  • LIBERTY IS NOT A PRODUCT OF PERMISSION, BUT OF CHOICE Without states how is libe

    LIBERTY IS NOT A PRODUCT OF PERMISSION, BUT OF CHOICE

    Without states how is liberty enforced?

    It’s enforced aristocratically: by violence under the ternary logic of cooperation: Null-violence, 0-boycott, 1-cooperation.

    If another individual desires property rights we grant them to one another in exchange for fighting to preserve those rights from all comers.

    *We grant that right regardless of state, country, nation, or boundary*.

    That is the origin and institution of aristocratic egalitarian liberty. Egalitarian meaning: “anyone who is willing to fight for property rights will be given property rights by all others in exchange.” And by contrast, those who do not demand property rights, will not fight for them, shall not be granted them.

    Everything else is masturbatory begging for permission by slaves.

    You cannot have liberty, and property, if you have it by permission. That statement would be illogical.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-06 05:09:00 UTC

  • WHERE LIBERTARIANS GO WRONG. Libertarians get lost in introspection. The central

    WHERE LIBERTARIANS GO WRONG.

    Libertarians get lost in introspection. The central problem of creating an anarchic society is fully articulating property rights such that they are possible to rationally adjudicate under the common law.

    It is this rational ability to adjudicate differences under the common law that makes possible ‘rule of law’. Without such rational articulation, rule by man’s discretion is necessary.

    The sufficiency of that articulated list of property is what determines if transaction costs are low enough that it’s rational for people to voluntarily join a polity in which plans can be made, and disputes can be resolved, according to that list of property rights.

    As I have written recently, libertarians (foolishly) discount these transaction costs because they tend to be above, and interact above, the threshold at which moral behavior is dominant.

    The NAP is either an insufficient test, or private property rights that are intersubjectively verifiable are an insufficient scope. Propertarianism extends property to that which people demonstrate they believe is their just property, and places the burden on the individuals with the greater knowledge. “Seller Beware”.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-05 14:56:00 UTC