Curt Doolittle

Category: Natural Law and Reciprocity

  • Property, Praxeology And Violence

    Polish_nobility_in_1697

    [U]nfortunately, while humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption that is made possible by the combination of private property, the division of knowledge and labor, and the experimental innovation the market drives us to, humans also demonstrate an equal preference for violence, theft, fraud, omission, interference, free riding, privatization of the commons, socialization of losses, rent seeking, corruption, organizing for the purposes of extortion, and organizing for plunder and conquest via war. All of these forms of theft from the most direct to the most subtle, in the absence of the threat of violence, are easier means of competition than is the risky and personal act of speculative production we must engage in, if we choose to compete in the market for goods and services. Only a minority of us demonstrate a preference for the market, and by consequence, demonstrate a preference for private property: which is to eschew, at high cost to ourselves, the tempting portfolio of thefts – and instead work to consume exclusively via voluntary, informed, exchange that is the product of guesswork, planning, foresight and risk. For these reasons – these praxeologically obvious reasons – any portfolio of property rights, from the most collective, to the most individual, to the most totalitarian, and within that portfolio, the scope property ranging from simple personal possessions to complex anonymous contractual commitments; has been and must be imposed on a body of people by the threat of violence. [T]he concept and practice of liberty was created by egalitarian aristocrats who granted property rights to those who equally respected property rights of their peers, and who fought to preserve them at great personal cost. Moral arguments as to the utility of private property are specious. They are an attempt to obtain the right of private property at a discount – despite the fact that the majority do not favor those rights for either themselves or others. That the enlightenment’s emergent middle class philosophers tried to justify taking power from the aristocracy by fabricating moral and utilitarian arguments was a necessary political ruse at the time. But we if we desire to preserve our vestiges of freedom we should not confuse that ruse with the factual reality that all systems of property rights are imposed by the threat of violence. It is praxeologically illogical to suggest that those who would compete better in the absence of private property, should suffer lower state in order to yield to the desires of those others who may be more successful under private property. This makes no sense. As such, the only defense is the offensive application of organized violence for the purpose of implementing one system of property rights and obligations over another. [A]ristocracy is a functional synonym for private property – and private property a right gained in exchange for reciprocity both in the respect of private property and the obligation to use one’s wealth of violence to ensure the perpetuation of the portfolio of property rights that we call ‘private property’ at the expense and exclusion of all other possible portfolios of property rights.

  • PROPERTY, PRAXEOLOGY AND VIOLENCE (Cross posted from FB.Libertarian) Unfortunate

    PROPERTY, PRAXEOLOGY AND VIOLENCE

    (Cross posted from FB.Libertarian)

    Unfortunately, while humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption that is made possible by the combination of private property, the division of knowledge and labor, and the experimental innovation the market drives us to, humans also demonstrate an equal preference for violence, theft, fraud, omission, interference, free riding, privatization of the commons, socialization of losses, rent seeking, corruption, organizing for the purposes of extortion, and organizing for plunder and conquest via war.

    All of these forms of theft from the most direct to the most subtle, in the absence of the threat of violence, are easier means of competition than is the risky and personal act of speculative production we must engage in, if we choose to compete in the market for goods and services.

    Only a minority of us demonstrate a preference for the market, and by consequence, demonstrate a preference for private property: which is to eschew, at high cost to ourselves, the tempting portfolio of thefts – and instead work to consume exclusively via voluntary, informed, exchange that is the product of guesswork, planning, foresight and risk.

    For these reasons – these praxeologically obvious reasons – any portfolio of property rights, from the most collective, to the most individual, to the most totalitarian, and within that portfolio, the scope property ranging from simple personal possessions to complex anonymous contractual commitments; has been and must be imposed on a body of people by the threat of violence.

    The concept and practice of liberty was created by egalitarian aristocrats who granted property rights to those who equally respected property rights of their peers, and who fought to preserve them at great personal cost.

    Moral arguments as to the utility of private property are specious. They are an attempt to obtain the right of private property at a discount – despite the fact that the majority do not favor those rights for either themselves or others.

    That the enlightenment’s emergent middle class philosophers tried to justify taking power from the aristocracy by fabricating moral and utilitarian arguments was a necessary political ruse at the time. But we if we desire to preserve our vestiges of freedom we should not confuse that ruse with the factual reality that all systems of property rights are imposed by the threat of violence.

    It is praxeologically illogical to suggest that those who would compete better in the absence of private property, should suffer lower state in order to yield to the desires of those others who may be more successful under private property. This makes no sense.

    As such, the only defense is the offensive application of organized violence for the purpose of implementing one system of property rights and obligations over another.

    Aristocracy is a functional synonym for private property – and private property a right gained in exchange for reciprocity both in the respect of private property and the obligation to use one’s wealth of violence to ensure the perpetuation of the portfolio of property rights that we call ‘private property’ at the expense and exclusion of all other possible portfolios of property rights.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-20 16:31:00 UTC

  • THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY IS A EUGENIC ONE Or isn’t that obvious? And isn’t th

    THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY IS A EUGENIC ONE

    Or isn’t that obvious? And isn’t that the complaint against it?

    Does it all really boil down to that, and nothing else?

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-13 07:16:00 UTC

  • FROM QUORA: IS GOVERNMENT OR PRIVATE PROPERTY MORE “NATURAL’? QUESTION: “Is priv

    FROM QUORA: IS GOVERNMENT OR PRIVATE PROPERTY MORE “NATURAL’?

    QUESTION: “Is private property is more natural than government? Why or why not?”

    AN INTERESTING QUESTION – THANK YOU FOR THE REQUEST TO ANSWER IT. I’ll try to give you the best answer currently available.

    “We have laws because we have property, we do not have property because we have laws” – Frederic Bastiat.

    PROPERTY AS A SPECTRUM

    We define private property as something over which one EXPECTS TO HAVE exclusive “monopoly” control, and common family property as something over which we expect to have limited control and consumption, and shareholder property something over which one expects to have LIMITED control and prohibition from consumption, and ‘the commons’ over which one expects to be PROHIBITED from consumption and or exclusive control, but where membership is dynamic.

    NATURE

    Many animals treat their nests, stores of food, mates and offspring as property. Humans have more complex memories, and can put objects to a multiplicity of uses. And humans can learn to specialize in the use of certain resources to produce certain increasingly complex goods and services.

    The first value of memory is to observe resources and avoid dangers. But once we have complex memory, and the abilty to locate and store resources, we can create property, and therefore conserve energy by creating stores for future consumption, and stores for future production. The human mind is a is a difference engine, but the primary difference it calculates is property: what can I expect to make use of or not make use of, as a member of a family, band, tribe, or society?

    We can speak. That we can speak and negotiate demonstrates that property is natural. Without property cooperation would be unnecessary. To debate by definition is to acknowledge the existence of property. And we were able to speak before we were able to form governments. We were able to trade before we were able to form governments.

    However, just because property is natural to man, and humans can peaceably cooperate by conducting voluntary exchange of property, that does not mean that humans will do the hard work of trying to satisfy the wants of others. Instead, rather than exchange, humans try to harm, steal, commit fraud, commit fraud by omission. Rather than adhere to agreements as shareholders, humans free-ride, rent-seek, privatize assets and socialize losses.

    So, despite our natural ability to create and use property, and to negotiate exchanges and contracts, we also require the use of third parties to administer conflicts. We have used tribal headmen, elders, priests, judges for private matters, and politicians, lawyers, advocates, and lawmaking to regulate the process of dispute resolution itself.

    However, rather than justly administer agreements people engage in all possible manner of direct and systemic corruption. But, rather than enter political agreements honestly, they lie, cheat, defraud, deceive, use incrementalism, use coercion and bribery.

    So, despite our creation of these administrative institutions, we have created the constitutions, rule of law, and a high court so that we may limit the ability of politicians, kings, bureaucrats to conduct thefts of many kinds. And hold them accountable. We have enacted democratic processes to remove them from office if they commit these crimes.

    However, rather than adhere to constitutions and rule of law, people undermine the rule of law, buy voters compliance with redistribution and privileges. Threaten to replace judges if they don’t rule in the politician’s favor.

    So, despite our creation of limits on politicians and law makers, and the bureaucracy, and judges, we must retain our ability to use violence and revolution in order to defend ourselves from those who would seek to live off our efforts rather than administer our efforts.

    Property is the result of memory. Property is necessary to make use of the vicissitudes of time, to store and produce goods. Property is necessaty to uniquely and efficiently calculate uses of resources. Property is necessary to reduce conflict over possible usees even within families and tribes. Property is necessary for the construction a division of knowledge and labor. Without which we cannot specialize, save time, and produce high value goods that make us independent of nature’s bounty.

    Property is prior to government. Government exists to resolve disputes over property.

    As our division of labor increases, it becomes useful to develop additional common property. In a marketplace, competition provides us with incentives to produce better products and services at lower coasts. Competition is the privatization of other people’s assumptions about the opportunities in the market. However, common property, unlike private property, is hard to protect from privatization, and necessary to protect from competition, which for any commons, is just a theft from those who organize and pay for the commons by those who fail to organize and pay for the commons. In the market competition and privatization are desirable, but in the production of commons competition is an unnecessary cost. Therefore, the second purpose of government is to allow the formation of commons at a discount by prohibiting privatization of any commons, and preventing free-riding on any commons by the use of mandatory taxation.

    THE TWO NECESSARY PROPERTIES OF GOVERNMENT

    These are the only two necessary properties of government. In order to perform these functions any body of people must have a portfolio of property definitions that describe each kind of property on the spectrum from private to commons. Most difficulties arise from the failure for societies to do so. One of the reasons the west was (and partly remains) superior in economic per capita perormance is that more of the property in the civilization is privatized, and therefore available for frictionless use, and therefore as an incentive for individuals to act to better their status.

    CLOSING

    I won’t carry this further for now, and it is a book length topic, but it is probably the most, if not only, accurate description of property and government that you will be able to find, despite extraordinary efforts to research the subject. That is because I’ve tried to articulate the necessary properties of government not the multitude of abuses we can put it to.

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute, Kiev.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-12 08:09:00 UTC

  • It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on t

    It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.” – Gandhi

    Violence is a virtue not a vice. Violence and time are the only capital nature grants us at birth. The institution of private property is the product of the organized application of violence. There is no greater return on our use of violence than the creation of the institution of private property. There is no greater loss than the loss of the institution of private property. And the loss of the institution of private property can only occur if we fail to use violence to create and maintain it.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-11 10:24:00 UTC

  • PHYSICS IS THE SCIENCE OF THE MATERIAL WORLD. PROPERTY IS THE SCIENCE OF THE COO

    PHYSICS IS THE SCIENCE OF THE MATERIAL WORLD.

    PROPERTY IS THE SCIENCE OF THE COOPERATIVE WORLD.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-07 02:49:00 UTC

  • Are There Any Absolute Unrestricted Rights?

    RIGHT
    A right is a universal, contractual obligation, reciprocally granted to others by voluntary consent to the agreement of all parties.

    NATURAL RIGHT
    A natural right is a NECESSARY right that we must have in order to form a cooperative division of labor – largely by avoiding violence, fraud, and theft.  The only natural right is property and all other rights derive from that one. Because the only possible rights you can reciprocally grant regardless of circumstances are those that do not require material resources from you:

    1) property rights (safety and freedom of your body, your children, your spouse and your things),

    2) Charity under temporary duress (mutual insurance to the extend of your capacity) 

    3) kindness without material cost (manners that signal safety and that you will respect both 1, and 2.) 

    Since these require no resources from you other than those at your disposal in a temporary emergency, then these are the only rights that all people regardless of condition can grant to others, and they are the only necessary rights in a division of knowledge and labor.

    HUMAN RIGHTS
    A Human RIght as we use the term, a statement of moral ambition.  They are aspirations, because very few things can be both necessary and reciprocally granted.  We call these aspirations rights in an effort to pursuade all governments to implement these aspiration with the force of law, thereby making the aspirations into contractual rights for all people within a polity. 

    The universal declaration of human rights consists almost entirely of derivations of property rights.   Where they do not, they suggest that we must work together to raise people out of poverty (but we cannot stop them from breeding – which is what would achieve it.)

    SUMMARY
    There is a very great difference between what is possible to possess as rights that are guaranteed by others, and those that we desire to have guaranteed by others. If it requires others act, then that is very difficult. If it requires others refrain from acting, that is somewhat easier. In current western governments we ask people to refrain from consumption by taxing them so that others may consume. So far this is the only possible way we have found to solve the problem of inequality of ability and circumstance in solving material disparities, even if immaterial disparities (no fraud theft or violence) are possible without material cost.


    PART II – ANSWERING ALL QUESTIONS ON RIGHTS
    (Added in response to the question: “Yes or No?”

    The problem is the wording of the question. It is either dishonest, misleading or erroneous.  But it is so common that it is worth answering:

    “Are there” is a play on words – a deception.  Are there where? Where are they? if they exist, where are they? If you cannot find them, then how do they exist? How do they come into being? If you can ACT to create  them, then you can make them exist by your actions. If many people act the same way, for some reason, and they require others to act the same way or they will ignore, ostracize or punish them, then that action is called a ‘norm’.

    So, if you say that some rights are required for us to cooperate, or at least, avoid violence, then if we want to cooperate we must act to create those rights. And by our actions, create a habit, that is a norm.

    One of the ways to create a habit is force (law). But most laws are the contractual codification of norms, in order to justify, and clarify, and create equal punishments for, violation of those norms.

    All rights are contract rights.  That contract can be temporary and conditional mutual consent. It can be habit within the group. It can be norm within society. It can be codified with the force of law.

    That some set of normative contract rights are NECESSARY for human life, in order to make cooperation POSSIBLE, is true.  Without some portfolio of property rights it is not possible to develop a division of knowledge and labor. It is not even possible for people to live together in tribes or families.

    That some OTHER set of normative contract rights is ADDITIONALLY necessary if we want to achieve other things in society, we need only develop the means of communicating and enforcing them.

    So, again, the original question is an erroneous play on words. A contract right cannot exist without someone else’s participation in an exchange of rights.  And normative contract rights require most people grant them and that they somehow punish offenders.  And legal rights require that most people have hired specialists (politicians and judges) to specialize in enforcing their legal rights.

    As such, there are  normative contractual rights that are necessary for human life in a polity EVEN IF there is no force of law.  These rights are commonly called NATURAL RIGHTS. Living in the natural world requires that we have them.

    Beyond necessary (natural) contract rights, there are PREFERRED normative contract rights that become possible ONLY because a market society is generating enough excess production through the division of knowledge labor and capital, that it becomes possible to MAINTAIN the norm of natural rights, while granting, conditionally, assuming the resources exist, those PREFERRED contractual rights.  In this case, these PREFERRED rights are not necessarily granted by individuals directly, but through the corporation we call the government, and its members – the bureaucracy. Thus creating a third party, albiet an organizational party, to the contract.

    Pareto efficiency is the idea that you can take some amount of taxes from group A and distribute those funds either directly (good) or via services (bad), to group B, without causing the producers of taxes in group A to stop working, or to slow their working, thereby making the act of taxation counter productive.  And, when, above, I say, that we can gant additional, not necessary, but preferred, contract rights to people, if we can, we are limited in their willingness to maintain the norm of NATURAL contract rights.

    Human (contract) Rights, in the sense that they have been written as a document called the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights,  include both NECESSARY and PREFERRED contract rights.  The additional rights that are preferred, are preferred because conditions must exist to make them possible, and those conditions are greater than any individual can grant to any other individual. Therefore human rights are a political, governmental, and legal contract right.

    The only necessary rights are property rights: Life, body, action, time, and property. Which means avoiding theft and violence.

    The necessary rights for the high trust society also appear to include (a) prohibition against fraud (fraud by misrepresentation), (b) requirement for fully informed symmetry of information in any exchange (fraud by omission) (c) warranty as a defense against fraud and asymmetry, (d) requirement of action to earn profit, (e) prohibition against free-riding, privatization (corruption), profit by impediment.  The net of these rules is that all exchanges are voluntary and that all competition takes place only in the market for goods and services.

    I believe that this answers all questions on the cause and difference between rights as contract rights, (necessary) natural rights,  and (preferred) human rights, and how they can be used as temporary (truce), normative (culture), and legal (political), and economic (positive) contractual rights.

    I could edit this a bit. But it is very close to the final word on rights as we understand them.

    https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-absolute-unrestricted-rights

  • Wikipedia Entry on Propertarianism

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PropertarianismWIKI! – Wikipedia Entry on Propertarianism

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-24 13:50:00 UTC

  • PROPERTARIANISM: WHAT IS “DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY”? In economics we have the conce

    PROPERTARIANISM: WHAT IS “DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY”?

    In economics we have the concept of ‘demonstrated preference’. This means that people tend to say a lot of things, but they they demonstrate by how they act, what their true preferences are, and those things are often very different from what they say.

    We also have the concept of property. And, we tend to think of property as a legal concept, or a utilitarian concept. But the more interesting question is “What do people consider to be property as is demonstrate by their actions?”

    That’s the interesting question. And, Propertarianism is based upon what people DEMONSTRATE by their actions that they consider their property?

    It turns out, that they consider quite a few things to be property. And, with that observation, it turns out that we can explain all human action and emotion in terms of what people consider to be property.

    So, with private property, we can, indeed, reduce all human rights to private property. But further, with DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY, we can reduce all human action, and perhaps, all human cognition and emotion, to statements of property.

    And with that knowledge we can render different systems of economic preference into statements of a competition for the definition of property rights.

    For example, using Praxeology, we can determine whether any proposed incentive is logical to the individual. With demonstrated property we can further explain why Praxeology was insufficient – because (besides the failure of ordinality) it failed to incorporate the full breadth of what humans considered to be property. And as such, could not explain their behavior.

    Propertarianism, which relies upon Demonstrated definitions of property, is able, along with understanding of our cognitive biases, to complete Praxeology.

    Cheers

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-24 10:32:00 UTC

  • Property Rights are Themselves Property which Must be Acquired.

    [P]roperty rights are a means of cooperation between peers. Every means of acquiring them, other than organized violence, is an insipid appeal, an act of fraud, an involuntary transfer, from those who pay the cost of property rights by the preparation for, and threat of violence, by those who would obtain property rights at a discount. Enfranchisement was always how one earned property rights. Thats because they can’t be earned any other way. The weak, the lazy, the deceitful, all want property rights at a discount. Now, one could argue, that it is possible to PAY people in some way, to extend to you property rights. To HIRE your property rights. And we might argue that, that is, in part, what we use taxes for – but only if I get property rights in return. If I don’t get them, then I’ve given up my violence – meaning my opportunity to use violence for self interest instead of property rights for self interest – for free. It’s theft. Humor: Rothbard was a scam artist. 🙂