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. Violence is a virtue.
Category: Natural Law and Reciprocity
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Competition Is The Only Sanctioned Involuntary Transfer
The ethics of competition. From another piece I’ve been writing. “[C]ompetition” itself, as we use the term, is the normative sanction of external involuntary transfer by an artificial, counter-intuitive, set of rules we call the market, consisting of voluntary transfer of goods and services, by fully informed consensual exchange, and insured as fully informed and consensual by warranty, at the cost of opportunity and investment to other producers of similar goods, in an effort to coerce producers to innovate in their use of resources, to produce goods for all at lower price, or higher quality, in an effort to produce goods and services at the lowest cost and highest quality for all consumers participating in that set of normative rules that comprise that market, and which we in turn call ‘a society’.
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Competition Is The Only Sanctioned Involuntary Transfer
The ethics of competition. From another piece I’ve been writing. “[C]ompetition” itself, as we use the term, is the normative sanction of external involuntary transfer by an artificial, counter-intuitive, set of rules we call the market, consisting of voluntary transfer of goods and services, by fully informed consensual exchange, and insured as fully informed and consensual by warranty, at the cost of opportunity and investment to other producers of similar goods, in an effort to coerce producers to innovate in their use of resources, to produce goods for all at lower price, or higher quality, in an effort to produce goods and services at the lowest cost and highest quality for all consumers participating in that set of normative rules that comprise that market, and which we in turn call ‘a society’.
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Voluntary Transfer Is The Only Testable Ethical Principle
THE ONLY TEST OF ETHICAL STATEMENTS [T]he only test of any ethical statement is whether all transfers caused by any act, are voluntary transfers – including involuntary transfers of goods, actions and opportunity, and including both direct involuntary transfers by externality, asymmetry of knowledge, fraud, theft or violence (in that order), and including reverse involuntary transfers caused by impediment, free-riding, rent seeking, or privatization (in that order). There is no other test of any ethical statement. There isn’t. Period. – Curt
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The Honesty Of Violence
PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE ONLY HONESTLY ACQUIRED BY ORGANIZED VIOLENCE [A]ny attempt to state that rights are acquired other than by organized violence is an attempt to acquire them at a discount. In other words, it is an act of fraud. Any attempt at utilitarian justification then opens us to the utilitarianism of involuntary transfer, and undermines the entire libertarian argument that property rights are absolute. – Curt Doolittle : “Taking liberty out of the ghetto, and back to the aristocracy, one day at a time.” 😉
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PROPERTARIANISM (FOR WIKI) Propertarianism is an ethical discipline within liber
PROPERTARIANISM (FOR WIKI)
Propertarianism is an ethical discipline within libertarian philosophy that is used to advocate and justify anarchic, private, and contractual models of government as replacements for monopolistic bureaucracies organized as states.
It is used more loosely to categorize all libertarian philosophy that gives ethical precedence to the voluntary transfer of property. The term propertarian refers both to practitioners of these ethical systems, and their arguments. Those opposed to private property may be referred to as non-propertarian or anti-propertarian.
The term “propertarian” was used originally by critics, to refer to the nearly exclusive reliance upon property rights and private property demonstrated by anarcho-capitalist libertarians in their ethical and political arguments, in order to distinguish them from the classical liberal disposition toward liberty in the American constitutional tradition.
In recent years the term has been used within the libertarian movement as a self-identifying label by those libertarians who rely on propertarian ethical arguments, but try to define practical political institutions in order to separate themselves from sentimental libertarians who rely on classical liberalism’s moral, allegorical, and historical arguments, as well as from members of the ideological anarcho-capitalist movement.
The propertarian ideologies can vary from those based upon the Propertarian canon consisting of Misesian Praxeology, Rothbardian Ethics, and Hoppian Private Government, to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, to a variety of minor thinkers.
Libertarian philosophy, like Marxist philosophy that it was created to compete with, is a complex dogma dependent upon economic and philosophically analytical arguments that assert that voluntary transfer of private property is the only means of testing ethical arguments.
When libertarians apply this ethical technique to political philosophy, they express it as the principle that all human rights can be reduced to property rights. And further, that the only rights it is logically possible to possess are property rights. This principle rests in turn on the proposition that respecting property is the only right that people can equally grant to one another, since property rights only require that people refrain from doing something. And while people cannot all contribute actions equally because of their differences, they all can all refrain from acting regardless of their differences.
This line of argument is often difficult to master, and so many of the people with libertarian bias, simply resort to treating private property as sanctified, which allows them to rely upon more intuitive, emotionally loaded, and less complex moral arguments. The rise of “internet libertarianism” may reflect this simplification.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-21 16:46:00 UTC
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ARE THERE OBJECTIVELY MORAL STATEMENTS? (FROM ELSEWHERE) “There is no such thing
ARE THERE OBJECTIVELY MORAL STATEMENTS?
(FROM ELSEWHERE)
“There is no such thing as objective morality only preferences and demonstrated preferences.”
I’m not sure that’s true.
In every society, the portfolio of norms consisting of maners (signals of fitness for voluntary transfer), ethics and morals (prohibitions on involuntary transfer), vary considerably. But all of them are signals of fitness, signals of contribution to a commons, and prohibitions on involuntary transfer.
Some of these suites of property rights produce superior economic outcomes, and some inferior. That’s true. But they aren’t preferences. Norms are not preferences they are artifacts of the process of evolutionary cooperation according to prejudices (pre-judgements).
Given that human beings universally eschew involuntary transfer, in every possible culture and circumstance, and will act twice as hard to punish it as they will for their own interest, its clear that it’s not a purely subjective phenomenon.
And in fact it is a necessary phenomenon which genetics must eventually enforce. So while the arrangement of property rights and obligations in any set of norms may vary, the fact that humans observe norms out of prohibition on involuntary transfer is entirely objective.
So, moral actions are only a preference in those cases where normative codes, like laws, are general proscriptions, and where for specific circumstances, one’s actions do not create an involuntary transfer.
Moral codes may correctly or incorrectly constituted at any given moment (because they are intergenerational habits and must be constantly re-tested by each generation). But as long as they are prohibitions on involuntary transfers, then they are in fact, objective.
If members of a group observe a set of norms, and by observing those norms, forgo opportunities for gratification or self interest, then they have in fact paid for those norms. If others do not pay for those norms, and constrain themselves to signaling, then that’s not an involuntary transfer.if however, others choose to sieze opportunities created by the normative sacrifice of others, then that’s theft, plain and simple.
This is a quick treatment of one of mankind’s most challenging topics, but hopefully it will at least give you a few ideas.
– Curt
BTW: ALSO
a) an action is a demonstrated preference.
b) a preference is a demonstrated bias
c) a bias may or may not be subject to cognition
d) a habit is not subject to cognition, thats’ the value of them. They’re cheap.
e) a normative habit is rarely understood, but almost universally practiced. Which is the reason we even have this conversation in the first place.
f) a metaphysical bias is not subject to cognition, it’s almost never understood by anyone in any culture.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-20 15:49:00 UTC
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PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE ONLY HONESTLY ACQUIRED BY ORGANIZED VIOLENCE Any attempt to
PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE ONLY HONESTLY ACQUIRED BY ORGANIZED VIOLENCE
Any attempt to state that rights are acquired other than by organized violence is an attempt to acquire them at a discount. In other words, it is an act of fraud. Any attempt at utilitarian justification then opens us to the utilitarianism of involuntary transfer, and undermines the entire libertarian argument that property rights are absolute.
– Curt Doolittle : “Taking liberty out of the ghetto, and back to the aristocracy, one day at a time.” 😉
(Libertarians should have fun with that one.) 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-20 14:59:00 UTC
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THE ONLY TEST OF ETHICAL STATEMENTS The only test of any ethical statement is wh
THE ONLY TEST OF ETHICAL STATEMENTS
The only test of any ethical statement is whether all transfers caused by any act, are voluntary transfers – including involuntary transfers of goods, actions and opportunity, and including both direct involuntary transfers by externality, asymmetry of knowledge, fraud, theft or violence (in that order), and including reverse involuntary transfers caused by impediment, free-riding, rent seeking, or privatization (in that order). There is no other test of any ethical statement. There isn’t. Period.
– Curt
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-20 06:44:00 UTC
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YOU WANT A LIBERTARIAN GEM FOR TODAY? The ethics of competition. From another pi
YOU WANT A LIBERTARIAN GEM FOR TODAY?
The ethics of competition. From another piece I’ve been writing.
“Competition” itself, as we use the term, is the normative sanction of external involuntary transfer by an artificial, counter-intuitive, set of rules we call the market, consisting of voluntary transfer of goods and services, by fully informed consensual exchange, and insured as fully informed and consensual by warranty, at the cost of opportunity and investment to other producers of similar goods, in an effort to coerce producers to innovate in their use of resources, to produce goods for all at lower price, or higher quality, in an effort to produce goods and services at the lowest cost and highest quality for all consumers participating in that set of normative rules that comprise that market, and which we in turn call ‘a society’.
-Curt
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-20 06:35:00 UTC