Curt Doolittle

Category: Natural Law and Reciprocity

  • What Is The Justification For Political Authority Enforced By Force?

    I’m going to try to clarify the “Monopoly Of Violence” argument in Propertarian terms:

    All human existence can be reduced to property rights.
    • 0. All human beings object to involuntary transfer of what they worked to obtain, by theft, fraud, or violence, and whether that transfer be direct or indirect.
    • 1. All societies have collections of property rights.
    • 2. These rights exist along a spectrum that consists of individual, shareholder, and collective property rights.
    • 3. Those property rights can be constructive, neutral or destructive. They can be just or unjust. They can be dominated by egalitarianism, expropriation, or meritocracy or a combination thereof.
    • 4. Those rights are met with corresponding obligations we call norms: forgone opportunities, manners, ethics, morals. They are, in large part, prohibitions on involuntary transfers of property.
    • 5. And these obligations are costs. They are the cost of the institution of property. People feel that they ‘own’ their institutions because they ‘pay’ for them.
    • 6. Since any foreign group’s portfolio, upon interaction with the home group’s portfolio, will by definition and necessity cause involuntary transfers from any home group, and the inverse, then groups use violence to both to institute their property rights and obligations and to prevent involuntary transfers both inside and outside of the group.

    Groups have different property rights. Even among libertarians, we disagree upon warranty, symmetry, external costs and the right of exclusion. All groups, regardless of their portfolio, pay for property rights with forgone opportunities for violence, theft, and fraud. And the promise of violence remains whenever violence, theft, and fraud are committed.

    Therefore, people are ‘justified’ in protecting their property. Their property rights themselves are a form of property. They are justified in forming a group that mandates those property rights. They are justified in combating a government that abridges or abrogates those rights.

    You can run on with this reasoning and answer almost all political questions. However, to answer yours, directly, we need to understand that one does not ‘justify’ power. One exercises it to achieve one’s preferences, and either has the power to achieve them or not. Justification is an attempt to achieve one’s preferences at a lower cost, or to lower the cost of maintaining those preferences. But that is all.

    So your question implies a universalism that is not present in political action.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-justification-for-political-authority-enforced-by-force

  • Geopolitical Conflicts: From An Ethical Standpoint, How Long Back Should One Look To Decide Who Is The Rightful Owner Of Land?

    This only appears to be a complicated question. It really isn’t.  If a judgement will be made, how will one make such a thing?

    1) Property Rights. Property rights of any kind are derived from the portfolio of those rights within any given jurisdiction (country/state). Property rights exist in order to prevent disputes, and to permit cooperation.  Military conquest is not a subject of property rights. The very purpose of military conquest is to abrogate and redefine property rights.  There is no other reason to conduct military conquest.  In that sense, both the israeli and amerindian conquests are settled matters, because they were settled by conquest.  So to some degree to make a legalistic argument over property rights on a military matter is simply irrational. 

    2) Arbitrary Time Frames.  We have all been conquered people.  None of us can return to our homelands and our traditions. Even Northern europeans cannot go home any longer. The problem is infinitely recursive. These matters are not possible to solve by other than military means. That is why we solve them so.  It is an arbitrary and illogical statement to prefer one time and state of affairs to another time and state of affairs, because each state of affairs is predicated on the prior state of affairs and those conflicts. SO why, should we not take over Istanbul and rename it Byzantium, because the muslims conquered and stole if from Christians?  Where does this end?  Must we try to return Rome to the Etruscans?  Or are you just arbitrarily biased in favor of amerindians at the expense of everyone else?

    3) Practical Matters: it is not practical to displace a people, and they would simply go to war to stop it.  So it is an absurd parlor game of a question.  Israel is doing two things: building walls, and building settlements in order to expand it’s defensible boundaries. There is nothing new about what they’re doing.  The germans put them in concentration camps and killed them. There is a difference. The displaced peoples have a choice, the executed people’s do not.

    The English conquered (mostly) the amerindians in north america and the spanish and Portuguese in south america.  But, for example, if we quote George Washington, it’s because  (roughly quoting) they will be conquered by someone who we will have to defend ourselves against if we do not conquer them ourselves.(end roughly quoting). It is not that the English (Americans) were any different from anyone else.  Should the Kurds get their own territory? Should we go to war with china to give Tibetans their land back?  Should the russians drive out the chinese that have invaded eastern russia like the mexicans that have invaded the southern united states?  Land and the property rights imposed on that land are in constant flux everywhere in the world.


    SUMMARY
    So, these are not moral questions.  They are not philosophical questions. They are not legal questions. They are practical questions because in the end, the action necessary to alter the existing property definitions could only be resolved by military conquest.  THat’s what military conquests do: reassign property rights.

    Property assignments in any state are dependent upon a set of definitions established within that state using a monopoly on violence by that organization we call ‘government’.  Those assignments may be capricious (Asia), they may be nearly non-existant (muslim world and south america), they may be collective and corrupt (Romania) they may be collective and uncorrupt (sweden) they may be individual and utilitarian (the USA).   But they are meaningful ONLY within those jurisdictions during the life of the entity that enabled them. 

    This is a complex topic so if some other libertarian wants to challenge me, please understand that I’m erring on the side of brevity no on the side of incomprehension.  Liquid Personal property may be immutable. But land and fixed structures are not. That is not a moral statement. It is an historical one.

    https://www.quora.com/Geopolitical-Conflicts-From-an-ethical-standpoint-how-long-back-should-one-look-to-decide-who-is-the-rightful-owner-of-land

  • Geopolitical Conflicts: From An Ethical Standpoint, How Long Back Should One Look To Decide Who Is The Rightful Owner Of Land?

    This only appears to be a complicated question. It really isn’t.  If a judgement will be made, how will one make such a thing?

    1) Property Rights. Property rights of any kind are derived from the portfolio of those rights within any given jurisdiction (country/state). Property rights exist in order to prevent disputes, and to permit cooperation.  Military conquest is not a subject of property rights. The very purpose of military conquest is to abrogate and redefine property rights.  There is no other reason to conduct military conquest.  In that sense, both the israeli and amerindian conquests are settled matters, because they were settled by conquest.  So to some degree to make a legalistic argument over property rights on a military matter is simply irrational. 

    2) Arbitrary Time Frames.  We have all been conquered people.  None of us can return to our homelands and our traditions. Even Northern europeans cannot go home any longer. The problem is infinitely recursive. These matters are not possible to solve by other than military means. That is why we solve them so.  It is an arbitrary and illogical statement to prefer one time and state of affairs to another time and state of affairs, because each state of affairs is predicated on the prior state of affairs and those conflicts. SO why, should we not take over Istanbul and rename it Byzantium, because the muslims conquered and stole if from Christians?  Where does this end?  Must we try to return Rome to the Etruscans?  Or are you just arbitrarily biased in favor of amerindians at the expense of everyone else?

    3) Practical Matters: it is not practical to displace a people, and they would simply go to war to stop it.  So it is an absurd parlor game of a question.  Israel is doing two things: building walls, and building settlements in order to expand it’s defensible boundaries. There is nothing new about what they’re doing.  The germans put them in concentration camps and killed them. There is a difference. The displaced peoples have a choice, the executed people’s do not.

    The English conquered (mostly) the amerindians in north america and the spanish and Portuguese in south america.  But, for example, if we quote George Washington, it’s because  (roughly quoting) they will be conquered by someone who we will have to defend ourselves against if we do not conquer them ourselves.(end roughly quoting). It is not that the English (Americans) were any different from anyone else.  Should the Kurds get their own territory? Should we go to war with china to give Tibetans their land back?  Should the russians drive out the chinese that have invaded eastern russia like the mexicans that have invaded the southern united states?  Land and the property rights imposed on that land are in constant flux everywhere in the world.


    SUMMARY
    So, these are not moral questions.  They are not philosophical questions. They are not legal questions. They are practical questions because in the end, the action necessary to alter the existing property definitions could only be resolved by military conquest.  THat’s what military conquests do: reassign property rights.

    Property assignments in any state are dependent upon a set of definitions established within that state using a monopoly on violence by that organization we call ‘government’.  Those assignments may be capricious (Asia), they may be nearly non-existant (muslim world and south america), they may be collective and corrupt (Romania) they may be collective and uncorrupt (sweden) they may be individual and utilitarian (the USA).   But they are meaningful ONLY within those jurisdictions during the life of the entity that enabled them. 

    This is a complex topic so if some other libertarian wants to challenge me, please understand that I’m erring on the side of brevity no on the side of incomprehension.  Liquid Personal property may be immutable. But land and fixed structures are not. That is not a moral statement. It is an historical one.

    https://www.quora.com/Geopolitical-Conflicts-From-an-ethical-standpoint-how-long-back-should-one-look-to-decide-who-is-the-rightful-owner-of-land

  • Why Do Libertarians Treat Social Order And Civil Society As Free Goods?

    They don’t. While it costs nothing to abstain from theft, fraud and violence, it costs something to administer defense and disputes.  The libertarian argument is that these things can be produced by private organizations. They have produced a great deal of work that demonstrates how and why that private production of defense is both possible and preferable.

    The European monarchies were private governments, and there were political parties and labor unions and a great deal of diversity, with many cities having different neighborhoods for each ethnic group.  The monarchies were less warlike, taxed people much less, provided public services and had active civil societies.   Not that we should return to monarchies but the point is that these things can, and have worked.

    The problem with government is a bureaucracy. If you were to privatize everything, you would come close the the libertarian idea.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-do-libertarians-treat-social-order-and-civil-society-as-free-goods

  • Institutions That Allow Different Groups To Exchange, Not Pursue Shared Beliefs.

    The Golden Rule is quite simple. But what complexity emerges from it? Property rights are very simple. But what complexity emerges from them? The problem of cooperative politics does not seem simple until we reduce it to these first principles: 1) the dependence by humans on instinct in the face of complexity, and 2) the instinctual and irresolvable conflict in mating strategies between the genders — and the complexity that emerges in society because of that irresolvable conflict. 3) The instinctual, pervasive, and necessary differences in signals between the classes, tribes and races, because of the differences in distribution of ability, exacerbated by a market economy. Yet there is a solution provided by the libertarians: exchange is cooperative, encourages mutual understanding, and produces win-win rather than win-lose outcomes. The English class-based political model was superior to the democratic model for that reason: we now have a winner-take-all society in permanent conflict rather than a system of cooperation between classes with different strategies and no means of resolving that conflict except for class warfare, constant polarization and social disintegration. The solution is to create institutions where classes with different evolutionary strategies can cooperate despite those differences through a process of exchange. Since exchange must be calculable, which in this case means reducible to something so that it can be measured, then we can improve our existing institutions by requiring voluntary exchange between the classes that is reducible to calculative formulae. ie: contracts rather than laws. Data rather than moralistic rationalism. Interest and ownership rather than taxation. It is the process of democratic government as we have constructed it as a winner take all proposition that is the source of both our conflict and social disintegration. And if one is to argue against this strategy, one makes two mistakes. First, that you simply want to win regardless of the wants of others. And as such you expose yourself as impolitic and using the government as a proxy for theft fraud and violence. Second, that the miracle of the west has been its ability to produce of a balace of powers that requires competition and exchange in favor of the masses. And universalism, which the left seeks to embrace, is just the most recent version of the error of simplicity that all other civilizations have fallen into, and has resulted in their impoverishment and suffering. Besides being a vanity, it is a demonstration of a false consensus bias, and ignores the value that comes from competition, and the problems that arise with bureaucracy. The rest of my arguments, which expose and articulate our different strategies, are irrelevant once we create a set of institutions that makes that our differences in strategies something that is to our advantage. We do not need to engage in perpetuating and exacerbating the problem of politics by attempting to get a democratic majority to agree on universal goals. Something which is imposible because of those differences in biological strategies. We need only advocate institutions that allow each group to achieve its goals. Markets are useful in that they produce aggregate beneficial ends for all parties despite differences in preferences, knowledge and ability. And by creating a market for class cooperation we can produce beneficial ends for the aggregate by serving each other rather than destroying each other.

  • Institutions That Allow Different Groups To Exchange, Not Pursue Shared Beliefs.

    The Golden Rule is quite simple. But what complexity emerges from it? Property rights are very simple. But what complexity emerges from them? The problem of cooperative politics does not seem simple until we reduce it to these first principles: 1) the dependence by humans on instinct in the face of complexity, and 2) the instinctual and irresolvable conflict in mating strategies between the genders — and the complexity that emerges in society because of that irresolvable conflict. 3) The instinctual, pervasive, and necessary differences in signals between the classes, tribes and races, because of the differences in distribution of ability, exacerbated by a market economy. Yet there is a solution provided by the libertarians: exchange is cooperative, encourages mutual understanding, and produces win-win rather than win-lose outcomes. The English class-based political model was superior to the democratic model for that reason: we now have a winner-take-all society in permanent conflict rather than a system of cooperation between classes with different strategies and no means of resolving that conflict except for class warfare, constant polarization and social disintegration. The solution is to create institutions where classes with different evolutionary strategies can cooperate despite those differences through a process of exchange. Since exchange must be calculable, which in this case means reducible to something so that it can be measured, then we can improve our existing institutions by requiring voluntary exchange between the classes that is reducible to calculative formulae. ie: contracts rather than laws. Data rather than moralistic rationalism. Interest and ownership rather than taxation. It is the process of democratic government as we have constructed it as a winner take all proposition that is the source of both our conflict and social disintegration. And if one is to argue against this strategy, one makes two mistakes. First, that you simply want to win regardless of the wants of others. And as such you expose yourself as impolitic and using the government as a proxy for theft fraud and violence. Second, that the miracle of the west has been its ability to produce of a balace of powers that requires competition and exchange in favor of the masses. And universalism, which the left seeks to embrace, is just the most recent version of the error of simplicity that all other civilizations have fallen into, and has resulted in their impoverishment and suffering. Besides being a vanity, it is a demonstration of a false consensus bias, and ignores the value that comes from competition, and the problems that arise with bureaucracy. The rest of my arguments, which expose and articulate our different strategies, are irrelevant once we create a set of institutions that makes that our differences in strategies something that is to our advantage. We do not need to engage in perpetuating and exacerbating the problem of politics by attempting to get a democratic majority to agree on universal goals. Something which is imposible because of those differences in biological strategies. We need only advocate institutions that allow each group to achieve its goals. Markets are useful in that they produce aggregate beneficial ends for all parties despite differences in preferences, knowledge and ability. And by creating a market for class cooperation we can produce beneficial ends for the aggregate by serving each other rather than destroying each other.

  • One Brick At A time: A Propertarian Definition of Tolerance

    One Brick At A time: A Propertarian Definition of Tolerance http://www.capitalismv3.com/2012/03/06/a-propertarian-definition-of-tolerance/

    Source date (UTC): 2012-03-06 16:17:59 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/177065497790132224

  • A Propertarian Definition of Tolerance

    Every society contains a population which together, as shareholders, possess a portfolio of norms, a portfolio of opportunities, and a portfolio of capital. When we tolerate something, it means that we are willing to bear the knowing theft, involuntary transfer, or privatization of some small part of those portfolios that we would expect other members of the society to avoid. We can bear these costs for both positive and negative reasons: Positive: as an investment in the future, in the hope that these people will learn the norms, increase the portfolio of opportunities, or increase the portfolio of assets. Negative: as a matter of convenience, resulting in our privatization of public assets ourselves, we can refrain from paying the cost of policing the portfolios by forgoing opportunities with the individual, or bearing the costs of protecting those assets from involuntary transfer. The only way to know the difference between the positive and negative use of Tolerance, is to know whether the actions of the individual or group in question will result in the accumulation of assets or not. But it should be clear that it is impossible to perform neutral tolerance. All tolerance is either good or bad. Claiming ignorance is just convenience: privatization. Theft of public assets for one’s personal consumption. The complexity arises when multiple portfolios are involve and outcomes are speculative. Unless ‘Tolerance’ is an economic strategy whose impact is fully understood by the population, it is not investment but convenience. The example in the western countries is that they pay for their social programs by a) letting the USA pay for their international trade and defense costs, and b) using immigrants to create consumption not possible for the people to create by productivity. In canada, we add c) which is that we export resources. So the cost to canada is one of a pair of risk propositions: that immigrants can be assimilated sufficiently that a ‘canada’ and its portfolio can be maintained, OR that the future is irrelevant, and there is no responsibility we hold toward the future. In the States, one population holds to its heritage – attempting to retain its portfolio in the belief that it is something unique in human history. Another seeks to consume that portfolio in an attempt to build a more utopian society. And that is the source of conflict.

  • A Propertarian Definition of Tolerance

    Every society contains a population which together, as shareholders, possess a portfolio of norms, a portfolio of opportunities, and a portfolio of capital. When we tolerate something, it means that we are willing to bear the knowing theft, involuntary transfer, or privatization of some small part of those portfolios that we would expect other members of the society to avoid. We can bear these costs for both positive and negative reasons: Positive: as an investment in the future, in the hope that these people will learn the norms, increase the portfolio of opportunities, or increase the portfolio of assets. Negative: as a matter of convenience, resulting in our privatization of public assets ourselves, we can refrain from paying the cost of policing the portfolios by forgoing opportunities with the individual, or bearing the costs of protecting those assets from involuntary transfer. The only way to know the difference between the positive and negative use of Tolerance, is to know whether the actions of the individual or group in question will result in the accumulation of assets or not. But it should be clear that it is impossible to perform neutral tolerance. All tolerance is either good or bad. Claiming ignorance is just convenience: privatization. Theft of public assets for one’s personal consumption. The complexity arises when multiple portfolios are involve and outcomes are speculative. Unless ‘Tolerance’ is an economic strategy whose impact is fully understood by the population, it is not investment but convenience. The example in the western countries is that they pay for their social programs by a) letting the USA pay for their international trade and defense costs, and b) using immigrants to create consumption not possible for the people to create by productivity. In canada, we add c) which is that we export resources. So the cost to canada is one of a pair of risk propositions: that immigrants can be assimilated sufficiently that a ‘canada’ and its portfolio can be maintained, OR that the future is irrelevant, and there is no responsibility we hold toward the future. In the States, one population holds to its heritage – attempting to retain its portfolio in the belief that it is something unique in human history. Another seeks to consume that portfolio in an attempt to build a more utopian society. And that is the source of conflict.

  • Brick At A Time: A Propertarian Definition Of Tolerance

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/2012/03/06/a-propertarian-definition-of-tolerance/One Brick At A Time: A Propertarian Definition Of Tolerance

    Source date (UTC): 2012-03-06 11:17:00 UTC