Curt Doolittle

Category: Natural Law and Reciprocity

  • Violence and Virtue vs Morality and Fraud

    My rights are protected by my willingess to kill in order to defend them. Legal documents either require that many people are willing to kill to defend them, or that many people are willing to kill to enforce them, or that many people are wiling to kill to change them. Moral arguments by contrast are a form of deceptlon by which the weak attempt to gain advantages without paying the costs for obtaining those advantages. That is the sole purpose of moral argument. By contrast, any right that is possessed by virtue of social contracts, formal or not, is possessed only because of the willingness of people to use violence in order to protect it. The government does not protect my rights. I do. Instead, government is a shareholder system whereby we each obtain the productive efficiency of scale in enforcing our defense of established rights, and therefore obtain them at a discount. But the government has that power only because we relinquish it to them. And we do not pay those costs equally. Some of us have a greater virtue of violence at our disposal than others. We are initially wealthier in violence than other people, so the cost of our privileges is higher. While those who are weaker, obtain a higher benefit than do the stronger. This is looking at the mythology from the opposite perspective. Since in all of history, the minority who has the greatest capacity for violence has established all political orders.

    [callout]Moral arguments by contrast are a form of deception by which the weak attempt to gain advantages without paying the costs for obtaining those advantages. That is the sole purpose of moral argument. By contrast, any right that is possessed by virtue of social contracts, formal or not, is possessed only because of the willingness of people to use violence in order to protect it. The government does not protect my rights. I do.[/callout]

    The west was built diffrently from the east or middle east, because it was built by a fraternity of warriors. Even with our vast specialization of careers, it is still protected by vi olence. Violence is a virtue. The fact that women are poorer in violence, and that the poor and ignorant are less able to pay the sacrifice nand discipline eeded to use it, is why they rely on moral arguments. THE PROXY FOR VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL CLASS There is no argument among philosophers, and certainly among political economists, that the system of property rights and exchange, regardless of culture, is a proxy for violence. By monopolizing violence, ‘governments’ force people to compete by production rather than violence. This provides people wiht incentives to produce. Production vastly favors discipline. Wealth vastly favors IQ. Productivity has the negative emotional consequence of amplifying the differences between individuals, and rewarding individuals more diversely than under tribal society, and therefore subjects the proletariat to more negative status signals, and making a social class out of the proletariat because of it, that our tribal sentiments and cognitive biases support. THE ECONOMICS OF MORAL ARGUMENTS Moral statements depend on economic circumstances. In pre-agrarian society, murder, plunder and rape are heroic, not prohibited activities. In post-industrial society, some sort of redistribution is at least suggested by human sentiments. “rights” are a MORAL not NECESSARY argument. Rights are POSSIBLE only when there is very limited SCARCITY. Legal RIGHTS are only POSSIBLE when a minority is willing to exercise violence to protect them. We ACKNOWLEDGE the POSSIBILITY of certain rights only because we can AFFORD them at some period in time. There are vast differences between social classes on what ‘rights’ we can afford at one period in time or another. The lower social classes argue for rights. The upper social classes argue for utilities. The lower classes breed. The upper classes don’t. The lower classes envy the productive classes, the upper classes protect their assets. Property, civilization, society, in ALL CASES WITHOUT EXCEPTION were created by the application of violence by a minority Ideas held in ignorance are just evidence of ignorance, and nothing more. Moral arguments are irrational arguments because they do not enumerate their properties. Economic arguments are NECESSARY arguments, not the display of PREFERENCES nor MORAL arguments. The lower classes use resistance movements rather than actions to work against stronger forces. Resistance movements are ‘costs’. They are opportunity costs. They create economic friction. They create cooperative friction. Resistance increases the costs for the middle class, and can overwhelm the ability to export violence by the upper classes. Moral statements on rights made under the threat of the application of either resistance, political violence, or street violence. “MIGHT MAKES RIGHTS” “Might may not make right. But might certainly makes all Rights.”

    [callout]”Might may not make right. But might certainly makes all Rights.[/callout]

    Hence, my correct statement that my rights consist of my willingness (along with others) to use violence to protect my rights. THE FRAUD OF MORAL ARGUMENTS Violence is a virtue. It is the first virtue. And those who argue otherwise do so out of either ignorance or fraud. Because it is fraud to make a moral argument rather than a necessary and economically necessary argument. Moral arguments are, without exception, arguments made from either ignorance or deception. In most cases they are made from deception, in order to obtain transfer payments in order to accumulate resources at a discount. IN effect most if not all proletariat arguments for transfer payments are threats of organized violence against others. You are welcome to debate this topic with me but I am fairly sure I will prevail. Because unlike you I am not arguing from a network of silly moral deceptions. In moral arguments “follow the money” is a more valuable technique than it is in forensic investigation. Because the world is very clearly separated into people who produce and those who form resistance movements in order to obtain the productive results of others by the reliance on moral arguments the implication of which is violence if their wants for transfer payments are not met. The only good and bad is whether the transfer payments requested by the proletariat threat of violence is Pareto Efficient or not. ie: whether more harm to the economy is done by the transfers (redistribution) than by failing to do so, and over what period of time that harm is created. There is no harm in creating roads because roads increase productivity which is for the good of all. But all redistribution to individuals that is for personal consumption has significant negative consequences. While there is some benefit to Poor Farm’s and Social security, as long as it is a very minimal cost. Creating a dependent class of people by failing to force them to save, is creating an economic hazard. No matter what transfer we talk about the society is exposed to risk by the creation of supposedly risk abating transfer payments. It is very simple really.

  • The Reality Of Freedom #1: Freedom Requires Coercion

    Whenever something is scarce,  some concept of property (the exclusive use of a resource)  is necessary for the development of incentives, coordination, and production — even if the difference between ‘several property’ and ‘shareholder property’, is defined differently by different groups — therefore all societies include and sanction some form of coercion.  No society can exist without coercion. This applies to tribal hunter gatherers, nomads, village agrarians, market city dwellers, and vast urban and rural empires in a complex division of knowledge and labor. We can equally forgo the opportunity for violence theft, fraud, corruption.  For the poorest, this means refraining from theft, fraud, deception and violence in exchange for access to the market society and it’s prices. For the middle class, it means refraining from fraud and deception in exchange for participating in the market society and profiting from it.  For the wealthiest, it means refraining from manipulation of market prices or and participating in corruption of the rules of the market, and corruption, in exchange for status and choice.  For the most powerful it means refraining from corruption, and refraining from laziness, incompetence, and maintaining disciplined efforts to serve the marketplace in exchange for freedom from participation in the marketplace. Each of these forgone opportunities for profit is a cost to the individual.  Cumulatively, for each individual, and for any society, these are very, very high costs, because opportunities for violence, theft, fraud, deception, market manipulation, and corruption are more frequent than opportunities for fair exchange of goods and services due to asymmetries of knowledge and resources — even if the type of cost is different along the spectrum: theft and violence are easiest for the bottom and corruption is most easy for the top.

    [callout=’Freedom’]There is no social order that is free of coercion as long as there is scarcity. Property itself is a form of coercion. It must be or we would not have to invent it and enforce it.[/callout]

    There is no social order that is free of coercion as long as there is scarcity.  Property itself is a form of coercion. It must be or we would not have to invent it and enforce it. The coercion that people object to, and classify as corruption, is profiteering by the political class.  Or financial coercion, which means the taking of their time, opportunity, effort, property, or most importantly, status, and to some degree their very attention,  and distributing it to people with whom they disagree, or using it for purposes with which they disagree.  They see this as corruption: obtaining political office and favors by taking from one group and giving to another whom they disfavor. All societies concentrate and redistribute wealth. All societies participate in coercion – or else they could not have property and production.  But whenever a society consists of people with dissimilar interests, by definition there must be negative coercion. Almost all members of any society will tolerate any commonly accepted set of property definitions, even if the scope of individual property is severely limited.  They may form black markets if that scope is too severely limited.  They may form tax avoidance schemes if taxes are too expansive.  But if those definitions remain constant, and they do not have to feel that their plans, and efforts at gain were frustrated, then they will not see the state as coercive. Freedom is defined as freedom from coercion. Meaning freedom from all but equal coercions. And the only freedom we can equally coerce each other with is respect for property. And even then, respecting property is a higher cost for some, and lower for others.

  • A Definition Of Morality

    In taking a survey on liberal and conservative morality, I came across a question that asked me to define morality, and gave it an answer that I thought I would share here as part of my ongoing effort to provide conservatives with a framework for rational debate, rather than watch them continue their reliance upon tedious irrational arguments consisting of sentiments (conservatism) or legality (classical liberals) or an absurd single class state (libertarianism) or abandonment of government altogether (anarcho capitalism). Rothbard and Hoppe have given us a language, we just have to apply it to a multi-classed society wherein we hold trade routes and keep the proletariat from revolting. A Definition of Morality: In the sequence of cooperative social protocols beginning with manners ( limited personal consequences to one’s status), followed by ethics (externalized consequences of actions wherein one may be subject to retribution) , followed by morals (fully externalized consequences wherein one may steal from others unaccountably or irreversibly), Morality consists of those common habitual principles and descriptive statements by which which we codify and distribute the cultural rules of economic constraint whereby individuals pay for membership in the benefit structure of the group.In other words, manners, ethics and morals are human social general accounting principles. VIolation of moral principles is theft from those you do not know. Violation of ethical principles is theft from those who you may know. Violation of manners is petty theft from those who you do know. While these thefts may not be quantitatively measurable because of their incommensurability in units of measure, they are qualitatively accumulative in the form of decreased potential that may be drawn from the opportunities created by the division of labor.

    [callout]There are habitual property criminals…[And] there are habitual ethical and moral criminals. … Moral violations are forced redistributions to moral criminals[/callout]

    There are habitual property criminals. There are habitual ethical and moral criminals. Moral violations are forced redistributions to moral criminals. There is a Moral economy wherein different moral theories compete for economic dominance, just as there are political and financial economies wherein we compete for redistribution by the violent force of the state. Just as there are competitions between nations we call wars. it is our failure to articulate these actions as costs that make the political resolution of our differences impossible. Curt Doolittle – www capitalismv3 com