Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

ADVICE FOR NEW DRIVERS

(from elsewhere)

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS AND A BIG BAG OF CONCRETE

I rode a ran a lot, bicycled a lot, drove minibikes, and motorcycles. But when my mother taught me how to drive a manual truck in a school parking lot – even with all that experience – I was surprised at how different it was sitting on, and piloting, all that mass.

The primary difference that I notice, between each increasingly massive vehicle (up to a B52 bomber, which starts slowly turning a few miles after you move the stick) is that you shift your perception out to the limit of your vision, and slowly pilot the car in an arc toward that limit of your vision.

Most drivers start out trying to plan movements like they’re walking or riding a bicycle – thinking at ‘human scale’. As if we can turn, weave, stop, when we way a ton or two. It would be awesome if cars turned more slowly, for introductory drivers, so that they were FORCED to drive by slow correction of long arcs. Unfortunately cars are agile (and need to be for slow speeds). But basically the faster you go the longer the arc you have to aim at in the distance.

Pick up something heavy, run with it as fast as you can, and then try to turn, and try to stop. Feel it. Now imagine you’re carrying twenty times your weight, and trying to turn or stop. The surface area of your foot is roughly equal to the surface area of a tire on the road. In optimum circumstances, the car has four feet touching the ground instead of two. But otherwise the car has the same problem that you do. Now, take the same heavy thing and try to make small adjustments in your course in order to reach the next curve that you can see out in the distance.

ASIDE FROM MASS – THINK PARANOID

The other things are (a) you are invisible to everyone else, always. (if you ride in a blind spot (behind to the left or right) you are asking to get hit. Even if you can see the driver’s eyes, it doesn’t mean he sees you. It means only that he might see you. (c) Other drivers don’t drive logically, they drive impulsively, intuitively, habitually, with the least intellectual effort, lowest concentration, and with their minds on something else. (b) If you can’t see into any space, it means something is there that’s trying to kill you.

ASIDE FROM PARANOIA – THINK

(c) You cannot ever really take your eyes off the road for longer than it takes you to blink. (d) It takes WAAAY longer to slow down and stop than you think, and so always obey 1 car length per 10 miles per hour of velocity no matter what. (e) passing people is the best way to get into an accident. (f) never hurry when driving. (g) Never try to optimize your drive time within the flow of traffic, only prior to a flow of traffic.

SUMMARY

Basically, drive completely paranoid, and in small movements of the wheel, targeting as far in the distance as you can ‘arc’, and don’t try to be cunning. The only smart driver is the one who leaves early enough that he doesn’t have to rush. Keep music and audio books in the car to entertain you.

There… that’s my good deed for the day. lol

HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF

(from elsewhere)

I describe myself as any of the following:

– A Conservative Libertarian

– A Classical Liberal Libertarian

– An Aristocratic Libertarian

– An advocate for aristocratic liberty

– A Propertarian (in my technical sense of the term).

Reasons:

1) It is impossible to possess property rights in demonstrable fact, except in voluntary exchange of them in the form of reciprocal insurance.

2) It is illogical to forgo aggression, violence, fraud, deceit, conspiracy, and free riding, unless one obtains the same promise to forgo those parasitic actions in exchange. Our original exchange was permission to participate in the market. At present, given the advent of generations of labor saving technology, combined with rapid reproduction by the lower classes, has led to an oversupply of labor with nothing to sell in the market, and therefore no incentives to forgo aggression, violence, fraud, deceit, conspiracy and free riding.

3) It is illogical to abandon the production of commons when the western competitive advantage has been in the production of the commons made possible by our most important commons – the total prohibition on parasitic, and even unproductive actions.

4) It is only possible to produce commons by prohibiting their privatization, or the free riding upon them.

5) The classical liberal political model under an independent judiciary constructed a loose market for the facilitation of exchanges of benefits between classes by means of constructing commons. Our failure was in not adding a house of proletarians when we enfranchised them. And thereby allowing them to circumvent the common law. The collapse of the church, which had previously provided an independent taxation system, insurance, education and care-taking for the proletarians, exacerbated the problem of creating demand in the state. And the usurpation of moral argument by the academy, intellectuals and media in lieu of the church created malincentives for everyone. The ability to sell advertising on the back of distribution of the content that generated the greatest agitation, created yet another set of malincentives.

6) The attempt by (profligate) jewish intellectuals (the cosmopolitans) to justify immigration in order to maintain their ‘separate-but-apart’ culture, and, for various other producers to obtain discounts by immigrating labor at the cost of: social norms, traditions, history, language, intergenerational conflict, political polarization, has been destructive not only to the rule of law, to truth telling, but to the vast consequences of that immigration. We were able to indoctrinate the wave through 1925 by 1960, but in no small part because of the militarism of the war. Conversely, the only honest non-parasitic exchange is to export capital to locations where there is excess labor, and pay the cost of adapting the local norms to commercial and libertarian ends, rather than forcing others to bear the cost of increased transaction costs in every walk of life, and the consequential destruction of the civic society, liberty and truth telling. In other words, the argument to free immigration is an act of fraud in an attempt to privatize the gains produced by the commons.

7) The common law, truth telling, and the jury (of which the classical liberal model of government is an evolution) are responsible for western exceptionalism. The reason being that prohibitions on parasitism (involuntary transfer of property en toto – and in the extreme, the prohibition on profiting from non production), (a) deprive people of all possible means of sustenance other than productive participation in the market, and (b) produce what we call ‘trust’ (reduction of transaction costs), (c) allow the rapid identification of new prohibitions on parasitism BEFORE such behavior can develop into a norm, and institutionalize even the subtle parasitism of rent seeking or free riding.

So neither Hayek nor Hoppe solves the problem of identifying causality. Of the two, Hoppe gives us the full transformation of social science into statements of property rights, but he is misled by his heritage (as well all are), his education (as we all are) and likely by his friendships (as we all are), by incorrectly identifying property as the object of consideration, instead of an institution that suppresses parasitism, and forces all of us into productive labors.

It is irrational – at least for the strong – to abandon violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, deceit, theft by indirection, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of commons, conspiracy, and outright conquest, unless others grant us the same. When the weak ask the same, they are merely seeking to preserve means of theft by the only means available to them anyway. A hollow exchange if there ever was one.

The reason man developed cooperation was that it is a multiplier on productivity that is unmatched in living organisms. The problem with cooperation is that it invites parasitism in all its forms. The reason we have moral intuitions is that evolution needed to guarantee that we punish free riders (parasites) even at high cost (altruistic punishment).

Austrian economics is best understood as a research program into the institutions by which we improve voluntary exchanges. Whereas mainstream economics is best understood as the means by which we maximize consumption regardless of individual volition. The Austrian method makes use of all available information in society. The democratic and mainstream economic method does not. It aggregates this only in a single measure: consumption. And the consequence is rapid expansion of the population. So we practice moral economics and the mainstream practices immoral economics.

But in this same light, the abandonment of the means of producing commons, when commons are one’s greatest competitive advantage is merely an admission of failure to solve the intellectual challenge of recreating a market for commons equal in productivity to the market for private goods and services.

Either that or it is something much worse: yet another version of marxism, socialism, neo-conservatism: elaborate means of justifying parasitism that our civilization was more successful than any other in eradicating.

Group evolutionary strategies matter. Liberty is but one. But do we mean aristocratic liberty, or libertinism?

Western liberty is inseparable from the requirement for truth telling. And the Rothbardian Hoppeian model is specifically (conveniently) designed to preserve the utility of deceit and conspiracy, yet prohibit retaliation for deceit and conspiracy. Whereas for law to provide sufficient means of resolving conflict, we must resolve all possible sources of conflict. Otherwise, demand for the state fills what the does not.

The levant remains a low trust society because it practices low trust property rights. The west evolved a high trust and wealthy society because it practices high trust property rights. The levant remains a center for high demand for authoritarian government. Because the common law cannot function where people are so comfortable and free to engage in deceit.

The rule of law, the common law (organic poly-centric), strictly (Operationally) constructed, the jury, and the decidability of property-en-toto: the prohibition on all non-productive actions that create demand for retaliation. A market for the commons that divides individuals into classes (and genders) based upon the categories (scale) of property under their control – wherein all contracts can be negotiated, not monopolies imposed.

It’s not complicated. Or at least, it isn’t once you know it.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine.