Curt Doolittle

Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

  • That’s simply not true. There are whole provinces that would much rather join th

    That’s simply not true. There are whole provinces that would much rather join the USA if it gets them away from Ontario, and a bit less so Quebec. And I suspect it will eventually happen simply because Ontario policies have essentially doomed the rest of the provinces.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-11 00:41:31 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1988044380914282809

  • The most left wing person on the court, in support of the democrats, imposed the

    The most left wing person on the court, in support of the democrats, imposed the stay, giving time for opposition. But it’s just support of democrats delaying snap and blaming the republicans. And of course you fell for it.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-09 02:34:21 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1987348001917137343

  • how is the court’s decision trump’s responsibility? Why are the democrats demand

    how is the court’s decision trump’s responsibility? Why are the democrats demanding services for illegals instead of a budget and snap benefits? Fascinating that you support being manipulated like a child.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-09 02:13:07 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1987342657757274577

  • Explaining Rudyard Lynch’s Third World Leftism Definition of the Term Third-Worl

    Explaining Rudyard Lynch’s Third World Leftism


    Definition of the Term
    Third-World Leftism is a form of leftist ideology that attributes the poverty and underdevelopment of nations in Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, and parts of Eurasia primarily to historical and ongoing exploitation by Western powers. It interprets underdevelopment as a consequence of colonialism, imperialism, and unequal global exchange, and prescribes anti-imperialist, nationalist, and state-centered policies—such as protectionism, nationalization, and autarky—to achieve economic independence and social justice.

    Our NLI Assessment

    1. This criticism consists largely of status signaling, and is only possible because of the unfication of the world by the postwar order and the development of technology that exposes less developed countries, the regions, and peoples within them to their relative position. Prior to the industrial revolution, and certainly into it’s first decades, agrarian and population expansion was the only means of increasing wealth. As such most of history consisted of attempts to capture territory, labor, and resources as the only means of increasing wealth. After the industrial revolution industrialization and modernization were more impactful than acquisition of more territory. The only value of colonies then, were the natural resources. The net effect is that colonies were more costly than valuable which is one of the reasons for postwar decolonization.
    2. There are two factors that determine the consequences of colonization:
      a) which european country performed the colonization, and the stage of that country’s cultural and institutional development. The anglo-Dutch invented the trade system and the anglos invented the modern rule of law state. This is because these were the two most developed countries with the greatest seafaring demand for trade. The french and Spanish were less developed. The french retained both the authoritarianism of the cathoic chuch and of the monarchy – even after the revolution, and more so after napoleon. The Spanish, less developed than the french retained the feudal biases that they brought to south america as neo feudalism. The Russians brought their eurasian authoritarianism of the mongols to bear and not through trade but through conquest and resources. So whether you were an anglo or duct colony, a french, spanish, or russian, determined the standards of government that were brought to the colony. You were lucky if an anglo colony. Not so much anyone else’s.
      b) The state of development both culturally and institutionally of the colonized country, territory, or people. The less developed the more forcible the organization necessary to reform tribal or chieftain or kingdom or empire into sufficient economic and political organization that trade was possible in that region. The more backward, the greater shock, the more advanced teh colonizers, the more beneficial the colonization despite the shocks = over the long term.
    3. The problem remains is that the more tribal and politically immature the region (islam, africa) the more challenging the adjustment. At present Islam is still going through it’s adaptive crisis with great turmoil, south america is finally maturing out of feudalism, and it’s failed experiments with cetnralized socialism, and southeast asia appears to be doing just fine given they are more neotenic civilizations with greater homogeneity to start with.

    Third-World Leftism = a diagnosis and a prescription.
    • Diagnosis (causal claim): Underdevelopment in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and parts of Southern Eurasia is primarily the consequence of external predation: slavery, colonial extraction, unequal exchange, imperial wars/coups, corporate exploitation, sanctions, debt regimes.
    • Prescription (policy claim): Therefore the path to development is anti-imperial mobilization—nationalization, import-substitution, strategic autarky, single-party discipline, and redistribution—until external dependence is neutralized.
    Everything hangs on the word primarily. If external causes explain most variance, TWL is directionally right; if they explain a minority once we control for internal constraints, TWL misallocates agency and selects counter-productive strategies.
    Development = f( constraints, capital formation, governance )
    • Constraints: geography (market access, navigable waterways, arable land), disease burden, climate volatility, distance to frontier, initial human capital, population age structure.
    • Capital formation: physical (roads, ports, power), human (education, health), institutional (property/contract enforcement, fiscal capacity), social (trust outside kin/clan), technological (adoption, export sophistication).
    • Governance: violence control, corruption control, competence (state capacity), reciprocity toward domestic and foreign investors, macro stability, openness + industrial policy coherence.
    TWL emphasizes external shocks in constraints and governance (colonial rules, foreign interference) and terms of trade in capital formation. A complete model must allocate weights across exogenous and endogenous drivers and test the counterfactual trajectory under feasible policy choices.
    Exogenous (external) channels
    • Enslavement & extraction: demographic collapse, capital drain, predatory institutions.
    • Arbitrary borders: heightened ethnic fractionalization → higher coup/war risk.
    • Colonial legal origin: extractive administrations & concessions → weak property rights outside the state or cronies.
    • Cold War interventions: coups, civil wars fueled by superpower rivalry; sanctions; commodity-price manipulation; resource concessions.
    • Debt & conditionality cycles: pro-cyclical austerity, sudden stops, IMF programs with weak local fit.
    • Knowledge/IP regimes: latecomer penalties; technology licensing frictions.
    Endogenous (internal) channels
    • State formation failure: shallow tax base, weak courts, politicized security services.
    • Patronage equilibria: clientelism over merit; public payrolls substitute for production.
    • Kinship intensity & low impersonal trust: raises transaction costs, narrows market scale.
    • Policy errors: ISI beyond infant-industry windows; permanent overvaluation; financial repression; soft-budget SOEs; expropriations without capability transfer.
    • Resource curse dynamics: volatility, rent capture, Dutch disease, weakened accountability.
    • Demography: high fertility → capital dilution; urbanization without industrialization.
    • Education & health lags: slow accumulation of skills and labor productivity.
    Inference: External causes raised the starting difficulty and distorted institutional paths; but persistent underperformance is typically multiplicative—external shocks interacting with domestic institutional choices. The decisive margin for takeoff is governance quality under constraint.
    TWL underestimates: (a) the scarcity of state capacity, (b) the time-limited nature of protection, (c) the necessity of export discipline to discover productivity, and (d) the importance of predictable reciprocity with capital (domestic + foreign). It correctly identifies: (e) predatory histories; (f) unequal bargaining power; (g) the moral hazard in some external programs.
    1. Border test: Countries with similar colonial trauma but different governance quality should diverge. (e.g., Botswana vs. neighbors; Mauritius vs. peers.)
    2. Commodity cycle test: During price booms, do TWL regimes convert rents into non-resource exports/productivity? If not, the binding constraint is domestic capability, not external oppression.
    3. Openness with reciprocity test: Where rule-of-law + openness rise together, does growth accelerate despite past exploitation? If yes, primary causality shifts inward.
    4. Policy reversal test: When TWL policies are relaxed toward export discipline and macro realism, do outcomes improve? (Chile post-1990, Vietnam post-Doi Moi.)
    If TWL were primarily right, autarkic or high-protection regimes would systematically outperform open but rules-based regimes among otherwise similar countries. The cross-country record shows the opposite.
    • Narrative: From 1970s oil bonanza to 1980s debt crisis; 1999 Bolivarian revolution; 2000s–2010s nationalizations, price controls, exchange controls; sanctions in late 2010s.
    • External factors: Commodity volatility; some sanction effects (later stage); historical oil concessions shaped a rentier state.
    • Internal dynamics (binding): Oil-rent substitution for taxation → weak fiscal consent; chronic overvaluation → non-oil tradables collapse; expropriation without capability transfer; price/exchange controls → shortages, capital flight; politicized PDVSA de-skilling.
    • Counterfactual: With a Norway-style fund + realistic FX + competitive non-oil policy, vulnerability remains but collapse is avoidable. External antagonism is insufficient to explain the scale of failure.
    • Narrative: Pre-1959 unequal development; post-revolution expropriation, planning; COMECON subsidies; shock after USSR collapse; partial opening (tourism, remittances), re-tightened controls; US embargo persists.
    • External: Embargo and lost Soviet subsidies were large shocks.
    • Internal: Central planning’s productivity ceiling; dual currency distortions; repression of private enterprise; skill formation high but absent incentives for innovation/export.
    • Outcome: Good basic human development for income level; poor productivity and growth. External pressure mattered, but system design caps prosperity.
    • External: US interventions, civil wars, coffee/banana price swings, gangs shaped by US deportations; terms-of-trade shocks; hurricanes.
    • Internal: Highly concentrated land/property rights; weak courts/policing; fiscal incapacity; criminal governance in corridors; political polarization. Costa Rica avoided militarization, invested in education/tourism/eco-exports → better outcomes.
    • Inference: History of intervention raised violence; yet domestic elite bargains and state capacity determine divergence (Costa Rica vs. Northern Triangle).
    • External: Slave trade depopulation; arbitrary borders; commodity dependence; French monetary arrangements; jihadist spillovers (recent).
    • Internal: Resource curse (Nigeria); weak electricity/ports; patronage fragmentation; low tax/GDP; education quality gaps; Sahel security crises.
    • Positive deviants: Ghana’s democratic alternation and relative macro discipline; Senegal’s institutional continuity; Côte d’Ivoire’s export diversification in rebounds.
    • Lesson: Colonial legacies heavy, but governance + public goods explain relative winners.
    • External: Settler extraction; sanctions (apartheid era); commodity cycles; liberation struggles.
    • Internal:
      Botswana:       early property clarity over diamonds, conservative macro, rule-bound bureaucracy → compounding gains despite landlocked geography.
      Zimbabwe: expropriation without capacity, monetary collapse.
      Zambia: copper dependence; SOE inefficiency; gradual reform improved but vulnerable to cycles.
      South Africa: world-class firms/infrastructure but apartheid’s human-capital scar + governance decay (state capture) limit TFP.
    • Inference: Same region, similar external winds; rule quality and rent management dominate long-run variance.
    Strengths (what it gets right)
    1. Moral accounting: It keeps the historical bill of damages visible (slavery, conquest, coups, sanctions).
    2. Bargaining realism: Highlights power asymmetries in trade, finance, and IP.
    3. Elite discipline: Points out that foreign alignment can entrench domestic compradors.
    4. Social cohesion: Emphasizes distributional legitimacy as a development input.
    Weaknesses (what breaks in practice)
    1. Primary-cause error: Over-weights exogenous causes in contemporary underperformance, under-weights state capacity + policy quality.
    2. Capability neglect: Treats nationalization as transfer of ownership rather than transfer of know-how (which rarely transfers without reciprocity incentives).
    3. Protection without clocks: Uses tariffs/controls as permanent shelter, not time-boxed scaffolding to force export discipline.
    4. Reciprocity failure: Unpredictable treatment of capital (domestic/foreign) raises risk premia, starving precisely the investment needed to escape dependency.
    5. Information poverty: Isolation reduces learning-by-export and technology diffusion—the very engines of catch-up.
    Pragmatic correction
    • Replace “break dependency first” with “earn bargaining power first” through export competitiveness, institutional credibility, and human-capital compounding. Interdependence under reciprocal, rules-based constraints beats autarky.
    • Decidability tests (without discretion):
      Did policy raise non-resource tradable exports per capita within 10–15 years?
      Did       TFP and electricity generation per worker trend up persistently?
      Did the       tax base (non-resource) deepen?
      Did       schooling-adjusted learning outcomes and infant mortality converge toward frontier?
    • Truth tests (scope-limited claims):
      “Sanctions reduced output” → quantify pre/post differentials vs. unaffected neighbors controlling for commodity cycles.
      “Nationalization improved capability” → track O&M performance, downtime, and cost curves vs. private comparators.
    • Judgment (residual discretion): When evidence is mixed, choose remedies that minimize irreciprocity: time-boxed protection, transparent rent-to-results contracts, sovereign wealth funds with rule locks, predictably compensable expropriation.
    1. Macrostability first: credible, boring monetary/fiscal rules; FX realism; independent statistics.
    2. Capacity before control: professionalize revenue, courts, and procurement before ambitious industrial policy.
    3. Time-boxed infant industry: escalating export benchmarks; sunset clauses; automatic rollback if targets missed.
    4. Open regionalism: scale markets via regional power/standards pools; trade corridors and ports.
    5. Human capital flywheel: teacher quality, basic health, and firm-linked vocational pipelines.
    6. Rent-to-capability contracts: in resources and utilities, convert rents into local supplier development under auditable milestones.
    7. Sovereign wealth & rule locks: insulation from commodity cycles; fiscal councils; transparent dividend rules.
    8. Diaspora & FDI reciprocity: attract know-how with predictable rights, fast dispute resolution, and local-partner protections.
    Third-World Leftism is morally intelligible and historically grounded but strategically unsound when it treats external antagonism as the primary cause of present underdevelopment and autarky/statism as the primary cure. The binding constraint in most cases is capability—administrative, productive, and legal. Where states built those capabilities and coupled them to export discipline under reciprocal rules, catch-up occurred despite predatory histories. Where they didn’t, no amount of anti-imperial rhetoric compensated.
    • Dependency & world-systems: Prebisch-Singer; Frank; Cardoso & Faletto.
    • Institutional accounts: North/Wallis/Weingast; Acemoglu/Johnson/Robinson.
    • Late development & industrial policy: Amsden; Wade; Johnson; Rodrik; Hausmann/Hidalgo (ECI).
    • Resource curse & rents: Auty; Collier/Venables; Mehlum/Moen/ Torvik.
    • Africa specific: Herbst (state formation); Miguel (econometric evidence); Jerven (data/measurement).
    • Latin America cycles: Edwards (left turns); Dornbusch/Edwards (macroeconomics of populism).
    • Sanctions & growth: Hufbauer et al.; Neuenkirch/Neumeier (macro effects).

    cc:

    @Whatifalthist

    Source date (UTC): 2025-11-07 18:23:48 UTC

    Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/1986862163248750730

  • Our opinion is that the basics of our work can be taught anywhere from seventh t

    Our opinion is that the basics of our work can be taught anywhere from seventh to twelfth grade, and certainly in the first two years of college. But more importantly, we need our work taught in the first year of law school, and we need to provide incentives (they actually exist already) to police and obtain award for policing the judiciary and the state.
    At present the napoleonic code in europe provides an administrative court for doing so. In our opinion, as demonstrated by the problems trump has had with lower courts unskilled in constitutional matters – only in procedure and code – this is a necessary restructuring of the court system. In part because the common law evolved when one could appeal to the local church, the local manor, the local city, the local sheriff, even the parliament, and eventually the king.
    Theoretically our representatives and senators were to fulfill that role, but to suppress corruption we reduced tehir influence, and the centralization of power in washington requiring full time legislators there, has functionally left the people without a vehicle for protection from the state.
    Of course our work at the institute seeks to remedy this situation through constitutional ‘completion’ more so than reform. In other words, the natural and common law are merely incompletely stated for handling the emergent scale. We seek to complete that law rather than ‘reform’ it. Even if the word ‘reform’ applies correction rather than completion.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-10-30 16:16:15 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1983930960321376326

  • It’s just the fantasy of Feminine universal authoritarianism by baiting into haz

    It’s just the fantasy of Feminine universal authoritarianism by baiting into hazard. Same as abrahamic religions. Same as the marxist sequence of pseudo-religions.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-10-29 18:28:53 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1983601950114615508

  • We need to stage a pro-monarchy demonstration – as a celebration 😉

    We need to stage a pro-monarchy demonstration – as a celebration 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2025-10-23 21:30:55 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1981473435407847820

  • Nonsense. (a) the way you make the equivalent of a nordic country requires a sma

    Nonsense.
    (a) the way you make the equivalent of a nordic country requires a small ethnically and culturally homogenous polity surrounded by similar small ethnically and culturally homogenous polities, especially those bounded by seas instead of land, with a degree of high neotenic evolution, high average intelligence, high degree of institutional formation, and high degree of individual responsibility for both private and commons.

    And, in addition, how you get to norway is having oil fields and saving the proceeds from them before they run out.

    (b) Ergo, in the industry we say “How to get to Denmark”. The answer is simple: you fill it with danes.

    So you’d have be rather dim and ignorant to think that a continent wide population of diverse ethnicity and culture under diverse geographic and economic constraints, would act like a scandinavian country because under such conditinos your bias in favor of meritocracy is easy to satisfy, but your bias or need in favor of equality is simply funding people who want to effectively prey upon you.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-10-23 16:11:10 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1981392965030597021

  • This is trump using your leftist strategy of undermining by appeal to the common

    This is trump using your leftist strategy of undermining by appeal to the commoners. The right resisted. Social media enabled it. Now it’s being used to bypass the talking classes.

    Never criticize what you use and cause. It’s like most left propaganda: projection.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-10-21 01:41:46 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1980449398002970791

  • Dont be silly. This is pure trump negotiating. Play the good cop but send in the

    Dont be silly. This is pure trump negotiating. Play the good cop but send in the bad cops after.

    Source date (UTC): 2025-10-18 04:42:03 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1979407606453268557