http://trib.al/bXkp66A SEA IN A THIMBLE
“If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves. – Thomas Sowell, via Libertarianism.org.
Source date (UTC): 2012-09-07 15:44:00 UTC
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_HONDURAS_PRIVATE_CITIES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-09-05-22-36-19THREE PRIVATELY RUN CITIES IN HONDURAS
The Hoppeian government made real?
Source date (UTC): 2012-09-06 12:50:00 UTC
People need institutions both formal and informal to help them cooperate despite their different feelings and objectives. instead we try to argue with one another in order to make each other agree independently of those institutions. As if any of us actually listens to or comprehends the other.
Our institutions were designed to establish priorities among males who had extremely similar interests.
But today we have clearly divergent interests. If only because of gender and family structure preferences. And our differences are magnified by the technology that has made us prosperous, the addition of feminine majority, and group diversity.
If you diversify a population without altering its informal and formal institutions to allow for more complex cooperation – not upon ends but upon means – you will have institutional failure. The purpose of government is to help us cooperate despite our differences. The idea that we seek some form of truth in government is both an artifact of our prior homogeneity, the absurd bias of our democratic religion, and our belief in controlled choice rather than experimental cooperation.
The market instead allows us to collaborate on means even though we might pursue different ends. Government as it is currently structured by contrast requires that we have similar ends or the fantasy that we can persuade one another to possess similar ends.
When in fact it is both impossible for us to know what those similar ends should be, and given our various conflicting strategies about life in general, it is impossible for us to come to consensus on those ends. Or even understand all but a few of them.
We are prisoners of a set of institutions that have failed us and that cannot help us cooperate in our current state.
In most civilizations people abandon attempts at improving the government. That is the course we are on.
Having our civic culture handed to administrative government accelerated that decline as well as our divergence. Cowering in our little spatial boxes we rail at one another about how to think and feel rather than architect institutions that would help us to cooperate on means even if we desire a multitude of ends. And that multitude of experimentation would lead to discovery of solutions none of us is wise enough to conceive on our own.
Our vanity and hubris brought us here. Why is it that we think the next vanity of our intentions will be an exception to the rule?
Source date (UTC): 2012-09-01 23:06:00 UTC
“2016 OBAMA’S AMERICA” – MOVIE GOES INTO WIDE RELEASE.
The movie critical of Obama is number three in the weekend charts. It’s gone from limited to wide release. GO SEE IT. THIS WEEKEND.
“Immersed in exotic locales across four continents, best selling author Dinesh D’Souza races against time to find answers to Obama’s past and reveal where America will be in 2016. During this journey he discovers how Hope and Change became radically misunderstood, and identifies new flashpoints for hot wars in mankind’s greatest struggle. The journey moves quickly over the arc of the old colonial empires, into America’s empire of liberty, and we see the unfolding realignment of nations and the shape of the global future.”
Source date (UTC): 2012-08-25 13:04:00 UTC
THE IRON LAW OF BUREAUCRACY
“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.” – Pournelle
Source date (UTC): 2012-08-23 10:48:00 UTC
THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY
“All forms of organization, regardless of how democratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies out of the necessity for leadership and decision making, thus democracy is practically and theoretically impossible: He who says organization, says oligarchy.” – Robert Michels
Source date (UTC): 2012-08-23 10:46:00 UTC
http://www.meetup.com/Seminar-On-Political-Philosophy-Using-Libertarian-Reasoning/COME TO A SEMINAR ON LIBERTARIAN REASONING: “THE PROPERTARIANS”.
This fall, to help me flesh out my work, I’m running a seminar on political philosophy using the libertarian “Propertarian” reasoning of Rothbard and Hoppe combined with the moral research of Jonathan Haidt. In the first week, without any promotion, we have collected about a dozen interested people. I’d like to get about twenty regular participants, with an average of about 15 showing up at each meeting. And I’d like to run the seminar in multiple cities if there is sufficient interest.
If you know anyone who is interested send them to Meetup.com via the link below. Click on the [Read More About Us] button on the left.
-Cheers 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2012-08-17 12:32:00 UTC
http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/02/mitt_romney_is_living_every_social_scientists_nightmare @sebastianG @LeeBailey How about this: “Every population must have a reasonably uniform set of rights and correlative obligations, necessary to perpetuate the individual, familial, tribal, informal and formal institutional orders, which in turn makes planning, cooperation, a division of knowledge and labor, and conflict resolution possible. This portfolio of rights and obligations is largely unstated, and exists as manners, ethics. morals, rituals and traditions – all transmitted through imitation and training. This portfolio is generally called culture: the soft institutions that are habituated by a population. And as a rich and complex web of rights and obligations, many of which make assumptions about the natural world, and our relationship to it, changing these webs has infinite consequences, some of which are beneficial, and some of which are not. But the similarities that unite these rights and obligations generally impeded whatever changes we seek to impose upon that system of unstated rights and obligations.The written law generally codifies these unstated rights and obligations. Regulatory law then seeks to clarify them. Political or legislative law then seeks to alter them in order to grant privileges, rents and transfers. Some portfolios of rights and obligations accelerate cooperation, competition, a division of knowledge and labor, and provide a barrier against rent seeking and corruption. Some portfolios of rights and obligations inhibit cooperation, competition, a division of knowledge and labor, and provide a breeding ground for rent seeking and corruption. Every time an individual forgoes the opportunity for personal, familial, and tribal consumption by respecting someone else’s rights, whether individual or communal, it is a cost to him or her. To respect individual property rights, to avoid corruption and rent seeking, is an extremely challenging and culturally difficult thing to accomplish.These unstated, unwritten portfolios of rights and obligations are the most expensive infrastructure we can build. And they are resistant to change, and particularly to change that is not obviously useful to individual participants. The very idea that we must break family inbreeding and grant women property rights in order to reduce corruption at all levels of society, is not only foreign, but antithetical to some of our largest civilizations – which have retained familial or tribal priority. When by contrast, we understand, that human beings do like to consume. But the majority of people feel alienated by consumption and the dissolution of the family, tribe and nation. It is this conflict between what is necessary to create the productive and prosperous society, and the human desire to be part of a pack or tribe, that is impossible to solve with our current institutions. And it appears we cannot have it both ways.
Source date (UTC): 2012-08-13 21:25:00 UTC
http://blog.ted.com/2012/08/13/how-pervasive-has-government-distrust-gotten/TRUST IS NOT POSSIBLE IN AN EMPIRE
Source date (UTC): 2012-08-13 16:09:00 UTC
Every class is unfit to govern. That’s why the english, and our american classical liberals created a house for each of the upper and middle classes. The mistake they made was in not creating a house for the proletariat, and instead handing the house of the middle class of business owners over to the proles by democratic process. Houses allow classes to cooperate without falling victim to mob rule by the proletariat, necessitating corporatism by the rest.
Source date (UTC): 2012-08-01 10:40:00 UTC