Curt Doolittle

Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

  • Secret Wars? Sure. They’re Cheaper. (And more effective.)

    Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/15shadowwar.html

    In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists. The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. The administration has worked with European allies to dismantle terrorist groups in North Africa, efforts that include a recent French strike in Algeria. And the Pentagon tapped a network of private contractors to gather intelligence about things like militant hide-outs in Pakistan and the location of an American soldier currently in Taliban hands. While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged.

    …

    Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

    Why don’t we just exit these ridiculous occupations, invest heavily in these kinds of activities, and close as many bases as possible? We don’t need to hold LAND. Just air and sea – land is useless transport for tade. We need to spy and kill people. Not wage war. War is a western technology as it is practiced today. The “raider cultures’ will never surrender to western war. They have no civilization or leadership who can surrender. Oh, that’s right. Spec ops teams have been saying this since Vietnam. Martin Van Creveld has been saying this for decades. But the military bureaucracy reigns.

  • Ground Zero Mosque. No. Never.

    Let me say this in public. Openly. With conviction. “Over…. My…. Dead…. Body….” Let me promise any and all that I mean that statement. I’ll die to prevent it. Period.

  • The Properties Of Political Argument

    [table id=2 /]

    NOTES

    Forms Of Argumenta) Our Republican political system is a trade of violence for argument. Argument, consent, and majority-voting are proxies for violence. These proxies for violence were the result of the need for expensively equipped warriors to resolve disputes among a military class of necessarily meritocratic warriors, and to enfranchise additional soldiers into western battle tactics, which required individual imitative and consent. But regardless of the reason of it’s origin, we have traded violence for argument. b) The unspoken purpose of our political structure is the management of the market. A society cannot have a division of labor without a market. Nor can it decrease prices, nor generate wealth — and particular, the relative wealth needed to defend the market as it becomes more attractive and prosperous. The purpose of government in the west, since it’s inception, is to create a market, and to control the quality of goods in the market, to convert barbarians into observing market behavior in exchange for participation in the market, and frankly, for the shareholders to extract profits from the market, while providing sufficient benefit and incentives to the consumers and traders that the cost of policing property was widely distributed to all ‘enfranchised men’. In effect, soldiers were shareholders in the market and were expected to police that market. The joint stock company was not a modern innovation. It was the very structure of western civilization from it’s inception. Cities were formed as markets under the Germanic manor system, and under the Roman and Greek systems, by fraternal soldiers who defended and regulated them.The origin of this market is the egalitarian joint-stock company of fraternal soldiers who created, defended, and managed it. A ‘barbarian’ then, is a person who does not pay the fee for participating in the market: respect for the rules and regulations of that market, the first being, non-violence, the second, maintaining the quality of the market’s ability to attract and serve consumers, so that the joint shareholders could profit from the market.b) Our political system has transitioned such that it is founded upon economic arguments. It is no longer founded on moral or religious arguments. Moral and religious arguments are, in the large part, poorly articulated economic strategies. While some are better and some are worse than others, religious arguments and moral arguments are almost entirely economic in nature. Religious arguments in particular are Since IQ and Religiosity decrease together and IQ and Morality increase together, we assume incorrectly that the behavior is not the same despite the different narrative methods held by people at different positions on the scale. Reason and science can be taught but not utilized by a child who must rely instead upon simple narratives and repetition of good behavior, and an elder wise man has no need of fairy tales, and finds his juniors often tedious. c) Where our political system does not consider economic arguments it considers equality. Our politics is no longer founded upon roles and responsibilities that are necessary for the maintenance of social cooperation. Cooperation is assumed as a legal, moral, political mandate, as part of the capitalist process, and redistribution now forms the moral component of political argument, rather than role and responsibility. This structure is a result of the increase in the division of knowledge and labor in industrial, post-agrarian, society. Our political discourse emphasizes the post-productive object Money, but ignores the pre-productive object opportunity. In particular we do not include the opportunity economy as the only means of prospering now that prices are so low. We do not articulate that the barbarians ‘are paying a tax in opportunity cost’ for their citizenship simply by avoiding violence and fraud, and we rarely discuss opportunity costs, since they were a minor import to agrarians, but are the primary source of wealth in advanced societies. This error is a product of temporary irrational wealth in the west gained by the acquisition of a new continent. Government is obsessed with redistribution and insufficiently obsessed with innovation, competition, and accumulating human, intellectual, and built capital for the purpose of maintaining our quality of life.d) A political argument must contain at least one of these forms of argument. (Most political argument consists of sentiments supported by selectively applied biases that confirm the sentiments. Very few arguments are sufficiently articulated such that the underlying sentiments are expressly stated. In many cases this is because these sentiments are not understood by the person making the argument. Because of this tendency, )e) All sentiments are preferential biases, not absolute truths. Biases are not truths because humans are unequal in their abilities and wants. These different biases are expressions of preferences for uses of capital. Capital is scarce and the uses of it infinite. Therefore uses of capital are in conflict and are irreconcilable. Since they are irreconcilable, parties use a variety of techniques from overstatement, to distortion, to taking advantage of mutual ignorance, to deception, to outright fraud, to corruption, to threats, to violence in order to appropriate capital for their preferential purposes.f) Democratic Groups must rely upon sentiments in order to achieve goals and form leaders.Sentiments are goals. Goals can be agreed upon, and means cannot be agreed upon. The democratic process forces aggregation and compromise of means in order to achieve goals. Leadership must form or seize power in order to resolve conflicts over means. g) All arguments rely upon sentiments, because all arguments MUST advocate a sentiment. Since people are of different in ages, possessed of different knowledge, preferences, biases, classes, resources, and abilities, rational debate among individuals over means, is of necessity difficult, and solutions that employ complex means, and imply complex causes, are OPAQUE to the majority of participants. Only sentiments, or goals, that express common aggregate desires, are possible across a broad enough polity to enact a policy by the process of democratic violence: majority voting. h) A scientific argument contains data, assumptions categorized as proposed facts, and a theory of causality without which facts have no meaningFurthermore it must state how it can be proved false, and in the social sciences no one test is sufficient for proof of an argument – an argument in the social sciences is only possible if considering all similar studies from all similar circumstances from all similar cultures, including the opposing positions. This is the Aristotelian argument. Citation of a study is a guarantee of falsehood. Citation of the full body of studies is the only material reason for judgment. i) An economic argument should contain ALL of these forms of argument. (The primary component of an economic argument is a theory of incentives. An economic argument is supported by exhaustive application of correlative mathematics to indirectly accumulated data (economic activity that was naturally recorded, not intentionally constructed.)j) Economic arguments are the only possible arguments.They are not a preference. They are a necessity. Only an economic argument is sufficiently useful for a polity that must make capital decisions in a division of knowledge and labor whose scope both in people and time is sufficiently complex that no human can perceive that answer by other means. Conversely, the population may not consist of a sufficient number of people literate enough to communicate rational choices to each class, race, culture, and generation. This problem can be solved by fairly simple education. But such education would disadvantage numerous political groups with selfish motivations.k) All politicians represent a bias. They are not corrupt. They are not ill intentioned. They have no choice. The human mind is incapable of synthesizing the universe of outcomes. As such they will advocate any set of preferences to the maximum of their abilities. They cannot do otherwise. they are not hired by their constituents for any other reason, even if they were able to expand the scope of their understanding. However, we can hold them accountable for deceptions. And they are anthropomorphic symbols of opposing arguments for and against the use of capital. And we should see them as such. the fact that we allow the ignorant and foolish into office is a problem with our system of election.The Limits Of Social and Economic Science Unlike the physical sciences, all human economic activity is, cumulative, and correlative, not absolutely causal. Certainly, human interpersonal activity is causal, because it is observable. However, systemic data, and all non-contradictory causal derivations and deductions from narrative or factual history are correlative in the sense that they are necessarily insufficient, and open to external causality. We have markets because of our lack of perceptive ability. We have numbers, math, accounting, narrative, and reason to assist in compensating for a lack of perception. But history is constantly open to interpretation due to additional data, or because of an increase or decrease in the scope of the context of the causes and incentives we are applying in our analysis. This difference in scope of context, is the reason that scientific argument is often difficult to use in resolving political differences; due to the fact that most scopes of context are related to class, knowledge and intelligence, and are generally expressed as ‘time preferences’ – longer and shorter time horizons, as well as expressed as ‘population preferences’, – the scope of people to be affected by the outcome. That is because, while events are the same, the level of ‘noise’ in economic activity varies considerably, Pseudo-Science Survey data is a formal argument of sentiments – it is not scientifically causal. It is only scientifically descriptive. And it is open to distortion and deception to the degree that it is universally suspect.

  • “What do you think about China?” I Think You Are Confused About The Virtues Of Political Systems

    Kenneth V. asks:

    I’m curious about your opinion on China’s future. As the democratic empire collapses in the west and power shifts its balance, do you think that the Chinese people will demand more political freedom, especially since libertarian books are bestsellers? Or do you think the oligarchy will be successful in suppressing dissent? What do you think of the demographic trends there? Chinese couples do a trial-and-error with childbirth where babies who are less than perfect are killed. The massive gender imbalance of 40 million more males than females. What do you think of this kind of extreme eugenics? I personally find it abhorrent, but I’d like to ask your opinion.

    Ken, The Chinese are driven by the conflict between northern government, southern trading prosperity, interior poverty, and hostile borders. The cultural tradition is ancient and it’s purpose is to avoid civil wars at all costs, simply because civil wars were so common for them, because they are exposed to what they see as threats (their country needs the china seas open in order not to be starved into submission), and because of natural conflicts between the regions. This history is as important to china as the sense of freedom is to the west. (a sentiment which is in no small part a reaction to the middle eastern model – which westerners considered horrid.)

    [callout]I suspect that they will never achieve the middle-class society as we understand it. They will bypass that phase of development. They will go from totalitarian rural poverty to totalitarian urban poverty, and maintain their corrupt bureaucracy. The reasons for retaining that bureaucracy will simply evolve to support a different set of objectives.[/callout]

    Now, to avoid drinking our own Kool Aid, we probably should understand that the west has always had an advantage of being a society filled with craftsmen rather than laborers, not the least of which was the result of widespread metal smithing, easy river trade, and the western agrarian cycle which was very seasonal. The importance of that sentence may not be obvious to you unless you think of the 360 day a year job of a rice farmer. So Romans conquered northern europe because the ‘barbarians’ were fairly wealthy by contrast, and presided over resources. While they exploited the warmer climes for food. But western wealth over the past 500 years, has largely to do with selling off the american continent to immigrants. Not to any particular western genius. IN fact, the continental view of exploiting the continent as they had the islands, by bringing resources back home paled by comparison to the money that could be made by settling, populating, and selling consumer goods to immigrants to the north american continent. In this broader context, our political order is more dynamic, and by that I mean, flexible, and the republican model with capitalistic institutions (for cooperation) is the only one that is effective for mobilizing enough people to accomplish such a task. China by contrast is simply doing the same thing without inventing it: they are selling off apartments, electricity, water, and food to immigrants to the coastal cities. Their model is better for doing their migration under their circumstances. Our model was better for doing our migration under our circumstances. The question is, for them, for us, what will happen when that’s done. Because we are going to have very densely populated cities, and in that model FARMER ETHICS AND MORALS EVAPORATE. Traditional religious principles, ethical constructs, and the ability to manage class differences become very difficult in those environments. The difference is that the chinese have the benefits of monarchy (long term thinking), the capital concentration of totalitarianism (which is very useful) and the institutions of capitalism (banking, finance, accounting, interest and credit, western laws), and they get to profit on the implementation of western technology – without having to have had to discover it. This is a very good model for competing externally. it is not a good model when you’re the ‘winner’. It’s a very good model for when you’re a century and a half behind the rest of the world. I suspect that they will never achieve the middle-class society as we understand it. They will bypass that phase of development. They will go from totalitarian rural poverty to totalitarian urban poverty, and maintain their corrupt bureaucracy. The reasons for retaining that bureaucracy will simply evolve to support a different set of objectives. But the damage that they will cause in that transition, to the world in general, if they are faced with uprisings, is substantial. I think your question begs the wrong assumptions: political models are utilitarian goods, not absolute goods. Societies need to concentrate capital in order to compete and cooperate with other societies. Then they need internal institutions for everything else. Complex market capitalism when combined with totalitarian command of large investments, with the least corruption possible is probably the most competitive form of political order. As long as investments are competitive rather than redistributive. Redistribution is the result of competition. Not a replacement for it. There is no inherent value in political freedom on its own. It’s not a virtue. It is an acceptable risk in a homogenous society. But it is a net danger in a pluralistic society. The struggle for power must never be available to factions or minorities. Only the struggle to compete in the market. Political freedom is the freedom to usurp the market. THere is no other reason for it. The only value of political freedom is in reducing corruption, which is an impediment to trade, exchange and capital formation. The problem for a people is suppressing corruption, not obtaining political freedom. People don’t really choose their political system. It’s determined by their circumstances and they are pragmatic in adopting it. They don’t pick idealistic things, and if they do, they fail (Iran). Democracy is just slow moving communism. As Schumpeter said, Democracy will just lead to socialism. Republicanism and oligarchy are rule by the middle classes (trade). Totalitarianism is rule by the upper classes (force). Theocracy by definition, rule by the lower classes (fraud). (IQ and Atheism increase with class structure, although under capitalism moral behaviors tend to emerge with the decline in religiosity.)

  • Reason Is Insufficient To Reform Immigration. Violence Is The Only Political Option.

    A friend posted an article on immigration reform. It’s yet another appeal to perceived wisdom.

    [callout]We can be free, or we can be exploited, or we can be oppressed or we can be enslaved, or we can be murdered. Choose your position on that spectrum. [/callout]

    Once an argument is understood in that it possesses explanatory power, is non-contradictory, and solves a pertinent practical political problem, one can seek consensus. And as long as that consensus appeals to a majority, then a democratic polity can adopt the policies that support the argument. However, the classical liberal ideal cannot be supported within a democracy, and no such rational arguments can prevail, for the sole reason that freedom is the desire of the minority – the creative class. And instead, safety is the objective of the majority. And the majority will always pursue safety rather than liberty. If the freedom-desiring minority loses it’s willingness to use violence to preserve it’s freedom, it will possess neither freedom, nor prosperity. And the rest of the civilization will calcify upon being deprived of the mental fertility of its creative, and therefore, most productive classes. This is the history of civilization. Fertility followed by calcification, followed by conquest and poverty. The answer is not violence, nor is the answer argument. The answer is sufficient argument so that the creative classes will apply violence, for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining the political power needed to secure the minority liberty against the predatory majority’s exploitation of the creative class in order to obtain security. We can be free, or we can be exploited, or we can be oppressed or we can be enslaved, or we can be murdered. Choose your position on that spectrum. Because your actions and the use of violence will determine it. Talk is cheap, and demonstrably ineffective.

  • Angry Old White Men? Hardly.

    Claude Fischer is a sociologist at UC Berkeley who published a piece entitled “Angry Old White Men” in which he categorizes the Tea Party movement as a rural movement of old white men. Mark Thoma, a left-leaning economist picked up the article and posted it on his blog The Economist’s View, where he adds: “Rural America senses that he represents a major shift in the political landscape, one that will no longer put the white male farmer at the center of the American political landscape.” As if its a rural cause rather than a white cause. To which others add:

    “What we’ve got here is a real warning sign that something in our society just isn’t working. It’s not just hand-wringing liberals and right-wing Christians anymore; when your educated upper-middle classes start lashing out, you know the regime’s days are numbered.”

    and

    “The hate directed at “white men” by so many members of leftist establishment(s) borders on blood lust. At their deep core is a burning anger that they focus on the “white man” taking delight in belittling, marginalizing, and taunting that demographic. Perhaps the “delicious irony” is that many of these folks proudly flaunt their fake “tolerance” and calls for “peace” while obviously unable to control their desire to stoke division and strife.”

    and this:

    “Did these [old white guys, especially affluent, Protestant ones] give ground or was it an enlightened choice? … My guess is the shift had more to do with U.S. government based public education, by mostly female primary school teachers, which gave children a sense of respect for all. It still took many generations.

    The last of which is actually the structural answer: our schools teach democratic secular humanism in an effort to replace our traditions and cultures with a state religion. We do not have a separation of church and state. We have a state religion and we send most of our children to the theocracy for education. White Protestants lost political power, status and their culture due to “enlightened choice”. There was no material reason why they HAD to lose power. They chose to be ‘Christian’, which was the sentiment needed to unify a fragmented europe. They could just as easily have chosen to keep slavery, to keep control of government, to forbid immigrants political power, to maintain the requirement of protestantism. In other words, they could have done what most civilizations have done. What most civilizations still do. In fact, the entire purpose of nationalism was to give racial groups their own sovereignty after centuries of tribal distribution across monarchic europe. It Wasn’t Political Power, It Was Economic Power Starting with the industrial revolution, the dominance of the HOUSEHOLD lost importance, and there for the dominance of the MALE waned. The decline has been not just among white men, but among men in particular. Women’s entry into the work place has not hurt high performing men, but since women have taken all the lower risk clerical functions in society, and seem to largely be better suited for it, this has moved men toward the edges – into the riskier professions. They Gave Up Power Voluntarily These voluntary abdicators of male political power were Christians. They tried the experiment. It was a heady debate. We have just wrapped class, race and cultural preference in a deep cloak of secular language instead of religious language. But the underlying sentiments and logic are essentially the same. We have a religion of democratic, secular humanism rather than paternal christianity. The difference is that the political myth of the ‘white man’s burden’ of anglo exceptionalism in order to morally justify the empire, has become the myth of democratic secular humanism in order to justify the empire. The Experiment Failed What has happened is that these previously tolerant people believe that the experiment failed. That their conservative sentiments (the belief that humans have immutable behaviors), have returned to precedence over their liberal sentiments (people can aspire to utopian behavior in the right environment) have changed. White Men in particular tolerated man-hating feminism because they felt it was somewhat justified, but that society would ‘settle back’ because people have ‘natural tendencies’. White Men felt that because of slavery and WW2, that they were wrong in their fantasy of exceptionalism – that they had betrayed their christian sentiments, and so they tolerated criticism in the hope that society would settle down. White men today no longer believe those egalitarian myths. WHen you destroy a mythos you don’t destroy just the ‘bad parts’. You destroy the entire system of myths. They no longer believe in their guilt. They now feel equally wronged. The Levant Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan, describes how he and his fellow members of the levant thought that they had solved the problem of heterogeneity, and that they were more civilized than the rest of the world. But it was a myth. That small civilization is now dead and gone, and gone within his lifetime. People continue to murder each other in droves around the world. And while capitalism decreases costs and increases quality of life, and it because of the prosperity, decreases the incentive to devolve into violence, it is not a sufficient tool for altering the human perception of status, nor of the realities of cooperating in groups: tribes remain fixed in their cooperative networks even under capitalism. It’s just FRICTION that is less important because there is less scarcity of opportunity. What Happens Next The question becomes, a) whether white men will cease tolerating their denigration and become activists, – or b) whether they will do what men have in all other collapsed cultures, which is abandon the Fraternal Order, and become like byzantines, Mediterraneans, or africans, and simply pursue non-political localized self interest which will over time, simply erode the legitimacy of the state. There is another option c) which is violence. But that is always a minority position because it is so costly. And if history is a guide we will get all three of these factors. Western Protestant Culture Is An Anomaly The sentiments of white male culture are an anomaly. It is the product of the fraternal order of city-defending soldiers who treat the ‘market’ (which they don’t differentiate from ‘society’) as if they were shareholders. That sentiment is extremely rare. If that sentiment ceases, we will not get the civilization that utopians aspire to. We have a lot of historically similar situations. We might get something random. But history tells us what we will get will not likely be the ‘free society’ that we aspired to. Urbanization Affects Social Institutions By Increasing Anonymity And Decreasing Economic Conformity We are urbanizing, world wide. And we must. There are too many of us to return to farming. We no longer live where we are self sustaining yet produce excess in order to participate in the market for the purpose of getting money with which to buy what we cannot produce. Nearly all of us must participate in the market for our entire livelihood, trading our skills in manipulating someone else’s tools and materials for money so that we can buy ALL of our needs in the market. We live in a world of perceived risk, surrounded by plenty. But urbanization under market-centricity poses difficult problems. The problem of ‘social order’ (conformity to law or convention) occurs when any civilization sufficiently urbanizes. The human social tools of ostracization (economic exclusion) and fraternalism (economic inclusion) do not operate in dense populations where anonymity is common and therefore social ostracization alone cannot block people from opportunities. There is no evidence that these social tools operate in the dense urban environment. There is no evidence that Law or Religion can cause them to operate either. The Shift To A Racial Minority This is the last generation where white men will feel guilty about their position. They feel disempowered. They are soon to be a minority. They dislike being ridiculed and having their status trampled upon, and are rapidly considering it RACISM against them. (Which they believe will give them the right in turn, to be racist.) The question is what will they do. And if history is any indicator, most of them will do nothing but acquiesce. But like any racial group they will likely form a disenfranchised but radical minority who is activist. This is what is occurring today. If the minority gains traction it gains followers from those who perviously acquiesced – people follow a winning team. White men are also developing the sentiment of racial persecution, and with it, the egalitarian christian sentiments, and their historical guilt are waning. When a people are oppressed they revert to self serving behavior and abandon behaivors of social sacrifice. The Forgone Opportunity Economy Society is not paid for by taxes. We pay for bureaucrats and soldiers with taxes. Society, or social order, is paid for by refraining from seizing opportunities. We create property by not stealing. We create comfort and safety with manners. We create prosperity and frictionless trade by non-corruption and ethical behavior. We prevent ourselves from externalizing high costs to others, and often to ourselves by moral behavior. We take on the burden of truth-telling. We define the granularity of property, the rules of the market. Each of us does ten thousand things a day to pay the tax for social order. And that tax system of opportunity costs is what we call ‘culture’. it is the highest cost of human capital a group can invest in. Groups with different systems compete. They get angry with one another because they ‘sense’ theft or fraud, not of money, but of the sacrifices that they made for their group’s benefit. They get angry when their sacrifices (forgone opportunities) are wasted when another race or social class demeans them. In this way, human groups conduct forgone-opportunity-funded warfare, but they largely do it peacefully. This is the racial and cultural economy. Money, Status, Forgone Opportunity, Access to Opportunity, and Access To Mates. Money is the least of them. Political power is simply the means by which to control the economy. Not just the money economy. But the status, opportunity and mating economy. Institutions (self-perpetuating social habits) are the highest cost development for any civilization. The people in the civilization know the costs. They know the opportunities that they spent on building that cost. They know the taxes that they paid. THey know what property is theirs that they earned. And egalitarianism and charity are happily given as long as they are FRACTIONAL and do not allow one group to steal its institutional costs from another. People are not having a simple emotional reaction. They see usurpation of political power as THEFT. They are ACTING like they see it as theft. The Implications For everyone else who is not a white male, it becomes the question how a society can be managed, or how it will operate without those sentiments of fraternalism. We never get what we think we will. The French and Russian revolutions were horrific both in process and outcome. But most if not all civilizations simply decay once they urbanize, and their expansionist class of males surrenders to the sense of impotence, or the luxury of hedonism, by exporting the effort needed to maintain the social order to the bureaucracy. The general assumption is that the democratic process will solve this problem of social integration and power distribution. But there is no evidence in history that such a thing occurs but rarely, and almost exclusively in England. Politics is a market, and people will circumvent the market when it no longer serves them. No Longer A Nation But An Empire The USA, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt and his ilk, is an empire in imitation the european model. Empires consist of factions. Factions are geographic (trade routes), racial (genetic), cultural (normative), and religious (legal). But an empire over whom half the population feels oppressed and stolen from is simply fragile. We are no longer a country contentiously dealing with a problem of integration caused by our need for population to complete the westward expansion of the continent. Instead we are an empire over some number of smaller nations yearning to be free, and a disenfranchised geographic ex-majority that appears to be developing a new sentiment (acquiescence to failure), a political movement (tea party), and a radical movement (militias). At least, that is where this appears to be going, if history is any indicator. And men who no longer see the existing order as beneficial to them may not work to overthrow it, but they will not work to maintain it. And that may be worse. The Difference Between Methods The difference between conservatives and progressives lies in the different assumptions we have of human nature. Progressives are utopians that believe we are free to build whatever world we choose to – they err on the side of people ‘doing good’ which is why progressivism is a movement of the industrial period. Conservatives err on the side of people ‘pursuing self interest’ which is why conservatism is an ancient sentiment, although conservatism as a political movement is a reaction to the english and french revolutions and the rise of socialism and communism. It is a contemporary reaction to progressivism. And like all conservative movements it is a reaction to the perception of theft of one’s assets by political means (even if those assets were unjustly acquired as in mercantilism or predatory banking or slavery). Conservatives believe that human beings have innate sensibilities, biases and preferences that are immutable. And because they are immutable we should develop institutions that take these immutable differences into account. We should expect people to act with racial preferences because people almost always do act with racial preferences. They do so because intra-racial status is more beneficial for the majority than is extra-racial status. And status controls access to mates. Except at the extremes where status can be increased by breaking racial barriers, status determines access to mates, determines access to opportunities, access to networks, in general, access to a better life. The Economics Of Race And The Impact On Politics So the question is, what will happen in a world where we have a white minority whose traditions create the opportunity for democracy and rotation of the elites, and most people have racial preferences, where there is no method of organization urban conformity, but we have a political system that allows democratic rotation of elites? In general, at least in history, people tend to vote in what is called “Bonapartism” or a totalitarian who can forcibly resolve differences. Bonapartism is democratic totalitarianism. Our systemic answer to urbanization was credit. Credit is more useful than laws because with record keeping it produces both positive and negative incentives. We are likely going to continue to build the credit society instead of the religious and legal societies. In fact, law is so technical it is largely immaterial, and most people are both isolated from it and ignorant of it. We actually operate by credit and exchange instead of legal or religious conformity. We live in the credit society. But while credit solves the problem of anonymity and ostracization, it does not solve the problem of tribal and cultural sovereignty, which is a code-phrase for the system of status signals among people with racial and cultural similarities. In a world of economic plenty and cheap debt and fiat money there is an inflationary impact upon status perceptions that like a tide floats all boats and reduces class and race friction. But in a world of unemployment, which may be structural, permanent, and wherein opportunities are more scarce, and therefore racial status more advantageous, and in a society where there is a very large and disenfranchised minority that is government by an activist political system that they see as tyrannical and against their interest, it seems unlikely that people will support that government, that way of life, or even the assumption that the government and way of life are ‘goods’. Race matters. Race matters because ENOUGH people act with racial preferences, and MORE of them act with racial preferences under economic duress, because acting within racial preferences is economically rewarding for the majority of its members. It’s just simple economics.

  • Postcards From Hell: The Reason For Failed States

    Postcards from Hell

    A terrifying photo essay from Foreign Policy on the world’s failed states. Note that with just a few exceptions, the 60 or so states the magazine had determined to be “failed” are located in tropical climates. Someone recently sent me this fascinating video related to the new book by sociologist Philip Zimbardo (of the Stanford prison experiments fame–or infamy, I guess). The theme of Zimbardo’s new book is the way time is perceived among different cultures. Of relevance to the Foreign Policy essay is the idea that populations and cultures in northern climes have adopted a future-oriented timeframe, likely because it’s necessary for their survival. You have to stock food, fortify shelter, and so on to prepare for the winter months or you’re going to starve. Or freeze. Tropical populations have a more present-oriented concept of time. Food is available year round. There’s no winter for which they need to prepare. I’ve read some interesting commentary on how these differing concepts of time might explain why warmer countries have been slower to develop than cooler ones.

    The reasons for the under-development of Tropical States are as as follows: 1) Disease gradients are lower (safer) in the cold and higher (harsher) in the warm. 2) Physical effort is difficult in hot weather, which hampers the creation of built capital. (core body temp also affects iq during exertion) 3) Agrarian cycles in the north encourage cottage industry in winter, farming in spring and fall and war in summer. This creates certain social orders that foster human, built and technical capital accumulation. Compare to the brutal survival farming of the Chinese and their 360 day-a-year discipline of rice farming. 4) Rivers or seas, but rivers in particular provide safe, easy and low cost product transport. The opposite is true: some areas are simply geographically resistant to trade. 5) Unequal distribution of useful plants and animals favors certain regions. As well as agrarian productivity. 6) Access to trade means access to knowledge, and greater availability of resources and technology. This increases the probability of innovation, and the development of ‘virtues’ as we understand our commercial and moral code.

    [callout] The abstract thing we refer to as society, that ‘thing’ that is embodied in the accumulated habits that we call ‘social order’, are the most important and expensive forms of human capital. [/callout]

    7) The abstract thing we refer to as society, that is embodied in the accumulated habits that we call social order, are the most important and expensive forms of human capital. These habits define the unspoken normative goals that define cooperation and coordination. (The set of things that we don’t do: the opportunities we do not sieze. We pay for social institutions by forgoing opportunity, we pay for infrastructure and governance with the results of trade.) These institutions include our different definitions of public and private property, manners, ethics, morals and rituals. These require political institutions that perpetuate them one adopted. 8) General technical knowledge. (how to craft things) General systemic knowledge (how the natural world operates). We often confuse education with practical knowledge and scientific knowledge. ( the Muslim world is full of Islamic studies which do nothing except persist in resisting ignorance. the sub Saharan world is still in the embrace of magical thinking. ). Commerce not education (imitation of practice) is the primary means of knowledge transfer. 9) Concordant technologies. Civilizations need to accumulate a greatdeal of human capital in order to adopt certain technologies before they can adopt others, else these technologies are not disruptive, and do not increase the division of knowledge and labor. Otherwise tyrants simply use it to institutionalize corruption and profiteering. This isn’t any different from children but on a larger scale. If people do not forgo the opportunity to misuse a technology, they will never be able to gain its productive benefits. You don’t give a child a gun. 10) Social orders. The west was built by fraternal orders of city/market joint stockholders, partly because of the high cost of equipment and training. This is the source of our republican sentiments, as well as our tools of argument,reason and science. Other societies have not been so lucky. Now we get to how westerners hurt some cultures: 1) Creating political boundaries across tribes destroys their ability to create human capital because it over stimulates the need for group persistence and impedes the development of common market habits. Thievery and tribal banditry is much easier and cheaper than creating trade and infrastructure. Even today, there is no small sentiment among males that suggests civilization has limited their potential access to mates. 2) Colonialism under England was effective in creating stability. In fact the hallmark of the Anglo model is stability and stability fosters the accumulation of all forms of capital. If you were colonized by someone else, then you will suffer for it. Anglo social technology is as important as the development of Greek science and reason. That technology, unbenknownst to most of us, is the development of abstract principles that allow calculation and coordination. ( this is a very complex topic.). French colonies are a disaster. 3) Economic interference, and in particular the crime of Charity. Ths is a hotly debated problem. But individual and locals assistance by devoted people seems to make a difference, while insertion of capital is extremely harmful to developing economies that must transform from tribal to market economies. Unpleasant realities :

    [callout]IQs are unequally distributed in different races, and in clases within those races. And that all people are racist in that they prefer acting within and in cooperation with people of their race. And this will never change, ever … [/callout]

    And the one factual reality that the vast body of people will fail to accept in the face of universal, overwhelming and scientifically evidence: that iqs are unequally distributed in different races, and in clases within those races. And that all people are racist in that they prefer acting within and in cooperation with people of their race. And this will never change, ever, simply because of the imitative nature of man, his need to learn, and his desire to learn from those he most easily can imitate. And the consequential need for, conceptions of status in order to choose who to imitate.

    [callout]While economic classes are semi randomly plastic, social classes are decidedly inelastic.[/callout]

    When the hard reality is that women are hypergamic (marry up), while men have a wider iq variance than women, it presents men with the need to compete for mate selection. And this system requires a diverse economy of status symbols within each race and class that guarantee the eternal search for demonstrable differences in status in order to pursue both mates and opportunities for alliances.. Racism is permanent as is classism. The dirty secret of the human genome project is that class is genetically determinant. While economic classes are semi randomly plastic, social classes (which are readily evidenced in the postings on this and other blogs) are decidedly inelastic. (spoken as a member of the upper middle class). Furthermore IQs are different in consequence between groups. A white, Jew or east Asian with a sixty iq is perceptibly broken. A sub saharan African is not – he or she just has a higher barrier to the learning of abstractions. In general, To maintain machines requires a 105 IQ. To get a liberal education requires an IQ of 110. To design machines requires an IQ of 122 . To design abstractions requires an IQ above 130. To innovate upon a system of thought requires, it appears, above 140. Everyone else simply uses the tools created by others. It is demonstrably true that the top quintile has more influence on productivity of the society than all the rest combined. Since all societies are run by minority elites (even ours) the composition of elites in government, intelligence in the middle classes, and capable mechanics in the proletariat determine the competitive rates of innovation and change in a society. There are also ways to manufacture ignorance. Some religions are regressive. In fact it could be reasonably argued that many are simply dangerous. The reason one is out gunned out germed and out steeled, so to speak, is a function of a culture’s willingness to adapt disruptive technologies. Luddites perish. Most of the scriptural religions are Luddite systems of thought.

    [callout]… it does not take a genius to run a market economy. As our politicians demonstrate daily.[/callout]

    Despite these iq distribution differences, it does not take a genius to run a market economy. As our pliticians demonstrate daily. What is important is that in any sufficiently large body of people exist sufficient numbers to adopt the rule of law, the intitutions of trade, and some form of capital production. The problem is one of numbers: getting the barbarians and potential corrupt bureaucrats to forgo opportunities for personal gain in order to fund the development of their human capital. The problem of coordinating production in a division of knowledge and labor requires a great deal of sacrifice. It is the is a sufficient set of principles govern the progress and adaptability of cultures. As other readers have commented, colonialism is perhaps the greatest determinant today of the relative state of failed nations. I hope this was helpful in providing food for thought.

  • Invert The Tax System And Give Control To The States?

    The wealthy states export leftism and money to the poorer states. This redistribution is hidden by the ‘money laundering’ that occurs when taxes are pooled then redistributed through the tax and legal bureaucracies.

    [callout]The wealthy states export leftism and money to the poorer states. This redistribution is hidden by the ‘money laundering’ that occurs when taxes are pooled then redistributed through the tax and legal bureaucracies.[/callout]

    The majority of the federal budget gies to redistributive programs. Effectively an over extended intergenerational insurance company relying upon external uncompetitiveness, internal growth, and internal population The problem with turning programs over to the states is the lack of competence in state and local government. Especially the higher incidence of corruption in local government.

    [callout]People do not hate government. They hate the necessary corruption that comes with human behavior in a bureaucracy whenever the limits of the bureaucrat’s knowledge are exceeded, and the necessary contrivances of bureaucrats who are intentionally isolated from the market and the pricing system, become a predatory liability to the freedoms of the citizens under the rubric of efficiency and practicality – a failure of bureaucracies but not private sector business that is entirely at the service if the pricing system.[/callout]

    What troubles the poorer states despite their receipt of cash benefits is priority given to urban density, urban political gains from immigration, debt expansion., bias against lower productive but self supporting non urban groups, and cultural tyranny. The soution is to limit the federal government to non social programns, to return money to the states as you suggest, and to privatize all possible government services, while increasing audits of the private sector companies. People do not hate government. They hate the necessary corruption that comes with human behavior in a bureaucracy whenever the limits of the bureaucrat’s knowledge are exceeded, and the necessary contrivances of bureaucrats who are intentionally isolated from the market and the pricing system, become a predatory liability to the freedoms of the citizens under the rubric of efficiency and practicality – a failure of bureaucracies but not private sector business that is entirely at the service if the pricing system.

  • An End To Nato? A Different Form For The Monarchical Role

    An End To Nato, “Mike DiBaggio” from The Paleolibertarian Digest

    There was once a time when the US hated piracy so much they went to war over it, but that time has obviously come to an end. Israel’s attack on the Turkish aid ship has generated little obvious outrage in the US, but then again neither did the assault on the USS Liberty. Meanwhile the rest of the world is pretty upset, and Turkey especially. Supposedly, the Turks have vowed to send naval escorts with their ships in the future. The problem for Israel then is that Turkey is a member of NATO. If their ships are attacked again, they it stands to reason that they will try to invoke Article V and call for military retaliation against Israel.

    I agree in principle. However it appears that NATO is a parallel political organization that allows more stable relationships and stronger intelligence gathering and processing than do democratic societies and their fleeting party fashions. NATO functions as a weak imitation of monarchic relationships (which were military alliances) and NATO is providing the material value that was traditionally provided by monarchic relationships. There is no NATO, other than the US military. There really hasn’t every been a NATO other than the US military. The europeans are not capable of projecting power outside of their coastlines. The only material value nato has is to allow the US power in trade negotiations and to increase US debt capacity because of the demand that trade power places upon the dollar. So, while Mike’s logic is accurate given the NAME of NATO, it’s not quite right given the FUNCTION of NATO. The monarchic militaristic social order and social class still exists in the west. It is just nearly invisible because of the predominance of popular representative democracy. Just as the upper class is invisible to society, the military is in visible, and it’s very crucial, very useful, very capitalist relationships and culture are invisible. This is one of the benefits and dangers of democratic systems. They make the real problem of maintaining trade routes and enforcing contracts, and preventing shifts in power by military means, into the art, artifice and entertainment of redistributive government. This distracting entertainment makes the population entirely incognizant of what every poorer country’s citizens understand very clearly : that the purpose of the government, if there is any purpose at all, is to establish and pool investment within a geography so that citizens can compete in, or even participate in, the market. And that this is possibly the only legitimate purpose of government other than territorial defense, and the resolution of differences over property. And the demonization of the military is propaganda for taking political control from the monarchy and transferring it to the middle class under the system of classical liberal republican government. (Just as political control moves to the masses under the system of democratic socialist secular humanism.) Schumpeter didn’t go far enough. Socialism isn’t the only problem we must guard against. Its losing the entire reason why people coordinate in groups: to compete in the market. Or to fail to and return to poverty. Schumpeterian processes might not end in a slowly declining socialism, but a catastrophic end of a society, by ending its comprehension of the market.

  • The Euro. What Will Happen?

    Germany Moves East Germany and Russia are now more politically aligned because they are now economically aligned. Europe will have: 1) the German-Russian block, which will reclaim the eastern block countries. 2) the France and PIGS block (latins – portugal, spain, italy and greece over whom it can feel superior) 3) The UK trying to figure out if it’s part of the Anglo-american, French or German block, and becoming irrelevant unless it simply becomes the world version of switzerland -weak but trustworthy with your money. The European left-coast lost. And the USA can’t protect anyone any longer.