The war period has been highly controversial, and unfortunately led to a radical minority taking control of our government, and that minority is creating policy that is against the will of the majority of the people. This is another example of the dangers of war. Countries overreach during war. Empires overreach. Democracies, counter to conventional wisdom, are actually very willing to wage war. Yet they are unwilling to continue them. In a democracy, an exaggerated counter reaction develops in response to warfare, because only exaggerated reactions are possible, when the nation consists of opposing forces whose extreme elements determine the candidates. Extremes breed extremes by creating a dichotomy of choice between dramatic positions. These positions then empower the radicals. There is no failure to understand this trend in history among political scientists. There is every reason to advocate it among political theologians. This is because there are very few political scientists that measure what people actually DO, and many political theologians who recommend what people SHOULD do. Evidence is what it is. Democracy is a dangerous construct when government is a debate over the reigns by which one economic class or philosophical class can oppress the other, rather than forming a government where each class has control only over those issues where their class has demonstrated accomplishment. This was the reason for the property requirement in the USA’s founding. While property may be an insufficient requirement in modern society that is no longer dependent upon farming, we do not have houses of government that represent classes and we need a means of empowering houses and regulating participation in the, and we must return to that state of affairs, or continue our decline and class warfare. As I have stated before, we are all unequal in our ability to create violence. Some of us petty interpersonal violence, some of us rabble and protest, some of us revolution and civil war. I only constrain my violence because I feel the state acts justly. But we are nearing a point where I feel that the state has become a means of class oppression, specifically designed to doom me to poverty and dependence in old age, and to do my heritage, my class, and my people to servitude under a false argument for morality. And while I have rejected their please twice now, the next group of people that offers me money to raise a revolution will find me a willing advocate of bloodshed. War is dangerous because it makes a polity and it’s state fragile, and allows radicals to obtain purchase amid the chaos and dissatisfaction, which in turn leads to oppression, which in turn leads to civil war. While the myth of the general strike is a commoner’s revolution, the myth of a violent minority creating a coup is the nobility’s revolution. And I’m getting very close to changing from a public intellectual to a violent revolutionary. It is only marginally more interesting to be personally acquisitive, run companies, and write for a living than it is to wage war. And it is becoming painful enough to pursue the former, that the latter becomes more enchanting by the day. We have an entire american civilization around the great lakes that is in decline, and like china, have coastal areas that oppress the interior. And a southern border under assault because of fear by those in power to protect the southern states. That is our nation’s fragile position. It simply requires fomenting local interests against a universal federal government, and restructuring our government so that it is either representative of the different nations that make up the American empire on the north American continent, or that we destroy our imperial government and restore power to the regions. The world has adopted commercial capitalism. We have completed the act for which our federal government was created: to sell off the american continent. We no longer need to be the world’s policemen. And we are no longer competitive enough and possessed of enough advantage that we can continue to do so. Now we find ourselves the citizens of a corrupt and declining state. It is time to let local areas prosper, and return to the practical matters of civic interest in local development and politics away from our fascination with theocratic democracy, socialism and empire.
Category: Politics, Power, and Governance
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The Threat Of Revolt, The General Strike, And The Myth Of Non-Violence
A tactic used by the vocal left is the threat of violence, or revolt if their needs are not met. The tactic of revolt is ancient. This modern version of revolt is a product of The Myth Of The General Strike. (I am referring to Burnham’s treatment) The contemporary version is the Economic Armageddon and Political Upheaval of the classes. The opposing argument is the libertarian argument for private property, and private capitalism, and the Randian version of Atlas shrugging. Both of these are myths of the general strike. The argument, or myth in any of it’s versions, is disingenuous. Workers will eventually relent, be replaced, or the businesses close. Entrepreneurs will be replaced by others. It is the state who would suffer it’s loss of legitimacy in the event of failure. But a new group would take over in government, and life would go on. An analysis of history tells us that it is much easier for the minority with wealth to pay another minority to violently oppress the peasantry, and to obtain their compliance going forward with commercial incentives and rewards, than it is for a peasantry to organize a movement of a general strike. In fact, the government conducts all general strikes, because without government suport and threats of government violence on business people, they would largely be irrelevant. When a ruling class loses it’s will for violence, the society loses it’s binding mythology. It simply opens it’s ranks for a different group to take over the ruling class, and redefine the existing network-map of property rights, and the dispensation of them. However, provided that the ranks of the elite are open to absorb those ambitous people from all classes, and the elite retain sufficient willingness to use violence, the myth of the revolt is specious. Because people simply need leaders in order to revolt. Before an elite allows itself to be displaced, it commits fraud. They verbally ally themselves with ‘the people’. All societies determine the scope of private and group property differently. There are limits to the scope of private property. Property is necessary because of the limits of people’s knowledge in time. However, there are points at which certain forms of private property deny service to consumers, (such as misuse of intellectual property rights) and therefore it is theft from consumers. Why? Because consumers forgo the opportunity for violence, and in doing so pay for the cost of creating that private property. So denying the market a good in order to increase prices and profits is a theft of the costs paid by consumers to create the opportunity for private property. So the limits to private property come from artificial scarcity (denying a good to market), whereas reinforcement of private property comes from the There are limits to the scope of public property, because there are limits to the amount of knowledge that can exist in any person’s mind, and limits to decision making among groups of individuals, and distortionary effects (basically, perceived risk reduction, limited by the amount of knowledge of the largest population able to exercise it’s will) and the rapidity of timely action, and because of the limits of timely action, limitations on the opportunity cost for the group. ie: increases in private property are an opportunity cost reduction for a group. The purpose of the union movement is to allow the populists to use threats against the capitalists, without fear that the capitalists can respond in kind, and thereby allow government to profit from intermediation, thereby forming an alliance between the unions and the state, regulated only by the long term (and therefore easily imperceptible) impact of their intervention on tax revenues. Violence should not be eliminated from our discourse. It is a ruse. Starting with a principle of non violence is and always shall be a ruse. The fact is, that ALL movements that presume non-violence are attempts at theft of the cost needed to create private property. Costs are the only means of honest political dialog. Both direct costs and opportunity costs. The Principle of Non-violence is fraud. Plain and simple. Period.
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Preservation Of Status Is A Resistance To Libertarian Solutions
I was listening to a lecture by Roderick Long this morning, entitled “The Moral Standpoint” which is part of the series “Foundations of Libertarian Ethics: A Philosophy Seminar” (Available from Mises.org). In this lecture, Dr Long (who I enjoy and admire, not the least of which because he is very funny and charming in person) attempts to analyze the reasons for the popular rejection of libertarian solutions to political problems. And while I agree with Long’s arguments, as far as they go, I also understand, that the resistance to libertarian solutions, of which there are many, is the preservation of status that comes from the fog of our current, ambiguous, and unclear political order. In general, libertarian solutions propose fact-generating, and evidentiary solutions that expose causality. I tend to talk about these category of solutions as ‘calculable’ in the sense that they provide sufficient information to assist us in making decisions, and they do not permit the ‘laundering’ of causailty by the pooling of accounting information. THe problem with the clarity of libertarian solutions is that people enjoy the ‘fog of reality’. THe same way we all believe we are in the upper ten percent of our fields, we all believe we are contributing members of society, when in fact, we cannot all be in the upper ten percent of our fields, and it’s quite demonstrable that the only contribution most people make to society is to cause work for others, to provide local clerical or manual labor, to refrain from stealing so that we can create the institution of property, and to fill land so that others don’t take the earth’s potential from us. We do not want a clear mirror in which to see our true reflection, but a foggy one, that preserves our self-illusions – illusions that help us exist in a division of labor where indeed we may have little importance or relevance to one another, while at the same time, benefiting from the vast decreases in costs that such a division provides for us. We trade our ability to perceive causality for our mutual prosperity. Our status, which is, effectively, our access to mates, and often access to social groups, is more important for the political and lower classes than it is for the high performance (merchant and finance) sectors, who achieve that status by causal means in a division of labor, under the institutions of trade and exchange. My argument, which is contrary to general libertarian propositions, is that redistribution of profits from interest are the only means of resolving this status conflict – we have to pay other classes. And that the libertarian political strategy is effectively to propagate it’s value system, under the guise of moral or religious traditions, which it cannot, because it is against the status advantage of the less meritocratic classes. And while the libertarian position is to return to the gold standard, or some variation of it, the problem with that position is that, as the division of labor and knowledge increases, and especially as we urbanize, credit is the only means of preserving the social order – which means respecting property – as well as an identity for encouraging cooperation that was perviously created by nation, religion, village, tribe and family. Just as laws are a punitive system that apply to all equally (hopefully), credit is an incentive system that is more effective than law, because it does not require policing, just recording. And incentives under credit, are positive, and under law, negative. Furthermore, we need insurance provided through fiat money, or at least common money. Otherwise we are privatizing wins and socializing losses. The problem with the Rothbardian concept of banking and money is that in the end, it privatizes wins and socializes losses. This is justified in that model under a number of guises. however, what Rothbards model (and Mises as well) ignores, is that in order to create the institution of property people must forego their opportunity to employ violence. This redistributes violence across people who DO respect property. And therefore, any group of people who deny violence in order to create property, redistribute their violence and thereby pay opportunity costs. As such, a failure of profits from credit to be redistributed are a theft, and redistribution is mandated. By avoiding this conversation (or not understanding it) Mises and Rothbard, as well as libertarians in general, circumvent the problem of maintaining land, and creating the institutions of property. The poor, as long as they are not immigrants (who under this model are thieves – explaining peoples reaction to immigration) by respecting property, and denying violence, are due redistribution, which explains their use of violence (their repossession of their contributions). And a failure to redistribute a portion of profits is simply theft from them. CRedit and interest are the means by which we can do so, if, in the end, we are borrowing from them.
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A Speech On The State And Violence
I’m going to say something. It will only take a moment. And my time is at least as valuable if not more so than the state’s, the court’s, or that of the officers’. You see, I understand something very important. I understand that the state’s only power is violence. That power comes from its claim to a geographic monopoly on violence. That is what a state is. A group of men who lay claim to a monopoly on violence. All actions which compel a person to do other than he wishes in the use of his property, his body and his time in the peaceful and honest exchange of goods, services, information and affection, are acts of violence. Consequently, there is no action that a state needs to take, and therefore no action a state can possibly to take, by the application of law, that is not an act of violence no matter the form or ceremony the state drapes over such actions. A state is the administration of organized violence. A court and its servants dispense violence. The state exists, and possesses that monopoly on violence, because men like me, grant their capacity for violence to the state, so that it may dispense it as needed from a judicial bench. By granting our violence to the state we remove from ourselves the daily administrative responsibility of parenting society, defending life and property, and resolving conflicts over property, so that we may devote ourselves to the pursuit of specialization in our division of knowledge and labor, and thereby develop our skills so that we can achieve our ambitions, and amuse ourselves, in whatever way we see fit, while decreasing the cost for others to do the same. By the act of granting our violence to the state, we assume that our violence is justly dispensed on our behalf. That is the term of our agreement with the state. It is what makes a man a citizen by choice rather than a subject or slave. We are all capable of violence. It can never be taken from us as long as we live. We carry it with us as a constant potential. It grows, it matures, and it dissipates with age. It is not a right, or a privilege, because rights and privileges are things we give to each other. Violence is not given, it simply exists in all men at all times. Some of us are wealthier in violence than others. Some men are capable of very little violence, some men are capable of physical violence, some men capable of organized rabblery and protest, and some of us, men like me, capable of revolution and civil war. As such, we do not contribute our violence to the state in equal measure. The state’s power to organize society by way of its laws, institutions and processes is an illusion constructed by the accumulation of habits in the citizenry; habits which are perpetuated by the daily use of those habits, and where those habits are reinforced by small and instructional displays of violence by the state, so that it may maintain the illusion of a monopoly on violence, and therefore encourage among the citizens, the retention of those habits. The potential for violence within the citizenry vastly outweighs the limited violence that can be distributed by the state. It is a credit to our habits that so little violence need be distributed at any one time that the illusion of the state monopoly can be preserved so cheaply, by so few people, and using so little violence. The actors in the state, in whatever capacity, who make use of my violence on our behalf, are few and comparatively weak. And the state can only dispense my violence, on my behalf, from a judicial bench, because of the illusion of strength that comes from the presence of those habits, and its promise of enforcement by the grant of violence from citizens. As long as any agent of the state justly parents individuals to reach their greatest potential, as long as any agent of the state justly resolves differences in property, as long as any agent of the state protects life and property — any agents of the state have my consent to maintain that illusion of strength, and to dispense my violence on my behalf to maintain those habits, and that illusion, so that all men may continue to participate in productive exchange, or in humble amusement in the activity of their daily affairs. But if for one moment, you seek to treat me unjustly, and you begin to believe your own illusion, and you forget that you are dispensing my violence on my behalf, and you seek to treat me not as a citizen who bestows upon you my violence, to be justly administered, but a subject who must obey rules, and if you believe and act as though the law exists not as a convenient tool for the resolution of differences between peers, but a scripture that I must obey as a subject, then it is not only my right, but my duty to myself and others, to take from you my given violence, and to remind you if I can, and teach you if I must, that the source of that violence is in its citizens; so that the state understands those habits, their cause, and purpose. If I must remind the state, I hope it is by this simple, gentle oratory. If that will not suffice, I will not resort to the display of petty personal violence, nor to the disorder of rabblery and protest. Because that is not the capacity of violence that I gave to the state. I will instead raise an army and show you what violence it is that I do restrain, so that you are once again reminded that you are an actor on my behalf, and that of my fellow citizens, and nothing more. And if you doubt for a moment that I can do such a thing, I will be only so happy to prove it to you, by starting in this very room, on this very day, if necessary. This duty is what it means to be a citizen. To grant your violence to the state so that it may be justly administered. And to dismantle that state should it unjustly use your given violence. Foolish men find comfort in the sameness of life, without understanding that such constancy, and the illusion of control we have over our daily affairs, can be rapidly changed by one small spark, one man’s choice, one seemingly random act. Foolish men believe habits and rules are truths rather than conveniences, that their power is divine or systemic, and that their methods and rules are wise and scientific, rather than the accidental, pragmatic and convenient efforts of simple men fitfully crafting an edifice in anticipation of the turbulent events of an unknown future. These rules and ideas are nothing more than the limited judgements, habits and fantasies of such men, however well their intentions. And if at any point such foolish men lose sight of the fact that these convenient methods and tools are less important than, and subservient to, the men whose lives are affected by the use of my violence on my behalf, or if such foolish men forget that rules have no wisdom of their own, without the wisdom to interpret them, and that the use of them must result in the betterment of each man, then, they have forgotten the purpose of those rules. That purpose is the perfection of each individual man, and in that perfection, to parent each generation that follows so that it may reach it’s greatest potential. The perfection of man is our only just purpose, not the perfection of our methods and tools, or the ease and efficiency by which we administer them. The man is important, not the rules. And I will not allow my violence to be misused against any man. And in particular I will not allow the abuse of my fellow citizens or of myself for no other than methodological or procedural reasons, so that another man, an agent of the state, whose only power comes from my given violence, may be absolved of the difficulty and effort expended in justly administering the violence I so entrusted to him. I will not permit men to suffer for another man’s laziness, when it is my violence at the expense of my fellow men, that he wields in order to obtain such leisure. And when a citizen is abused by the criminalization of administrative rules, of petty regulatory processes and efficiencies, or of manners and disrespect of the court so that it can maintain its illusion and habituation, or when he is abused by prosecutors who are the worst ideological acolytes and to whose advantage these rules are biased, or when he is abused by the state’s staff, composed of common people endowed by procedure with powers incommensurate with their abilities, and the ability to abdicate responsibility for treating citizens with manners and good service, the state engages in the most heinous form of laziness, and the most intolerable misuse of our violence on our behalf. Revolutions are not made from single heinous crimes, but from the compounded layering of administrative abuses of citizens. It is not only citizens that must develop habits, but the state, for it is the state who must use greater manners when dispensing our violence, whether that violence is dispensed from the court, the prosecution, the staff, the police, and especially when doing so inspires the understandable and desirable disgust and displeasure of those men unjustly victimized because of the state’s laziness and irresponsibility with our violence. If the state’s ambition is restitution of property, or the collection of collection for contract violations, even social contract violations, or procedural errors, for which such fines are simply a form of restitution, then this is its duty, so granted by us. But if it is punishment rather than restitution that the state seeks to render, then I do not, and no citizen should, permit any man to punish me, and will return that punishment in kind. Restitution is the means by which we correct errors, selfish weakness, and human frailties among peers and is the only reason we give our violence to the state to administer on our behalf. Punishment is the submission of slaves to an authority. If you seek to punish me, or my fellow citizens, rather than to give restitution, you seek to enslave us. And I will not suffer your enslavement, nor tolerate the enslavement of my fellow citizens. Foolish men have come to believe that rule of law, is likened to the laws of physics: that they are tools that override our wisdom and senses, and which if followed produce scientific results. But this is an error. Laws are principles for wise men to refer to, no different from myths, traditions, and stories, to make use of in resolving conflicts among men, providing restitution in the case of loss, so that we may exchange property instead of violence, cooperate peacefully in doing so, and develop specialization so that we may increase productivity in safety, decrease the cost of goods and services to each other because of specialization and competition, and therefore improve the quality of our lives, at lowest cost and risk. I say this because I love life. I love mankind. I love my fellow citizens. I love each one of them. Fit or not, wise or not, young or old, wealthy or poor, healthy or ill. And I would gladly give my life in their defense, rather than allow someone, in his foolhardy and misguided illusion, to use my violence against them unjustly. And it is that statement, its passion, and conviction, and its promise of consequence, that makes me a citizen and no other. So, I ask you to understand this appeal: I do not fear you. And you need not fear me if you are just, and care for my people. But if you are unjust, and do not understand what I have said, then fear me. If you do not fear me then I must make you fear me. I must teach you the accountancy of the state, and its currency of violence. So that you never forget the origin of the violence you wield on our behalf, and in doing so abuse or enslave me or my fellow citizens. The state must fear its citizens. It is the duty of citizens to maintain that fear. That fear is fear of violence. I am a citizen by the granting of my violence. The violence that we give to the state, the violence that we possess as men, and is only granted to the state under the condition that it be administered justly, on our behalf, to parent the society, to protect life and property, to resolve conflicts over property, and to administer restitution for conflicts over property. For those reasons and no other. Curt Doolittle April 2009
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Gaddaffi is indeed a sad spectacle. But in the west we separate words and deeds.
Gaddaffi is indeed a sad spectacle. But in the west we separate words and deeds. This isn’t a universal perception. And it works for him.
Source date (UTC): 2009-09-27 13:23:11 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/4416521984
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Positioning Political Philosophies
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Whether you call us Aristotelians, Machiavellians, Nietzscheians, or some other label, is immaterial – save to say that in doing so you attempt to make equal a difference between approaches to politics and economics that is anything but equal. Those of us in this school of thought, study what men do and why, what they have done, and why, in its entirety, across civilizations and across time, and from that study propose incremental solutions based on that analysis, rather than postulate a utopian model that assumes how men should or could act if they were something other than human beings with the record of doing what they have done. And if you wish to say we have class philosophy I would agree at least to one meaning of that statement. Classes are part of the division of knowledge and labor. And like religion, they are very difficult to cross philosophically – even if we can cross them economically. And all philosophies are class philosophies. They must be. Universal philosophies that prescribe solutions for multiple classes, or that attempt to ally a set of classes, ask by doing so, that we allow one class to prosper – and to do so at the expense of another. So yes, to use this method of study is Aristotelian, Machiavellian, and Nietzschean. And yes it is the philosophy of antiquarian nobility, in the sense that its authors hail from the Aristotelian tradition, and that as a work of men from Nobility, and a managerial philosophy, and even perhaps a paternal one, it is a Noble class’ philosophy. But it is not a philosophy of the Noble class in the sense that it attempts to favor a noble class at the expense of others. It simply states that there will always be a governing class or at least a conflict between different classes who are in political control of a society at one time or another and that regardless of who is in control, the betterment of most is it’s goal – over time, even if that timeliness is resistance to a perceptible material change to some segment of society, and it is for the betterment and perpetuation of the existing social order. And this difference in preference for outcomes is the difference in class philosophies. The reason being that these people see the fragility of political systems, and with knowledge of the impact of non-gradual change, as detrimental to all. That being said, this is also the only method of reasoning that can be construed as political science – the rest of the methods are philosophies or religions by analysis of their methods. And any other comparison is a comparison between religion, philosophy and science. Just as any comparison between Aristotelian, Confucian, and Zoroastrian traditions are differences between scientific, philosophical, and religious traditions. These differences are more than tastes. They are materially different approaches to the problem of organizing large numbers of people that arose in the transition to urban life under the technology and economy of farming, and the necessary inequality that resulted from the division of labor increased production, and specialization that occurred because of that transition. And if our method is not a science, at least it is the most scientific of methods we have yet found, without first solving the problem of the social sciences – the problem of induction: which is the process of invention of the unknown. Whereas science, as we mean and use the term, is the name we give to the process and method of DISCOVERY, instead of the process of INVENTION. When what we should strive to do, is use the term science to apply to a process where we examine what is, and how it works, rather than how we, in our ignorance, propose that it should be. And we should abandon and refute simplistic utopian strategies knowing what they are: simplistic and utopian. Developing solutions that propose incremental evolution from the analysis of the record of human activity is much more complicated than proposing utopian models – a minor improvement over the spirit worlds or religious myths of our past. And such incremental methods do not promise quick or easy results. However, it is the most scientific, as well as the most likely to succeed, at the lowest possible damage to the set of alliances and habits we use to work together to produce the standard of living that we do possess, rather than the one we might possess if men were not men and did not act as they have, and could by some mystery or magic, adhere to some utopian concept, whose author proposed as a static universe, instead of one where each person in each class, struggled to increase his happiness and status and material well being for himself and his alliances, friends, and family on a daily basis. And where classes and the people in them, rotate and shift, albeit slowly. CURRENT TRENDS Men will not cease using credit to manage society. It is the only tool that is sufficient to manage a group of people in a complex division of labor. Religion is for slaves and peasants. Violence is for slaves and peasants. Law is for farmers, slaves and peasants and urbanites. But laws, religion, and violence require comparatively simple epistemologies: everyone must share them and know them for them to function as socially cohesive strategies. Furthermore, citizens, or group members, can opt-out of adherence to them and must be ‘caught’ in doing so, and punished for doing so. Credit performs this function because it is a superior enticement in a complex society, rather than a threat, and it’s also much more granular: effectively making laws on an individual by individual basis and creating a social order out of economic participation without prescribing a static set of behaviors. In other words, credit is the most evolutionary of political systems because it can apply to each individual differently while providing socially conforming pressures. Men will not cease using monetary policy – fiat money. Because monetary policy performs redistribution, as well as mutual insurance for members of the group, or state. We can argue about different economic and political nuances, but if we see these tools as technologies they are needed technologies whose function and methods need constant improvement. Therefore, while I am a member of that group of people who study what men have done in the Aristotelian and Machiavellian tradition, and in particular, I am an Austrian (a user of narrative who studies history and behavior), and a libertarian (a person who understands that prosperity comes from freedom, property, and trade) and an Anarchist (a person who studies how men act so that government can be optimized) I am also a Keynesian in the sense that I believe that credit money, like the technologies of real money, accounting, numbers, and writing – and like laws and science and religion and philosophy – is a necessary – not preferential but necessary – part of human existence if we are to live in large numbers and continue our transition from farming society to urban society, And I expressly am not a libertarian if that means that I am promoting the development of a banking class that profiteers from privatizing wins and socializing losses. That is no different from a priestly or bureaucratic class, or a thieving peasant class that takes from one group for its own use. I am a libertarian in that I do not believe a person in government can be wiser than I am. I do not disavow some form of redistribution either. I simply claim that the way we conduct it today is damaging to society, and empowers a degenerate and devolutionary government, and that a better solution to this problem is achievable, and that I know what that solution is. And we are very close to it now. The solution is incremental. It can be implemented. It may not even be that complicated in concept or in implementation. But understanding why such things will work, and abandoning our little class philosophies, each of which seeks to bend government for our class’ benefit at the expense of others, or those that seek to make something from nothing, or those that seek security from the illusion of the state, so that they can live at the expense of others, is no small undertaking. Because we have created a nice little set of cherished myths, the primary purpose of which was to wrest control from landholders, churches, and kings, and transfer it to bankers and politicians. And we will need to abandon some of those cherished myths.