Curt Doolittle

Form: Argument

  • ROTHBARD AS DESTROYER OF LIBERTY? So is liberty defined by voluntary exchange? O

    ROTHBARD AS DESTROYER OF LIBERTY?

    So is liberty defined by voluntary exchange? Or is liberty defined by suppressing all in-group involuntary transfer?

    I’ll help you: it’s the latter.

    Just like the Golden and Silver Rules, these two propositions lead to vastly different conclusions and their application leads to vastly different societies.

    The gnostics were right about ‘Jehova’ and I’m right about ‘Rothbardianism’.

    You couldn’t invent a better way to destroy liberty than a pseudoscience that encouraged passionate devotion to a false theory as a distraction from a scientific answer to a true theory.

    “You oughtta’ think on that a bit” before you repeat one more rothbardian falsehood as a prayer for liberty.

    Rothbardian ethics are immoral and parasitic, and the NAP is immoral, unethical and socially destructive.

    If there is a hell, Jehova is laughing at you every time you quote the NAP.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-09 15:30:00 UTC

  • THE VIRTUE OF VIOLENCE – THE FAILURE OF THE NAP AND ROTHBARDIAN PROPERTY RIGHTS

    THE VIRTUE OF VIOLENCE – THE FAILURE OF THE NAP AND ROTHBARDIAN PROPERTY RIGHTS

    MORALITY

    – Morality is a property of cooperation.

    – Violence is amoral. (Not immoral, but amoral.)

    – The purpose of the application of violence may or may not be moral.

    – If we are not cooperating then violence is amoral, regardless of purpose.

    – If we are cooperating, violence amoral, but its purpose is not.

    – If we are cooperating and one must obtain restitution then violence is moral.

    – If we are cooperating and violating property rights then violence for that purpose is immoral.

    Although technically speaking:

    1) Criminal violations are against body and property.

    2) Unethical violations are under asymmetry of information.

    3) Immoral violations are against asymmetry of awareness.

    In the construction of property rights by the suppression of free riding in its criminal, unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial forms, violence is not amoral, but a VIRTUE.

    Violence is a virtue not a vice.

    And attempts to obtain liberty without paying the cost of suppressing free riding are acts of fraud – attempts to obtain an expensive end without paying for it.

    Rothbardianism is Parasitism.

    Either the NAP is false or the definition of property is too narrow, because NAP covers criminal but not unethical and immoral actions. As such the NAP is a device for outlawing the moral use of violence in an effort to preserve the immoral and unethical use of deception.

    If instead, we state that property extends to all that humans have acted to obtain as their property by forgoing opportunity for consumption – then NAP against commons would be logical, and a prohibition against unethical and immoral behavior.

    Therefore you must either abandon the NAP or Rothbardian property rights, as immoral, unethical, and illogical.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-09 14:28:00 UTC

  • BETTER AND MORE LOGICAL LIBERTARIAN ANSWER (controversy warning) (reposed from o

    http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-freeman-is-not-a-monolithA BETTER AND MORE LOGICAL LIBERTARIAN ANSWER

    (controversy warning) (reposed from original site)

    I would argue that the gay community successfully suppressed the visibility of its promiscuous behavior once the chance for enfranchisement became possible.

    Furthermore the leadership changed the message from a request for tolerance of public promiscuity to one in favor of equal rights, marriage and stability.

    With the genetic, or at least in-utero cause of homosexuality identified, the idea of putting youth at risk disappeared – leaving only the problem of promiscuous behavior.

    The purpose of boycotting is to suppress undesirable behavior in favor of beneficial norms. Marriage is one of our most unnatural states, but most beneficial norms. In fact our moral codes are dependent, first and foremost, upon our family structures – which is why different family structures cannot politically cooperate. Different family structures means different property rights and different demands for state intervention.

    Since it was promiscuity that violated norms, and the general fear of further attacks on the family that mainly drove resistance, then BOYCOTTING WORKED.

    That’s important to grasp. BOYCOTTING WORKED BETTER than libertarian universal particularism. WE WERE WERONG.

    Conservatives are right on norms, and we are not. Cosmopolitan (rothbardian) ethics cannot compete against traditional familial ethics. They can only undermine the hight trust society and require that we return to totalitarianism.

    Freedom requires homogenous ethics. Heterogeneity simply increases the necessary demand for teh state.

    BOYCOTTING is a necessary device for enforcing the heterogeneity of norms that make the high trust society, and low demand for state intervention possible.

    That’s just how it is.

    Period. This isn’t a preference. It’s a logical necessity.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-06 12:38:00 UTC

  • **ALL LAW IS “THEORY” AND IS BOUND BY REQUIREMENTS OF THEORY** The Economist fin

    http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20th-century-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-doPROPERTARIANISM: **ALL LAW IS “THEORY” AND IS BOUND BY REQUIREMENTS OF THEORY**

    The Economist finally gets on board and criticizes democracy. TWENTY-TWO YEARS after most of us. It was pretty clear by 1992 that democracy was a failed experiment. It is pretty clear to those of us who specialize in political economy, that FEDERALISM is also a failure.

    REASONS WHY THE ECONOMIST ARTICLE IS MERELY “OK”

    Because, while the author does raise awareness of the failure of democracy, he does not address the reason’s for that failure:

    1) RENT SEEKING AND BUREAUCRACY: Succeeds in identifying rent-seeking and bureaucracy as the structural problem that democracy cannot correct. But does not address that privatization and competition solve that problem.

    2) RULE OF LAW AND CALCULABILITY : Fails to identify the difference between majoritarianism (bad) and rule of law (good). And therefore fails to Hayek’s argument requiring the CALCULABILITY of the rule of law and legal processes requires to change law under rule of law.

    3) REPRESENTATION vs LOTTOCRACY: Fails to identify that the problem with republican democracy is that we have chosen the worst of all worlds: elected representatives. When we could also choose between direct democracy, economic democracy, lottocracy, lottocratic citizen juries, and flexibility to add additional houses to represent each class’s interests. All of these solutions solve the problem of interests, and return us to the original purpose of democracy: lottocracy. (The common law is lottocratic which is why it’s so successful.)

    4) THE TRADEOFF OF SCALE: Fails to identify the reason micro-nationalism succeeds and macro-nationalism fails: That is because there is a trade off between the trade and insurance benefits of scale on the one hand, and the similarity of interests on another.

    5) THE PROBLEM OF MORAL DIVERSITY: Fails to identify the problem of moral diversity in different family structures, and the impossibility of reconciling competing moral codes except by degrading the higher moral code. **All moral compromises are devolutionary.** Truth is not a matter for compromise. The greater the suppression of free riding, the more moral the rule. Differences then, are not matters for compromise. They are matters for evolution or devolution.

    ALL LAW IS THEORETICAL, AND ALL LAWS, THEORIES

    What we have learned about humans from the discipline of science is that we must always adhere to two rules, in articulating any theory, because ALL LAW is a theory, and is bound by the same constraints as scientific theory.

    Revision of law, is equally a revision of theory, bound by the same constraints as all theory.

    Those two rules are:

    — a) Calculability and;

    — b) Operational language.

    In the context of law, ‘Calculability’ is a property of Empiricism (observation) that refers to the necessity that all monetary actions are made visible – and therefore there is a prohibition on pooling and laundering data through the use of aggregates. This implication is vast, and applies to all laws in all circumstances.

    For example, taxes are pooled into general funds, and their use discretionary, rather than taxes (fees) are collected for the purpose of particular contracts, and when those contracts are complete the taxes (fees) expire. Cause and effect are broken. Laws are not contracts that expire. They must be. Otherwise they would be ‘incalculable’.

    (continued)

    PART II. See my next post: The Canons Of Theory (which is the philosophical basis of Propertarianism.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-04 11:28:00 UTC

  • THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN ACTION IS PURELY EMPIRICAL The logic of human action is not

    THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN ACTION IS PURELY EMPIRICAL

    The logic of human action is not deductive. The logic of human action, including the discipline of economics, is entirely empirical. Empirical meaning ‘observable’.

    The canons of science require that we use instrumentation and logic to reduce that which we cannot sense to analogy to experience; that we test what we cannot perceive for internal consistency and external correspondence.

    But, we can test the rationality of incentives directly by pure perception. Our perception of voluntary exchange, involuntary exchange, and the satisfaction of wants is in itself the most reductive form of perception: we can both sense the rationality of incentives in relation to any change in state, and we can test the rationality of the incentives of others as well – because human incentives are marginally indifferent – at least outside of taste. Even then we can distinguish between rational tastes and non.

    As such, the logic of human action is constructed from, as all knowledge of truth is, empirical observation.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-03 05:19:00 UTC

  • A failure by NATO to guarantee the borders of #Ukraine tells the world that nucl

    A failure by NATO to guarantee the borders of #Ukraine tells the world that nuclear weapons are necessary for territorial sovereignty.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-02 01:10:58 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/439930831701020672

  • THE LOGIC OF LIBERTY AND PROPERTY INVERTED Instead of defining liberty as a stat

    THE LOGIC OF LIBERTY AND PROPERTY INVERTED

    Instead of defining liberty as a statement of victimhood – as rebellion by the weak: rights to property, we can state liberty as a positive – assertions by the strong: rights if exclusion and prohibitions on parasitism.

    NECESSARY RIGHTS

    1) Right of Private Property (right of exclusion from use)

    2) Right of Boycott (right of exclusion from trade)

    3) Right of Secession (right of exclusion from governance)

    Unless you have these three rights of exclusion, you are not free. You merely have permission.

    All rights are rights of exclusion. A fact which is missing from the logic of ethics.

    Freedom is the right to exclude, and that exclusion is what makes voluntary cooperation the only possible moral action we can take.

    By exclusion we boycott cooperation with those who do not engage in equally moral suppression of free riding.

    By the promise of violence we insure our boycott.

    This is the logic of aristocracy vs the logic of bourgeoisie and proletarian.

    The weak beg. The strong demand.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-27 08:12:00 UTC

  • THE ERRORS OF PRAXEOLOGY CORRECTED (cross posted for archival purposes.) I would

    THE ERRORS OF PRAXEOLOGY CORRECTED

    (cross posted for archival purposes.)

    I would like to weigh in on this discussion but so far it’s a mess.

    a) If you want to make claims about Praxeology, then please define praxeology, the praxeological method, it’s axioms and its postulates. if you do you will find that it’s pretty much nonsense to assume much can be deduced from praxeological theory.

    From Rothbard:

    —-

    AXIOM

    “…praxeology contains one Fundamental Axiom–the axiom of action–which may be called a priori, and a few subsidiary postulates which are actually empirical.”

    POSTULATES

    (Postulate 1) A “…variety of resources, both natural and human. From this follows directly the division of labor, the market, etc.; ” (Believe it or not that is a direct quote.)

    (Postulate 2) Leisure is a consumer good.

    (Postulate 3) Indirect exchanges occur.

    (Postulate 4) Every firm aims always at maximizing its psychic profit; and this may or may not involve maximizing its money profit, and or also stated as everyone tries always to maximize his utility.

    —–

    b) If instead we say that it is possible for us to empirically determine the logical rules of cooperation, then praxeology is an empirical method of determining internally consistent rules (a logic of cooperation) for the purpose of testing statements of human cooperation for rationality.

    c) This logic, as empirically based, will allow the test of ANY **CONSTRUCTED** description of human cooperation. (Constructed means “articulated as a set of actions, which in science we refer to as ‘operational language’.)

    d) Therefore praxeology is, if completed (and it’s not complete) a formal logic of cooperation, that like mathematical logic or language-logic, can be used for the purpose of internally testing any argument for logical consistency.

    e) However, ‘true’ statements require BOTH internal consistency, and external correspondence. (I guess I will have to probably teach a few people the meaning of truth by making that statement.) Internal consistency is a PROOF, not a TRUTH. The test of a PROOF is external correspondence in addition to internal consistency. We use the term ‘true’ in the context of proof only to say ‘my attestation is true and therefore corresponds to my assertion’. But proofs are never true in themselves. They are merely proofs.

    f) The reasons that we may use the LOGIC of cooperation AS IF IT WERE A PRIORISTIC are i) that the perception of incentives as rational or not is marginally indifferent between human beings. ii) our rational perception of incentives is open to subjective testing – and therefore subjective testing of incentives is EMPIRICAL. iii) If our rational perception was marginally DIFFERENT, then we would neither be able to easily cooperate nor treat cooperation as IF it were a prioristic.

    g) However, this said, that still means that the logic of cooperation is EMPIRICAL. It just means that we do not have to rely on external instrumentation and logic to measure the rationality of any incentive. We need only reduce any economic statement to operational language, each step of which is open to the subjective test of rationality.

    h) There is very, very little that can be deduced from man acts. Praxeology is NOT deductive. It is a logic – a test of rational incentives independent of theft or involuntary transfer. But one cannot deduce ‘sticky prices’ from it. One can only deduce the incentives that produce sticky prices once one observes that prices are sticky.

    c) Mises pretty much abandons his position on apriorism at the end of his career. He has to because it’s pretty clear that he failed at developing a logic of cooperation. He failed because he tried to state it deductively rather than empirically.

    j) What we intuitively LIKE about the praxeological logic is that it EXPOSES MORAL AND IMMORAL transfers in exchanges.

    k) As such, praxeology is not ONLY a logic of cooperation – IT IS THE LOGIC OF MORAL ACTION. Period.

    I will continue to attempt to reform praxeology and get us out of the trap of German Continental and Jewish Cosmopolitan endemic conflation of moral, rational, and scientific statements, and attempt to complete the logic of human cooperation, over the next year, by converting it into anglo-empirical language like all other logics and sciences have been.

    However, if you understand the points above, and ponder them sufficiently, you will no longer need to operate under the Misesian pretense that praxeology is a science when it is a form of logic dependent upon empirical testing – dependent upon science.

    And you will help us rescue libertarian philosophy from the same silly traps that all continental philosophy has fallen into since Kant: the attempt to recreate christian obscurantist mysticism through the use of fuzzy language that conflates of moral, rational, and empirical statements into pseudoscience.

    We are no better than the ‘scientific socialists’ who propagated a pseudoscience obscured by and justified by the use of aggregates to hide systemic thefts.

    We are libertarians. We are supposed to be the smart people. We are supposed to be the people who understand economics – the study of human cooperation. Its about time we abandoned continental pseudoscience and relied upon empirical science.

    Right now the world thinks we all wear tinfoil hats. And when we argue such obviously false pretenses they’re right.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-26 09:26:00 UTC

  • ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF “PARLIAMENTARY COMMON LAW” It’s not a practical time for bi

    ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF “PARLIAMENTARY COMMON LAW”

    It’s not a practical time for big political ideas, but in a country like Ukraine, that probably DOES need a parliament, it would be very helpful to use lottocracy to elect ‘citizen judges’, selected by lot, from each district, to approve any law voted on by the parliament. Say, 12 citizen jurors for each representative. This essentially places common law requirements on the legislature. Use standard jury selection processes. As a citizen judge you must only vote in favor of a law if you understand it, it does not violate the constitution and it is good for your country.

    That is the best protection OTHER than NO GOVERNMENT that we can come up with, Direct democracy is a good idea but it is also terribly open to corruption, whereas juries whose actions are taken in public are not as easily corrupted as you think.

    This makes each citizen have a personal stake in the law.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-23 09:45:00 UTC

  • WHAT DO WE VIOLATE? –“…I’ve come to think of violence as amoral. The rapist,

    WHAT DO WE VIOLATE?

    –“…I’ve come to think of violence as amoral. The rapist, and the victim who kills him in self defense… one is immoral, the other moral. Nothing to do with the violence itself, but the violation of rights.”–

    One can produce property without rights — all living creatures do.

    But one cannot produce a right except via contractual exchange.

    So then, do property rights have any meaning outside of the context of a state or polity with whom one ostensibly holds a contract?

    What is the point of using this term “rights”? Its meaningless except in the context of some contract or other – a contract libertarians would almost always refuse to enter.

    You create your property by your own actions. If people try to appropriate you property against your wishes, then that is not a violation of your magical rights – its just an attack against your property. Period.

    In fact, the only reason to define morality any differently is to logically excuse parasitism.

    Then the only limit to your property is your own parasitism : free riding on others who produce benefits that you consume but that you fail to pay for.

    We need no rights whatsoever. We need only recognize property is the result of our actions. Nothing more.

    All platonism is false.

    We are supposed to be the smart people. We should try to demonstrate it. Libertarian shouldn’t mean “stupid”. Too often it does.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-16 11:14:00 UTC