Curt Doolittle

Form: Argument

  • **Basic rule of ethics: if you aren’t willing to insure it yourself then you sho

    **Basic rule of ethics: if you aren’t willing to insure it yourself then you shouldn’t have made the loan.**

    The govenrment had to insert all this risk into the economy in order to use the financial system as a distribution network for getting money into the hands of consumers.

    We don’t need to use a financial system to distribute money to consumers with loans.

    We can just DISTRIBUTE IT TO CONSUMERS.

    I’d rather fight for consumer’s spending than fight my government and corrupt bankers who exploit my people, and destroy my savings.

    I’d rather the average joe who doesn’t pay any substantial taxes had the same self interest in shrinking the government than I do as a taxpayer.

    I don’t like redistribution. But then, I like consumers to have money that I can capture a piece of – that I can COMPETE for.

    I like government abuse of me and my citizens, and government’s predilection for war, more than I dislike redistribution.

    I like that if we redistributed cash, then we wouldn’t be dependent upon immigration, and in fact, we’d have every incentive NOT to allow immigration except of highly talented people.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-27 13:01:00 UTC

  • IRRATIONAL, AND EVOLUTIONARILY DESTRUCTIVE, ROTHBARDIAN PARASITIC ETHICS. It is

    IRRATIONAL, AND EVOLUTIONARILY DESTRUCTIVE, ROTHBARDIAN PARASITIC ETHICS.

    It is irrational and very likely an evolutionary impossibility for an organism to tolerate extraction or parasitism from it’s own kind except in matters of limited kin selection.

    The evolution of cooperation requires that we deny others the ability to free ride on our efforts, cheat against us, or steal from us, while still insuring each other against periods of incapacity to produce.

    So why would any group tolerate rothbardian ethics EXCEPT as a means of predation and parasitism on neighbors?

    They wouldn’t.

    Rothbardian ethics are irrational. Aggression either must include prohibition on cheating, non-predatory exchange, and all other forms of extractive parasitism, or else aggression is an insufficient test of rational property rights. The only tolerable means of cooperation is PRODUCTIVE, FULLY INFORMED, WARRANTIED, VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE.

    Everything else is just an excuse for suppressing the strong’s violence while maintaining the cunning’s ability to lie cheat and steal.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-26 12:23:00 UTC

  • THE ROTHBARDIAN CART BEFORE THE HORSE Rothbard got it backwards. You don’t start

    THE ROTHBARDIAN CART BEFORE THE HORSE

    Rothbard got it backwards. You don’t start with property rights as an assumption. You start in a state of nature with pervasive free riding in any population.

    Crusoe’s island is an obscurant argument. We do not start the development of ethics on an island where the ‘government’ is provided by the sea.

    Instead, we start in a tribe of consanguineous relations all of whom engage in free riding – and we must use violence, shame or remuneration to stop them from free riding so that we can accumulate capital.

    Property is what’s left as you increasingly suppress various forms of involuntary extraction. Property is not the cause. It is the consequence.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-23 15:57:00 UTC

  • ITS TIME FOR IMPEACHMENT. Crazy as it might sound. I’ve jumped on the IMPEACHMEN

    ITS TIME FOR IMPEACHMENT.

    Crazy as it might sound. I’ve jumped on the IMPEACHMENT bandwagon.

    Why? The non-accidental, repeated abuse of executive powers, without the consent of congress, as a means of avoiding congressional consent. The very purpose of divided government is to forbid any government action by any house without the consent of the others. And no priority except the impending threat of war, that presents a clear and present danger, may circumvent the necessity of the consent of the houses prior to any executive or legislative action.

    Obama makes Nixon look like a schoolboy prankster. Obama is the worst, most corrupt, president, in our history, and has done the most damage to this country’s government since Lincoln.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-22 06:54:00 UTC

  • ON MORALITY AND IDEAL WORLDS : IDEAL MEANS, NOT IDEAL ENDS 1) I think it is a ph

    ON MORALITY AND IDEAL WORLDS : IDEAL MEANS, NOT IDEAL ENDS

    1) I think it is a philosophical error (or at least naivety, and possibly profound arrogance) to think in terms of ideal worlds. I tend to think in terms of improving the world we live in, without causing externalities that negate the improvement. It is the latter part of that statement that changes philosophy from an interesting parlor game to one of consequence.

    2) I think the purpose of philosophy is to integrate expansions in scientific understanding into our current understanding of the world, such that we improve our ability to reason and act in such a way as to take superior advantage of the difference between our rate of change and the universe’s suite of constant relations.

    3) I think value claims are normative. In my work, I have found that if one looks at a) the structure of production

    b) the structure of reproduction (family)

    c) the class and status of the extended family

    d) the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the polity.

    e) the gender and generation of the individuals.

    That moral biases are predictable portfolios that reflect our reproductives strategies.

    4) I think we can agree on means but not ends. And if we could agree upon ends, we increase fragility and risk. But that said, it is non-rational to expect one group to sacrifice its reproduction for another group’s reproduction. And people demonstrate this universally in all polities (at least over time.)

    As such I see the only ‘good’ as creating sufficient prosperity, and maintaining it, so that we are all wealthy enough to obtain what we desire individually or in small groups, but certainly not en masse.

    And neither equality nor diversity assist us in this objective. And that is demonstrably empirical, and very difficult to refute without selective reasoning.

    If it stands that women are at maximum density in one sector or other the economy, then that is the optimum best for all, because any other arrangement, whether prohibited from their potential, or prohibiting some male from his potential, is detrimental to the fulfillment of all potentials.

    That is, unless, you feel one of the luxuries that we can afford, is false status signals. An that is a valid preference. It may be that we prefer to create certain false signals because we are wealthy enough to do so. The problem is in anticipating the externalizes (consequences) of such false signals. And whether one or many have the right to involuntarily cause others sacrifice for self benefit.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-19 08:59:00 UTC

  • THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCE OF NECESSITY ON MEANS VS PREFERENCE ON ENDS The dif

    THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCE OF NECESSITY ON MEANS VS PREFERENCE ON ENDS

    The difference between my set of statements and the various replies above, is one that is common in western philosophy.

    Because western philosophy was created and developed by its aristocratic classes, and those classes that performed sufficiently to afford the luxury of philosophy, and sought enfranchisement.

    Namely: necessity.

    Marx, for all his error, does not make this mistake, nor does perhaps our most influential moral philosopher: Adam Smith against whom Marx, like Freud against Nietzsche, is a reactionary.

    So, the difference in our approaches to philosophy, is that I start with necessity, and then choose preference from the available options.

    From that position I take the mutually moral and scientific requirements that:

    (a) it is only moral to compel necessities not preferences.

    (b) The only moral preferential political action is one that others voluntarily comply with.

    (c) the evidence is that most of our attempts to interfere with social orders, other than increasing participation in them, has proven to be a failure when we attempt to achieve ends, rather than provide means.

    There are many preferences that we could seek to pursue, the externalities of which are counter productive to the prosperity that decreases the possibility of choices.

    As such, philosophical discourse on luxuries is interesting. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that what we are discussing is the luxuries that our implementation of necessities has made possible.

    Discussing luxuries is a nice parlor game. It is like young men fantasizing about which supercar they can buy if they save for the next ten years. But I do not work on philosophy for entertainment. I work on it for the purpose of identifying possible solutions to looming problems: what is necessary for continued expansion of our ability to cooperate in a division of knowledge and labor so vast that we can exist with such wealth?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-18 04:17:00 UTC

  • RISK AND TRUST REQUIRE THE SUPPRESSION OF DISCOUNTS (FREE RIDING) “There is a ne

    RISK AND TRUST REQUIRE THE SUPPRESSION OF DISCOUNTS (FREE RIDING)

    “There is a negative relation between risk tolerance and egalitarianism in both jobs and portfolios.” — Meir Statman

    Santa Clara University

    Risk requires the suppression of free riding. No matter where we look, we will find that individualism suppresses free riding and increases trust, and therefore risk taking.

    To increase redistribution while retaining trust, require homogeneity.

    Everything else denies genetic necessity.

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1647086

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-15 07:29:00 UTC

  • LET MY PEOPLE GO! If your government services are so good, then why do you need

    LET MY PEOPLE GO!

    If your government services are so good, then why do you need a monopoly?

    Why would a government be afraid of competition? Why do governments demonstrate that they are afraid of competition?

    Are you afraid someone would do better than you?

    Let my people go.

    Nullification, secession, insurrection, revolution, civil war.

    It’s a five card deck of choices. Choose one.

    Let my people go.

    Let my people go.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 12:11:00 UTC

  • THREE POINTS PROVE A LINE – IN PHILOSOPHY TOO In propertarian methodology I have

    THREE POINTS PROVE A LINE – IN PHILOSOPHY TOO

    In propertarian methodology I have explicitly argued in favor of an expanded version of the golden mean: that is that definitions of states or objects or properties are not testable unless they are described in the context of a spectrum (or axis), either end of which the concept fails to meet the criteria of the axis.

    This habit, like equilibrial thinking, is not terribly natural. Humans tend to gravitate to the simplest mode of comparison: ideal types, just as they tend to gravitate to finite states instead of equilibrial thinking.

    So, whenever I define something I try to construct the axis.

    In the propertarian method, what little I’ve written about it, in the few examples, I suggest the simple method of collecting as many related terms as possible, and arranging them into axis by playing what thing is like the other and not games so to speak.

    This allows us to construct the equivalent of supply demand curves for human concepts and behaviors.

    I find that most philosophical error comes from either:

    (a) failure to state human concepts as human actions (as if they are geometric, or platonic, rather than praxeological).

    or

    (b) definitions (like ‘knowledge’) that are specious by construction, because they describe a fixed state rather than a spectrum.

    or

    (c) Failure to account for equilibrial processes

    or

    (d) Failure to account for opportunity costs.

    This (geometrization) is a curable habit in human cognition, by training us to be less solipsistic and increasingly sympathetic and then autistic in our understanding of the world.

    Now, this might be a little deep for the mind to grasp, but the reason we make these mistakes can be accounted for by a particular spectrum as well:

    The Increasing Abstraction Of Point Of View:

    1) Self (solipsism) – Awareness

    2) Other (the insight of introspection) – Comparison

    3) Categories (the insight of numbers) – Numbers

    3) Relationship (the insight of geometry) – Measurement

    4) Independence from the self (the insight of calculus) – Motion

    5) Equilibria (the insight of economics and physics) – Systems

    6) Opportunity (differences in multiple ‘worlds’) – Possibilities

    Each of these increasingly complex ideas places a higher burden on us by requiring that we make comparisons against less perceptible and intuitive objects of consideration.

    A loose spectrum is more precise than the most precise definition, whose spectrum must be assumed.

    This is the value of the “golden mean” in virtue, but it is a generic test of any concept: if you don’t state the properties of the spectrum, you must assume them.

    In most of western philosophy, like all philosophy, despite being rational, the assumptions are unstated. The virtues are stated but without axis. The logics are stated but without axis.

    But one needs axis. We are terrible at conceiving more than one flight of an arrow. But We are terrible at it. But no question of consequence consists of a single arc.

    And no definition consists of a single state.

    Because no such arcs or states are sufficiently testable, and therefore are loaded with metaphysical assumptions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 06:42:00 UTC

  • The single political action that provides the greatest return for any people, is

    The single political action that provides the greatest return for any people, is to suppress the breeding of the unproductive and expand the breeding of the productive.

    The only answer that I can come up with is that while harsh cold climates facilitated this eugenic process, in modern era, we must simply pay unproductive people not to bear children, and punish them severely with the withdrawal of funds if they do.

    The institution of private property is a method of self defense. Then institutional cost of eugenic reproduction is again, simply a method of self defense.

    Unfortunately, due to the errors of christianity, the enlightenment, and the socialist state, we do precisely the opposite.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-27 03:09:00 UTC