Curt Doolittle

Form: Argument

  • THE BHL’S, SENTIMENT VS REASON, AND ASKING FOR AN ARGUMENT Stephan Kinsella has

    THE BHL’S, SENTIMENT VS REASON, AND ASKING FOR AN ARGUMENT

    Stephan Kinsella has me thinking about our socially conscious friends: the BHL.

    And, again, I enthusiastically support ANY pursuit of liberty, wherever possible, by whomever possible. The more the merrier. The more positive the better.

    I think that, sure, adding ‘social compassion’ it’s an attractive means of making libertarianism palatable for the mainstream. If you can’t fight off the proletarians, then you can simply buy them off. I’ve certainly advocated the same strategy.

    Social compassion is certainly a way to destroy the myth of equality, and destroy the nuclear family, as well as the pressure to create and keep the nuclear family. So, that helps correct the erroneous assumptions of equality of interest, and that liberty is a universal desire, instead of the priority of a permanent minority.

    I mean, but, I think that the most likely outcome, without a ‘package deal’ is that we would both redistribute more money, AND get less freedom in exchange. Because the moral hazard would increase the weight of the unproductive, and the state would use that lever to increase extraction from us.

    I guess, what I’d like to see from the BHL’s is, some argument that supports their position by rational rather than sentimental means.

    Propertarianism can be used to rationally defend the BHL’s objective WITHOUT sacrificing, any way, the sanctity of individual property rights, or requiring charity. Compassion is a camel’s nose and there is no end to its infiltration of the tent of liberty.

    Propertarianism requires that you decide whether the reward for respecting property rights (and manners, ethics, morals and norms) is simply access to the market, or whether additional dividends are warranted for that investment.

    I think, intuitively, people feel that they are due more than access. And that (a) commissions are due on production and (b) dividends are due to ‘shareholders’, where shareholder-ship is obtained by, respect for property rights.

    This is a descriptive, not normative ethical explanation of what people actually think, feel, and do. It asks ‘at what point have I paid for my property rights? And what is my dividend on that ownership?

    But this strategy is incompatible with open immigration. And open immigration is incompatible with property rights – at least without full and immediate adoption of all manners, ethics, morals and norms. The most important of which, is the norm of private property, without which, the formal institutions of private property cannot exist.

    At least it is not possible to demonstrate otherwise.

    Give them some love too:

    http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-21 02:36:00 UTC

  • ON ONE POSSIBLE USE FOR VOTING (cross posted for archiving) The only argument th

    ON ONE POSSIBLE USE FOR VOTING

    (cross posted for archiving)

    The only argument that I can prove that includes voting is:

    (a) It is necessary for groups to have people who make decisions on behalf of the group (iron law of oligarchy). However oligarchies form whenever leaders are chosen. Therefore the Athenian tactic of Lottocracy appears to be the only solution that we know of that produces leaders who rotate as do juries, and who cannot easily be coerced (special interests) nor can they obtain power. I cannot be certain this wouldn’t exacerbate the problem of renters versus owners, but the evidence from juries is that no, it actually does the opposite.

    (b) If these lottocratic leaders choose a set of policies, we can each vote our tax dollars for or not-for those initiatives. This has a lot of value in that it requires us to pay taxes in order to vote and influence decisions. This keeps taxes relatively flat, otherwise it puts too much control in the hands of the very wealthy. Now, it’s also possible to start discounting ones contributions at some point but I’m still not sure that’s very good. In other words, say a lot of you pay 100$ and someone else pays 1B$. Now, you should be pretty happy that your initiative gets funded and tat you can use your money on LESSER INITIATIVES.

    I won’t go into all the different games that can be played under this scenario, but they’re reasonably easy to defend against if you can’t legislate involuntary transfers ,or taxes, you can only have a group of people get together to spend money for this one year.

    If a group deals with a single year, and cannot make multi-year commitments, and if their contracts only last a year, then it is very hard for ‘fashionable but bad ideas” to become institutionalized as they do under law and bureaucracy.

    Anyway. If you want voting of any kind, the combination of (a) public intellectuals conducting a debate, rather than politicians (b) lottocratic juries selecting proposed initiatives, (c) and economic democracy for voting.

    I think you’re pretty likely to get to the land of OZ better than any other solution that we have. I mean, parties and politicians have a pretty bad record. And bureaucracies are even worse.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 02:23:00 UTC

  • YOU’VE GOT IT BACKWARDS : ARISTOCRACY Aristocracy CREATES property rights by for

    YOU’VE GOT IT BACKWARDS : ARISTOCRACY

    Aristocracy CREATES property rights by forcibly demanding them of everyone he or she encounters, under the threat that he restricts his use of his WEALTH of VIOLENCE, only upon the condition that all others do so as well.

    It is not that the world desires property rights. Demonstrably that is false. What the world desires is to be taken care of and to consume, as a comfortable slave or farm animal.

    To be human, requires property.

    The only possible form of HUMANISM is ARISTOCRACY that demands by the threat of violence, property rights for all.

    Without property you are not human. You are only an animal, herded and shepherded like any other.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-08 10:37:00 UTC

  • RUINING AN AUSTRIAN’S DAY “Man must act” is of course, true, but it is an incomp

    RUINING AN AUSTRIAN’S DAY

    “Man must act” is of course, true, but it is an incomplete sentence. “Man must act to serve his interests” is the full sentence. And completing the sentence demonstrates it’s irrelevance. The meaningful problem is that “Man must voluntarily cooperate.” And that is where the problem becomes difficult. Because man must actually “calculate and choose to outwide the current course of events”.

    We call Reductio ad absurdum arguments rhetorical fallacies for a reason. ANy act of simplification or categorization is necessarily eliminative. “

    One must be careful not to eliminate the causal properties of that which is required for later deduction from first principles.

    It’s a cute trick of obscurant logic. And the genius is in constructing the (false) obscurant logic. Not in what we can deduce from it.

    Human cooperation requires the voluntary payment of vast opportunity costs, for which they expect something in return. No activity is conducted for altruistic reasons. All activity is conducted in exchange for something. Most of it for insurance on inclusion in future opportunity.

    Which Mises ignores and Rothbard intentionally avoids.

    It’s possible to fix Mises’ Praxeology and Rothbard’s ethics, but only by restoring the recognition of those costs, and the consequential impact those costs have on the program of ethics we libertarians rely upon.

    Fixing those errors then, returns LIBERTY TO ARISTOCRACY, truth and clarity, and rescues it from the ghetto of obscurant, deceptive language meant intentionally to mislead.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-08 07:21:00 UTC

  • MAXIMUM TAXATION? Taxation is by definition immoral. Whereas fees are not. We is

    MAXIMUM TAXATION?

    Taxation is by definition immoral. Whereas fees are not. We issue taxes even in local villages, largely to prevent free riding. We issue taxes under statism for the purpose of empowering the state. And little else.

    The maximum taxation possible is that which maintains the ability of exit from the market and the total reliance on past earnings as a means of maintaining one’s standard of living. If this lottery is removed it will decrease participation in experimentation that is only evident over a decade or more.

    Subtract from this the willingness of people to subsidize that which they disagree with.

    Subtract from this the impact that taxation places on their status signaling ability.

    Subtract from this the trust that their sacrifice is well used by government.

    Subtract from this their current level of economic confidence in the long term.

    That’s pretty much it. Math is pretty easy really.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 10:40:00 UTC

  • TECHNOLOGY UNDERMINE THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM? EDUCATION WILL REMAIN THE SAME Highe

    http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/arena/result/the-future-of-higher-education#comment-1091995003WILL TECHNOLOGY UNDERMINE THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM?

    EDUCATION WILL REMAIN THE SAME

    Higher education filters us and produces signals. It does not teach us very much. And that’s just what the evidence says. There is very little chance that higher ed will be replaced by technology. Technology is not a high enough cost to perform any filtering, and if it was high enough cost, then people wouldn’t use it.

    THE EXAMPLE OF FLIGHT SIMULATORS

    Pilots joining the armed forces usually must have a considerable number of hours in at-home flight simulators to compete against their entry level peers. Technology may have the same effect on entry into those institutions. Technology may be the way we ACTUALLY LEARN SKILLS instead of are filtered and sorted, and stamped with approval for signalling purposes. But it is unlikely that without the high cost of education, the personal associations that form in educational institutions, the cultural conformity and behavior that comes from working in a college environment, meeting expectations of the professor, and cooperating with peers, that individuals would learn what businesses actually hire them for: not their knowledge, but their ability to understand, solve and execute problems regardless of industry in which those problems occur.

    UNIVERSITIES ARE VALUABLE FOR FILTERING NOT FOR TEACHING

    In that sense it matters very little what we learn at university. We are being schooled in the one thing that matters: problem solving and execution without supervision. Because, the human pay scale is determined by the degree of supervision, or lack of it, that is necessary to perform different levels of work given decreasing amounts of known information about how to do it.

    For these reasons, technology CANNOT REPLACE the classroom. It is not what we learn but how we learn and how hard the assignments are (from social sciences in the trivial, to computer science, economics, mathematics and physics at the difficult end).

    College is an obstacle course for testing and eliminating performance. It doesn’t teach you much, we don’t remember much, we don’t apply much, and we won’t even apply it if we have the opportunity to. (see Caplan)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 08:10:00 UTC

  • ANIMAL RIGHTS If you cannot be trusted with the care of an animal – pet or prope

    ANIMAL RIGHTS

    If you cannot be trusted with the care of an animal – pet or property. Then we cannot trust you with care of the rest of us.

    Simple people use empathy toward animals moral and legal claims, and anthropomorphize all sorts of things instead of using reason.

    But what they intuit in their arationalism is at least functionally correct if not causally correct.

    The seek to protect the victim because it is less aggressive and confrontational than punishing the actor. It is an effective technique but a dishonest one.

    And as such, these people – sensitives – perform a function even though their arguments are arational justifications of their intuitions.

    Unfortunately their arationality creates consequences that are morally, politically and legally damaging to civilization.

    Those of us who because of our lack of fear in confrontation or punishment, have the luxury of honesty, certainly feel compassion for our pets, animals and wildlife. But we correctly understand that not only are the animals a commons that they should respect no matter who cares for them, but that someone sick enough to harm creatures for emotional reasons of any kind, is a danger to all of us. And science has thankfully finally proven why – genetic and birth defect exacerbated by living in families with the same defects.

    Tolerance is not a good thing without accompaniment by training. Without correction it is not tolerance but convenience.

    Animals cannot have rights since they cannot enter into contract. A few pets to some degree can closely imitate that contract (dogs) at the level if a child when dependency forms.

    Humans have contractual obligations with each other not to be cruel to animals. As such it is your contractual duty to the rest of us – your price for our promise not to use violence against you, and to cooperate peaceably with you – that you treat animals as if they are human whenever possible as a ritualistic test of your adherence to contract.

    This contract is a necessary natural law that does not need codification. Natural laws are the minimum rules for peaceful cooperation. They are reducible to statements of property rights. And they are necessary. Human rights are not necessary, they are aspirations once natural rights have been achieved.

    And should you break that contract if natural law, the foolish and weak may shame you and claim animals have rights because they lack the intelligence, wisdom, means and capacity to punish you for violating natural law and demonstrating you are unfit for the contract by which we agree to cooperate, and rescind our use of violence.

    But those of us wise and strong enough will be honest with you.

    And since you have broken the contract of natural law with us, we are no longer forbidden to use violence.

    And we will logically, rationally, wisely, and legally under natural law, punish you sufficiently that you either will not, or cannot, do so again.

    That punishment too, is part of the contract that the strong agree to.

    Curt

    (Propertarianism in application)

    ( also another example of solipsism on one end and autism on the other. )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-10 04:59:00 UTC

  • “IF I CANNOT HAVE MY MORAL CODE, AND YOU WANT ME TO HAVE YOUR MORAL CODE…” And

    “IF I CANNOT HAVE MY MORAL CODE, AND YOU WANT ME TO HAVE YOUR MORAL CODE…”

    And if morals, ethics and manners (norms) cost me opportunities.

    Then you are just using an excuse to deprive me of my savings in the normative commons, as well as my reproductive strategy, as well as my family structure, as well as my reproductive status, as well as my future opportunities.

    Property rights is the only form of cooperation under diversity.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-09 17:19:00 UTC

  • “I AM WILLING TO LET YOU HAVE YOUR MORAL CODE, AS LONG AS YOU LET ME HAVE MY MOR

    “I AM WILLING TO LET YOU HAVE YOUR MORAL CODE, AS LONG AS YOU LET ME HAVE MY MORAL CODE”

    But the only way that is physically or logically possible is if we respect each other’s property rights.

    This is the genius of property rights as a social order compared to majority rule government as a social order.

    Property rights make all more complex moral codes possible. Without them no cooperation between peoples with different moral codes is possible.

    This is why democratic government cannot survive heterogeneity – ‘diversity’. People in any democratic body politic must have the same status signals, family structures, metaphysical value judgements, and even similar economic interests.

    Otherwise, majority rules is a means of destroying the market for cooperation inside the body politic, and by consequence, outside the body politic as well.

    Democratic government in any heterogeneous polity must and will lead to economic decay.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-09 17:14:00 UTC

  • WHY PROPERTARIAN REASONING IS THE ANSWER TO MORAL ARGUMENT. “I work entirely by

    WHY PROPERTARIAN REASONING IS THE ANSWER TO MORAL ARGUMENT.

    “I work entirely by arguing with incentives. And I unload them as much as possible. We may not agree on the experience produced by any action, but the transfers produced by any action exist independently of how we react to them. And incentives are nothing more than values attached to transfers.”

    In other words ALL EMOTIONAL AND MORAL STATEMENTS AND EXPERIENCES can be reduced to statements of the transfer of property, and our differences merely different expectations over the distribution of property rights between the private and the common.

    **Propertarianism is what Praxeology should have been if it was complete.**

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 11:36:00 UTC