Curt Doolittle

Form: Argument

  • Natural Law Is An Attempt By The Weak Church To Obscure The Fact That The Source Of Property Is Violence.

    [W]e are each born with a capacity for violence. Some more. Some less. During our lives we develop that capacity. Some more some less. Prior to the institution of property, this violence is one of our forms of wealth. We trade our wealth of violence in exchange for the institution of property. If our property is taken from us then we no longer need exchange our wealth in violence for it. And we may now use our wealth of violence for other purposes. We pay for property with our wealth in violence. The source of all property is violence. Natural law is a convenient construct of the church in order to obscure the inconvenient truth that the source of property is the application of violence. Understood correctly, this means that natural law is an attempt at redistribution: to obtain the expensive right of property at a dramatic discount. As such. Arguments to natural law are acts of fraud. The source of property is violence. – Curt Doolittle ( libertarians have fun trying to get out of that box. ).

  • MONOGAMY Let me put it this way: monogamy is not in a man’s interest at all. Or

    MONOGAMY

    Let me put it this way: monogamy is not in a man’s interest at all. Or rather, it is only in the interest of the 30% of men who are undesirable. And many men are undesirable because men vary more than women, particularly at the extremes.

    Monogamy creates artificial scarcity of men. It’s a bad deal for women in gene selection, but it’s a good deal for women in an agrarian economy in terms of support for her offspring. For the upper fifth of men, monogamy is a very high cost of opportunity. For the Tiger Woods’ of the world, its an absurdity.

    The question we have to ask, is if we lose the family, and we lose monogamy, then what will a) those undesirable men do and b) how will men start to signal?

    I look around the world and I look at history, and this is the stuff that heady murder is made of.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-07 18:24:00 UTC

  • TEACHERS AREN”T SKILLED THEY ARE TALENTED There is no functional difference betw

    TEACHERS AREN”T SKILLED THEY ARE TALENTED

    There is no functional difference between a teacher with three months of training and one with twenty years of experience. In fact, it appears that we are better off with teachers who have three months of training, because they bring more passion to an industry that like entertainment, is dependent more on emotional devotion than wisdom.

    We would be far better off Rotating retirees through the educational system than continuing the masquerade that teaching gradeschool students is a profession.

    Whether you like this or not is not something that I can compensate for. It is simply a fact of life. Making a protected career for the bottom 16% of high school graduates out of what should be a social service conducted by those people who have demonstrated success in other careers, is simply nonsensical.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-06 06:33:00 UTC

  • THE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT The purpose of good government is to deny people acces

    THE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT

    The purpose of good government is to deny people access to power. To deny people access to violence. To deny people access to fraud. To deny people access to theft. To deny people the ability to abuse ‘norms’. The best government denies people all possible means of pursuing self interest except through the service of each other in the market.

    Now, it is true that there are efforts that are relatively difficult to impossible to undertake without the structure of government, because the privatization of contribution to the commons must be prohibited in all forms of contract. And unlike entirely private goods and private contracts, it is possible to privatize (cheat) from from the public contributions to the commons. But this again, is a negative. Individuals do not need government to conduct these investments. They only need a forum for creating public contracts that bar all members of the citizenry from privatization (theft) of the commons being created by the investment.

    In the end analysis, this means, that the problem of government is the creation of law, and the use of buraucracy rather than contract and private services. Contracts have terms. They expire. They can be fulfilled. They cannot be modified at will by later legislatures. Private firms must survive competition. THey can die off. They cannot become a parasite on investors (the public.)

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-01 03:44:00 UTC

  • Is Austrian Economics Falsifiable?

    COMMENTS ON THE COMMENTS ABOVE

    1) Falsification requires the failure of an empirical test, sufficient to contradict the theory. The purpose of falsification is to require us to rely on evidence that is unobtainable by our senses alone, and independent of the frailty and error of the mind and its perceptions.  None of the criticisms above pass this criteria. 

    2) That austrianism, or any body of work, contains insufficiencies is not the same as it whether or not it contains errors.  The failure to see the stickiness of prices is a natural consequence of micro analysis.  Just as the failure to see cognitive biases and irrationality are a natural consequence of macro analysis.   The value in micro analysis is that it correctly informs us as to the behavior that will result from incentives. So it is perhaps best to understand that we need both macro and micro analysis (top down and bottom up).

    3) Austiranism (as ten basic principles:  http://www.capitalismv3.com/menu… )
    makes only one significantly controversial premise: the theory of the business cycle: that government actions increase the severity of necessary experiments and corrections we call booms and busts. Competing interpretations (Keynesianism and Modern Monetary) assert that the economy is a perpetual motion machine that is possible to universally correct with good policy.

    4) Praxeology contains both stated and unstated propositions.  The stated proposition is that the incentives of the rational actor are deducible from the incentives available to him.  The unstated proposition is that by exposing these propositions, it becomes visible when and where involuntary transfers of property are occurring.  It is the latter statement that is of value to the libertarian movement because a) humans detest involuntary transfer, even if their construct of property varies   and b) the progressives use involuntary transfer to fund programs which the libertarians object to.  c) all involuntary transfers can be enumerated as thefts, and as thefts, the state may be attacked as a system of legitimized theft.

    5) Most of the comments by others in this thread, confuse Rothbardianism libertarianism, or Misesian Praxeology, with austiranism.  While it may be true that Mises followed Menger, and Rothbard relied upon Mises, Rothbard’s assertions are  an attempt to restate the church’s Natural Law in the defense of property rights in order to preserve individual freedom, and to demonstrate the exploitation that will occur whenever we empower the state. While Rothbard does attempt to address the business cycle that is the central tenet of austrian economic argument, it is not clear that he added anything to the debate.  Rothbard was an ANARCHIST. and Mises was a CLASSICAL LIBERAL.  Rothbard however did not succeed. He effectively prohibited all organizations and their ability to add additional rights an obligations to personal property rights which would disallow privatization of the commons (“Cheating”). (An argument that is too technical for this forum but which I’ve addressed elsewhere.)  It required Hans Hoppe to finish Rothbard’s political work, and provide us with a solution to the problem of bureaucracy.  Hoppe succeeds in replacing the bureaucracy with private institutions where Rothbard only placed a universal moral ban them.

    6) Caplan’s “Why I am Not An Austrian” is a political piece that I have criticized elsewhere.  One should see this piece as a complaint against the Rothbardian wing’s attempt to hijack Austrianism for its political ends, more than an attack against Austrian economics.   To quote:

    “My equation of Austrian economics with Mises and Rothbard rather than F.A. Hayek is bound to be controversial.”  -Caplan

    Caplan (and the entire George Mason group), consistently express frustration that the anarchists have been ideologically successful and have intentionally conflated anarchism and austiranism such that austrianism’s dependence upon classical liberalism has been lost in the popular vernacular.

    Caplan’s argument must be understood in this context. Unfortunately the rather weak conflated argument he puts forth in his essay has posed a bit of trouble for all of us, myself included.  Since the article is mis-titled.  It should be “Why I am not a Rothbardian Praxeologist”. 

    I am a supporter of Caplan’s work (particularly his new work on education).  But as I am the only theorist trying to resolve this conflict by extending praxeological analysis to preserve the insights of both the anarchic and classical liberal wings, I find the use of Caplan’s essay unhelpful and confusing to the general reader.


    CLOSING
    I hope this somewhat clarifies the topic for readers here, rather than muddying the waters further.  There is a place for both micro analysis and it’s emphasis on prohibition of involuntary transfers in order to create a natural aristocracy, and macro analysis and its emphasis on maximizing involuntary transfers in support of redistribution in order to create communal egalitarianism.  These two ends of the spectrum promote different choices, not truths.  There are certainly statements within each set of preferences which can be subject to tests of truth. But the collections of statements we categorize as macro and micro, because they promote subjective preferences, are not subject to tests of truth or falsity.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-Austrian-economics-falsifiable

  • Is The “right To Die” A Human Right?

    The question, as stated is irrational.  One has the right to die, because one cannot have it taken away.  If you want to die, and can act to kill yourself, there are a legion of ways to accomplish it. 

    So, it’s not that suicide is difficult to accomplish nor that people fail to.  Instead, it is difficult to understand how those that say that they wish to, can somehow fail to.  And therefore we argue that if you wanted to you could and would. So that like many human utterances, a desire for suicide may be a situational expression of emotional frustration, pain and exhaustion, rather than a desire to end one’s life. It is impossible for others to know.  And like many thoughts of human beings, it may be impossible for the individual himself to know.

    That said, the moral and legal prohibition in the west, is against assisting others with suicide, not against suicide itself.  The moral counsel against suicide exists only to encourage those who consider suicide to seek assistance in removing the source of their suffering rather than resorting to suicide. 

    So instead of asking why one may or may not have the right to die, the question must be “Why can others not kill me if I desire it?”    And the reason is that it is an irreversible decision, and we cannot ever really know whether it is a true desire unless one performs the act one’s self. It may be simply that the individual is venting exhaustion or frustration at that moment but at somepoint would change his mind.  And it is unjust to ask others to bear the risk of participating in a decision that we cannot know. Because the only demonstration of a human beings preferences is not his verbal statements but his actions.

    Secondly, as someone says above: “an elderly terminally ill patient may feel an obligation to commit suicide to relieve their family and the society of them as a perceived burden.” Which obscures the more common and problematic circumstance: that the elderly patient who is terminally ill, or even, or who is a substantial burden on family and society, will be pressured to commit suicide and comply despite their desire not to, and to hold onto life a little longer.

    Therefore the moral and legal prohibitions against assisting with suicide are rational in philosophical and practical terms.

    ——-
    Afterward: It is somewhat interesting to see among these answers, the prevalence of  the misapplication of scientific principles to a problem of moral exchange.  The inability to tell the difference between a problem that has can be objectively resolved by relying on an analysis of outcomes, rather than one consisting of an exchange between individuals that can be intersubjectively tested. That our citizens no longer rely on scriptural analogy may be beneficial. But that they do not see morality as a system of exchanges, rather than a means of achieving a utilitarian end, is somewhat more frightening than the misapplication of those moral principles to questions about the physical world.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-the-right-to-die-a-human-right

  • What Is The Justification For Political Authority Enforced By Force?

    I’m going to try to clarify the “Monopoly Of Violence” argument in Propertarian terms:

    All human existence can be reduced to property rights.
    • 0. All human beings object to involuntary transfer of what they worked to obtain, by theft, fraud, or violence, and whether that transfer be direct or indirect.
    • 1. All societies have collections of property rights.
    • 2. These rights exist along a spectrum that consists of individual, shareholder, and collective property rights.
    • 3. Those property rights can be constructive, neutral or destructive. They can be just or unjust. They can be dominated by egalitarianism, expropriation, or meritocracy or a combination thereof.
    • 4. Those rights are met with corresponding obligations we call norms: forgone opportunities, manners, ethics, morals. They are, in large part, prohibitions on involuntary transfers of property.
    • 5. And these obligations are costs. They are the cost of the institution of property. People feel that they ‘own’ their institutions because they ‘pay’ for them.
    • 6. Since any foreign group’s portfolio, upon interaction with the home group’s portfolio, will by definition and necessity cause involuntary transfers from any home group, and the inverse, then groups use violence to both to institute their property rights and obligations and to prevent involuntary transfers both inside and outside of the group.

    Groups have different property rights. Even among libertarians, we disagree upon warranty, symmetry, external costs and the right of exclusion. All groups, regardless of their portfolio, pay for property rights with forgone opportunities for violence, theft, and fraud. And the promise of violence remains whenever violence, theft, and fraud are committed.

    Therefore, people are ‘justified’ in protecting their property. Their property rights themselves are a form of property. They are justified in forming a group that mandates those property rights. They are justified in combating a government that abridges or abrogates those rights.

    You can run on with this reasoning and answer almost all political questions. However, to answer yours, directly, we need to understand that one does not ‘justify’ power. One exercises it to achieve one’s preferences, and either has the power to achieve them or not. Justification is an attempt to achieve one’s preferences at a lower cost, or to lower the cost of maintaining those preferences. But that is all.

    So your question implies a universalism that is not present in political action.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-justification-for-political-authority-enforced-by-force

  • What Should Be The Rank-ordered Budget Priorities Of The U.s. Federal Government?

    (I agree with Stephan Kinsella’s answer to What should be the rank-ordered budget priorities of the U.S. Federal Government?. But I’m going to try to answer the question so that it’s possible to provide some insight.)

    Let’s look at this scientifically.

    I. The federal government, as constructed, has no vehicle for prioritization, or considering prioritization. So the federal government cannot prioritize expenses. Parliamentary government is constructed as a tactical organization with limits on it’s power, not a strategic one that must prioritize its actions. In theory an executive branch should establish such priorities, and does, but it does so in order to establish a legacy for the executive, rather than to cautiously administer the ‘trust fund’ that is the country. Instead, parliamentary organizations are vehicles for interest groups to request special claims which can then be forcibly extracted from others by means of complex involuntary transfers.

    II. We can observe what governments do when they are forced to prioritize, and when we make that observation, we find that all governments do the following:
    • a) prevent insurrection
    • b) protect their jobs
    • c) maintain the capacity for extracting income from citizens.
    • d) maintain the capacity for accumulating debt.
    They then threaten or improve those things voters care about (police, emergency, fire, school and libraries) or things voters need (roads, power, and sewer) which are operational, in while capturing as much revenue as they can for ideological programs, favored special interests, and additional personal income capture.

    III. Given what parliamentary governments actually do as tactical organizations, it’s not rational to discuss what priorities they should follow. We did not construct government in order to achieve priorities. Instead, we should discuss, what a government that followed priorities would look like, and how it would run, and how those decisions would be made.

    IV. If such a government could be constructed, and if it could survive attempts to circumvent it, then I suspect that the following would be the priority scheme that would be ‘best’ if we assume ‘best’ is something other than arbitrary. In the ase below, ‘best’ means, delivering the prosperity necessary for people to have choices, with the minimum cheating, corruption and rent seeking.
    1. Define a set of property rights (all human rights can be articulated as property rights.)
    2. Establish a geography within which those rights apply.
    3. Establish a judiciary for the resolution of differences according to the property rights.
    4. Establish registries for property (titles to anything and everything).
    5. Establish military, police, and other emergency service services to secure those rights.
    6. Establish and maintain commercial infrastructure.
    7. Establish an educational infrastructure.
    8. Given sufficient income produced from establishing commercial and educational infrastructure, allocate gains to the preferences of the people. (monuments, parks, social programs, etc.)

    In periods of duress, work backward from the end of the list to the top, cutting services such that the public is informed as to the importance of those priorities.

    https://www.quora.com/What-should-be-the-rank-ordered-budget-priorities-of-the-U-S-Federal-Government

  • Geopolitical Conflicts: From An Ethical Standpoint, How Long Back Should One Look To Decide Who Is The Rightful Owner Of Land?

    This only appears to be a complicated question. It really isn’t.  If a judgement will be made, how will one make such a thing?

    1) Property Rights. Property rights of any kind are derived from the portfolio of those rights within any given jurisdiction (country/state). Property rights exist in order to prevent disputes, and to permit cooperation.  Military conquest is not a subject of property rights. The very purpose of military conquest is to abrogate and redefine property rights.  There is no other reason to conduct military conquest.  In that sense, both the israeli and amerindian conquests are settled matters, because they were settled by conquest.  So to some degree to make a legalistic argument over property rights on a military matter is simply irrational. 

    2) Arbitrary Time Frames.  We have all been conquered people.  None of us can return to our homelands and our traditions. Even Northern europeans cannot go home any longer. The problem is infinitely recursive. These matters are not possible to solve by other than military means. That is why we solve them so.  It is an arbitrary and illogical statement to prefer one time and state of affairs to another time and state of affairs, because each state of affairs is predicated on the prior state of affairs and those conflicts. SO why, should we not take over Istanbul and rename it Byzantium, because the muslims conquered and stole if from Christians?  Where does this end?  Must we try to return Rome to the Etruscans?  Or are you just arbitrarily biased in favor of amerindians at the expense of everyone else?

    3) Practical Matters: it is not practical to displace a people, and they would simply go to war to stop it.  So it is an absurd parlor game of a question.  Israel is doing two things: building walls, and building settlements in order to expand it’s defensible boundaries. There is nothing new about what they’re doing.  The germans put them in concentration camps and killed them. There is a difference. The displaced peoples have a choice, the executed people’s do not.

    The English conquered (mostly) the amerindians in north america and the spanish and Portuguese in south america.  But, for example, if we quote George Washington, it’s because  (roughly quoting) they will be conquered by someone who we will have to defend ourselves against if we do not conquer them ourselves.(end roughly quoting). It is not that the English (Americans) were any different from anyone else.  Should the Kurds get their own territory? Should we go to war with china to give Tibetans their land back?  Should the russians drive out the chinese that have invaded eastern russia like the mexicans that have invaded the southern united states?  Land and the property rights imposed on that land are in constant flux everywhere in the world.


    SUMMARY
    So, these are not moral questions.  They are not philosophical questions. They are not legal questions. They are practical questions because in the end, the action necessary to alter the existing property definitions could only be resolved by military conquest.  THat’s what military conquests do: reassign property rights.

    Property assignments in any state are dependent upon a set of definitions established within that state using a monopoly on violence by that organization we call ‘government’.  Those assignments may be capricious (Asia), they may be nearly non-existant (muslim world and south america), they may be collective and corrupt (Romania) they may be collective and uncorrupt (sweden) they may be individual and utilitarian (the USA).   But they are meaningful ONLY within those jurisdictions during the life of the entity that enabled them. 

    This is a complex topic so if some other libertarian wants to challenge me, please understand that I’m erring on the side of brevity no on the side of incomprehension.  Liquid Personal property may be immutable. But land and fixed structures are not. That is not a moral statement. It is an historical one.

    https://www.quora.com/Geopolitical-Conflicts-From-an-ethical-standpoint-how-long-back-should-one-look-to-decide-who-is-the-rightful-owner-of-land

  • Geopolitical Conflicts: From An Ethical Standpoint, How Long Back Should One Look To Decide Who Is The Rightful Owner Of Land?

    This only appears to be a complicated question. It really isn’t.  If a judgement will be made, how will one make such a thing?

    1) Property Rights. Property rights of any kind are derived from the portfolio of those rights within any given jurisdiction (country/state). Property rights exist in order to prevent disputes, and to permit cooperation.  Military conquest is not a subject of property rights. The very purpose of military conquest is to abrogate and redefine property rights.  There is no other reason to conduct military conquest.  In that sense, both the israeli and amerindian conquests are settled matters, because they were settled by conquest.  So to some degree to make a legalistic argument over property rights on a military matter is simply irrational. 

    2) Arbitrary Time Frames.  We have all been conquered people.  None of us can return to our homelands and our traditions. Even Northern europeans cannot go home any longer. The problem is infinitely recursive. These matters are not possible to solve by other than military means. That is why we solve them so.  It is an arbitrary and illogical statement to prefer one time and state of affairs to another time and state of affairs, because each state of affairs is predicated on the prior state of affairs and those conflicts. SO why, should we not take over Istanbul and rename it Byzantium, because the muslims conquered and stole if from Christians?  Where does this end?  Must we try to return Rome to the Etruscans?  Or are you just arbitrarily biased in favor of amerindians at the expense of everyone else?

    3) Practical Matters: it is not practical to displace a people, and they would simply go to war to stop it.  So it is an absurd parlor game of a question.  Israel is doing two things: building walls, and building settlements in order to expand it’s defensible boundaries. There is nothing new about what they’re doing.  The germans put them in concentration camps and killed them. There is a difference. The displaced peoples have a choice, the executed people’s do not.

    The English conquered (mostly) the amerindians in north america and the spanish and Portuguese in south america.  But, for example, if we quote George Washington, it’s because  (roughly quoting) they will be conquered by someone who we will have to defend ourselves against if we do not conquer them ourselves.(end roughly quoting). It is not that the English (Americans) were any different from anyone else.  Should the Kurds get their own territory? Should we go to war with china to give Tibetans their land back?  Should the russians drive out the chinese that have invaded eastern russia like the mexicans that have invaded the southern united states?  Land and the property rights imposed on that land are in constant flux everywhere in the world.


    SUMMARY
    So, these are not moral questions.  They are not philosophical questions. They are not legal questions. They are practical questions because in the end, the action necessary to alter the existing property definitions could only be resolved by military conquest.  THat’s what military conquests do: reassign property rights.

    Property assignments in any state are dependent upon a set of definitions established within that state using a monopoly on violence by that organization we call ‘government’.  Those assignments may be capricious (Asia), they may be nearly non-existant (muslim world and south america), they may be collective and corrupt (Romania) they may be collective and uncorrupt (sweden) they may be individual and utilitarian (the USA).   But they are meaningful ONLY within those jurisdictions during the life of the entity that enabled them. 

    This is a complex topic so if some other libertarian wants to challenge me, please understand that I’m erring on the side of brevity no on the side of incomprehension.  Liquid Personal property may be immutable. But land and fixed structures are not. That is not a moral statement. It is an historical one.

    https://www.quora.com/Geopolitical-Conflicts-From-an-ethical-standpoint-how-long-back-should-one-look-to-decide-who-is-the-rightful-owner-of-land