Curt Doolittle

Form: Argument

  • Are There Any Arguments Against Immigration That Are Compatible With Libertarian Thought?

    1) Hoppe has put forth an argument (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han…)  But hoppe would also argue that if a bunch of neighbors made a contract that no one without red hair could move into a neighborhood/village/city that was all privately owned, even by the use of shares, that since that contract was vountarily entered into by members that they would all have to respect it.  (This is called the “right of exclusion”.)

    2) When libertarians talk about any given issue, they do so within the libertarian context: the inviolability of private property. The inviolability of private property requires that no involuntary transfers occur. This tenet of in turn requires the absence of redistributive programs that allow immigrants to transfer weath by moving into a geography and obtaining redistribution (theft).  Theft which therefore is used to fund the growth of the bureaucratic (parasitic) governmnet. This argument is that OPEN immigration is incompatible with the welfare state.
     
    The alternative solutions are that a) people pay their way in, or b) they borrow and pay back their way in c) or that they are ‘sponsored’ by someone who is financially responsible for their productivity or loss (as was common in history). Further that they conform to norms that are expressions of property rights. Any one of these solutions makes immigration possible without violating property rights. Open immigration under redistribution doesn’t. I think this argument is pretty hard to refute.

    https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-arguments-against-immigration-that-are-compatible-with-libertarian-thought

  • Are There Any Arguments Against Immigration That Are Compatible With Libertarian Thought?

    1) Hoppe has put forth an argument (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han…)  But hoppe would also argue that if a bunch of neighbors made a contract that no one without red hair could move into a neighborhood/village/city that was all privately owned, even by the use of shares, that since that contract was vountarily entered into by members that they would all have to respect it.  (This is called the “right of exclusion”.)

    2) When libertarians talk about any given issue, they do so within the libertarian context: the inviolability of private property. The inviolability of private property requires that no involuntary transfers occur. This tenet of in turn requires the absence of redistributive programs that allow immigrants to transfer weath by moving into a geography and obtaining redistribution (theft).  Theft which therefore is used to fund the growth of the bureaucratic (parasitic) governmnet. This argument is that OPEN immigration is incompatible with the welfare state.
     
    The alternative solutions are that a) people pay their way in, or b) they borrow and pay back their way in c) or that they are ‘sponsored’ by someone who is financially responsible for their productivity or loss (as was common in history). Further that they conform to norms that are expressions of property rights. Any one of these solutions makes immigration possible without violating property rights. Open immigration under redistribution doesn’t. I think this argument is pretty hard to refute.

    https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-arguments-against-immigration-that-are-compatible-with-libertarian-thought

  • CAPLAN FAILS TO JUSTIFY OPEN IMMIGRATION (*HIGHLY UN-PC PAINFUL TRUTH WARNING*)

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/06/six_theses_on_e.htmlBRYAN CAPLAN FAILS TO JUSTIFY OPEN IMMIGRATION

    (*HIGHLY UN-PC PAINFUL TRUTH WARNING*)

    1) Do a group of people have the right to exclusion? To deny trade, habitation, and spatial access, to others based upon some property of the others’ group?

    Moral norms, traditions, and even differences in language and ability impose a cost on groups. Morals are largely expressions of property rights, and differences in morals are expressions of conflicting property rights. Norms are a form of shareholder property in themselves. So differences in norms impose costs on both sides and in many cases constitute attempts at fraud and theft.

    For example, I regularly write about the difference between Bazaar Ethics and Warrior Ethics, and how externalities and implied warranty are a product of high trust warrior ethics and not a property of low trust Bazaar Ethics. And a high trust society is very rare, and very complicated to build. It’s also very productive and innovative. But it requires that sellers exhibit symmetrical transparency, be constrained from imposing external costs and required to provide limited warranty.

    While I’m a pretty big fan of Brian’s I just see this post on immigration as yet another attempt to express jewish cultural bias as a truth or moral principle when it’s just a byproduct of the fact that jews are a diasporic people with a small population and the memes, morals and narratives of a diasporic people that are unable to hold land, when land holding is necessary for the establishment of norms and formal institutions, and land holding is necessary in order to enforce the right of exclusion, in order to reduce the costs of cooperation.

    So no, immigration poses high costs on host countries and peoples where there is a high trust moral code including a requirement for symmetric honesty, warranty, and a prohibition on external involuntary transfers, a nuclear family, with a homogenous language.

    I realize that this is a painful truth. But it is a truth none the less.

    2) Secondly, norms are not governed as brian suggests by extreme examples. This is just faulty logic in the extreme. In fact, using extreme conditions as examples of norms is the source of most false criticism of moral statements using moral dilemmas – which turns morality into a victorian parlor game.

    I agree with Brian on a lot of things. But on this topic both his argument and it’s justification are nonsense. People have the right of excluding in both personal and political spheres. They must have it. They demonstrate it. And it’s the only way to force people to adopt high-trust norms.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-06-18 08:09:00 UTC

  • Where Did The Idea That Libertarianism Includes Social Liberties Come From?

    There are two libertarian traditions; The christian aristocratic classical liberal (epitomized by Hayek) and the jewish merchant anarchic (epitomized by Rothbard)  Christians were a land holding majority and so needed formal institutions.  Jews were a diasporic religiously governed minority  and favor anarchism.  With the heavy jewish immigration into the USA, jewish authors advocated their means of avoiding the oppression of the state just like christian classical liberals advocated their means of avoiding oppression by the state.  These two traditions became allies.  Then Rothbard and Friedman became the primary intellectual advocates for libertarian policies.  There has not been an evolution in christian classical liberalism.  This is partly because institutional programs are nearly impossible to put into place, and ideological programs that require only ‘belief’ or ‘support’ are much easier to put into place. It is also a failure in part, because classical liberalism is an institutional model that can resolve conflicts in priority among people with similar interests, but it cannot provide (majority rule cannot) a means of resolving conflicts among people with dissimilar interests. (As they warned us in Federalist Papers 10.)  The recent dominance of Rothbardianism on the internet, can be largely attributed to Lew Rockwell’s insight that it was possible to adopt the ideological tactics of the communist movement, and the organizing tactics of Alinsky to promote libertarianism as an ideology through education and community building. His impact through the mises institute cannot be overstated.  So, in essence, we have not created the next evolutionary step in classical liberalism in order to solve  the problem of running an empire in a modern economy where the institution of marriage has become unbound and where women and men have different reproductive strategies and therefore different political sentiments.   THe libertarians (Hans Hoppe in particular) have devised some solutions for small states. But no one has yet determined a solution for large scale states that desire to federate.  As such, because of this failure, the debate for freedom takes place largely in the context of anarchism.  Because the jewish anarchists have supplied the only ideological program that can compete with social parliamentary democracy (ie: it’s communism by other means.)

    You could look at the problem this way: jews have always been a minority and christian classical liberals are becoming a minority — and beginning to act like one.  Only majorities look to provide institutional solutions.  Small groups stick with informal institutions: religions and norms.  Because they lack the power to create formal institutions.

    That’s a lot to cover in one note.  But it’s the answer you’re looking for.

    https://www.quora.com/Where-did-the-idea-that-libertarianism-includes-social-liberties-come-from

  • Should Political Advertisements Be Banned From Television?

    It would violate the principle of free speech.
    It would increase corruption at the cost of decreasing an annoyance.
    It would very likely decrease voter participation

    https://www.quora.com/Should-political-advertisements-be-banned-from-television

  • Why Do Libertarians Treat Social Order And Civil Society As Free Goods?

    They don’t. While it costs nothing to abstain from theft, fraud and violence, it costs something to administer defense and disputes.  The libertarian argument is that these things can be produced by private organizations. They have produced a great deal of work that demonstrates how and why that private production of defense is both possible and preferable.

    The European monarchies were private governments, and there were political parties and labor unions and a great deal of diversity, with many cities having different neighborhoods for each ethnic group.  The monarchies were less warlike, taxed people much less, provided public services and had active civil societies.   Not that we should return to monarchies but the point is that these things can, and have worked.

    The problem with government is a bureaucracy. If you were to privatize everything, you would come close the the libertarian idea.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-do-libertarians-treat-social-order-and-civil-society-as-free-goods

  • LAWS CREATE PROPERTY RIGHTS EVEN INDIRECTLY We often confuse ourselves that we c

    LAWS CREATE PROPERTY RIGHTS EVEN INDIRECTLY

    We often confuse ourselves that we create laws to produce the declared ends. But when we create laws we create a portfolio of property rights — from the prohibition of them under communism, to the centralization of them under socialism, to the lending of them under democratic socialism, to the individual ownership of them under libertarianism, to the abandonment of them under totalitarian thievery. As such land requires taxes, because any composition of the institution of property requires laws by which to exclude other compositions of property, and that we bear the cost of prohibiting those alternative compositions of property by the threat of violence. The government is a monopoly on violence for the purpose of creating the institution of property rights.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-16 15:51:00 UTC

  • FAMILY MEMBERSHIP IS NOT A PRIVILEGE – A PRIVILEGE IS A GRANT BY THE STATE A pri

    http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/05/web-of-privilege-supports-this-so.htmlA FAMILY MEMBERSHIP IS NOT A PRIVILEGE – A PRIVILEGE IS A GRANT BY THE STATE

    A privilege is something granted by the state. He has no such privilege. Instead, it is indeed lucky that one would possess genes and membership in a family with enough credibility to convey trust to investors, so that they would risk giving you money versus risk giving it to the millions of other unknowns that try to obtain it from them. There is no better form of insurance that an investor can buy than familial trust. And there is no inheritance more valuable to protect than that trust. Because, as you say, there may be no value added by his presence, but then there is no value risked by it either. Since all candidates may in fact provide marginal increase in value, the investor selects a candidate due to loss aversion.

    You [Angry Bear] are not following through to the logical conclusion of your statements (and neither is DeLong, but then he’s a hack). A family demonstrates the trustworthiness of its members. But that isn’t the conclusion you would like us to take from this question. Because that would be an indictment of the lower classes. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2012-05-16 10:44:00 UTC

  • By Dennet’s criteria, property, prices, and the state itself require faith. Any

    http://richarddawkins.net/articles/280FAITH?

    By Dennet’s criteria, property, prices, and the state itself require faith. Any time more than a few hundred people need to take independent action on a collective good, then need to have faith in each other. That faith comes from shared values. The mythical artifice that we wrap around that ‘faith’ is immaterial. Only that we share the myth. Even if that myth is the benevolence of the secular state.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-16 14:30:00 UTC

  • Question? Where In History Has Libertarianism Ever Worked?

    Where in history has libertarianism ever successfully been practiced? It seems a miserable failure in Somalia. What are the problems that you feel need to be “fixed”? I like much of what I read at the Mises site and other Libertarian internet gathering places, but I dislike and disagree with the majority of it. What would you call “socially progressive” and how can that be achieved through libertarian policy as opposed to our current system?– Jeff.

    You’re right sort of. That is, if you define libertarianism as rothbardianism (anarchism) rather than Hayekianism (jeffersonian classical liberalism). Because the term ‘liberal’ was stolen by the progressive and socialist movements, the classical liberals adopted ‘libertarian’ under Hayek’d advice. The anarchists under rothbard adopted it as well, following the french tradition. (Realistically this division is a debate between the jewish and christian concepts of social order. and those two concepts are differentiated by the norms needed by land holding Christians and non-land holding jews.) At this moment, the anarchists and classical liberals are fighting over ownership of the self identifying label ‘libertarian’. This pair is, over the past two years, further breaking into ‘bleeding heart libertarians’ under the guidance of Horowitz, the Propertarians under Hoppe and people like myself, and the ‘libertarians” (anarchists) under the mises institute., and the more classical liberal republicans under the Cato institute, and the conservatives under the Heritage and other organizations. So when you hear ‘libertarian’ most of the rhetoric on the web is driven the the Rothbardians under the Misesians. Because Lew Rockewell has succeeded in educating a legion of informed followers using the argumentative model developed by the marxists. That is why the ron paul effect is working. And the rest of us are trying to promote either private government that replaces political bureaucracy with private insurance companies, or some version of jeffersonian classical liberal institutions with updated principles that include libertarian economic insights – mostly those developed by Friedman, and legal insights, most of which are developed by Hayek and Sowell. The conservatives meanwhile are relying on insights found from history that finally articulate the conservative position as something rational. These ideas are being provided by economic historians like Neal Ferguson, Religious historians like Karen Armstrong, and inadvertently by political historian Francis Fukuyama as well as hundreds of others. And then I’m in my little corner of the world trying to piece it all together as a consistent framework so that we can have rational rather than moralistic arguments.

    So to answer your question: the reason you and I have the choice to argue about the ‘spoils’ of productivity from this classical liberal economy (libertarian economy) that we live in, is because unlike every other society on earth, we developed the rule of law (which means that the government is limited in what it can do by laws, it does not mean that we have to follow the laws). We developed rational debate, and the competition between powers in order to preserve that rule of law. And we developed the nuclear family in order to break bonds of consanguinity so that people would eschew corruption — something unique to the west — in order to be loyal to society and abstract rules, rather than family and tribe. The trick in history it turns out is to produce innovation faster than the state and others can seek rents against that productivity. This feat is accomplished through property rights guaranteed by the rule of law.

    So the answer to your question is that we live in libertarianism. It was successfully attacked by marxism, at the cost of 100M dead. It was attacked by socialism, at the cost of endemic corruption and poverty. It has been attacked by social democracy, which has played out as bankrupting the west. And finally it has been conquered through immigration.

    The underlying question is whether we transfer from the productive who breed less to the unproductive who breed more. And that question has a dysgenic answer. That answer has resulted in the falling of westerners behind their ashkenazi peers. That is the best metric we use for a practical example of the result.