Curt Doolittle

Form: Argument

  • Straight Dope: Would Communal Ownership Result In Fewer Oil Spills?

    No. But increased liability would. I found the Straight Dope forums and they’re full of fairly good libertarian thinking. So I’m going to add them to my crawler’s roundtable. This is the second or third posting I”ve made there. And in it I’m making a bold claim in response to this statement:

    And I think you’ll find it makes a difference to the wider community, too. It’s hard to imagine a worker-owned oil company, with broad shopfloor participation in decisionmaking, making the kind of decisions that led to the BP oil spill — and got several BP workers killed.

    That’s an interesting statement. The problem is, that such an organization would never be able to exist at any size in order to make that kind of decision, and without that size could not concentrate enough capital to create and combine sufficient technologies to get into the position in the first place.

    [callout]**In general there will be no case that you can contrive of where the above sequence of logic does not apply.**[/callout]

    Why? Because of the very reason we have markets, corporations, organizations, political systems: because while people can agree upon the sentimental ends, they cannot agree upon the requisite means, cannot do so in time to sieze opportunities, and they cannot do so in large numbers, and as the complexity of the division of labor increases, necessary ignorance intervenes on the part of all people involved such that additional opinions actually REGRESS back to the mean. This fact in turns results in the “Iron Law Of Oligarchy” wherein decisions making is delegated in every form of voluntary organization to an elite, which upon attaining the ability to make decisions, always seeks to preserve it, expand it, and to expand it to the point of their necessary ignorance and incompetence.

    [callout] while people can agree upon the sentimental ends, they cannot agree upon the requisite means, cannot do so in time to sieze opportunities, and they cannot do so in large numbers, and as the complexity of the division of labor increases, necessary ignorance intervenes on the part of all people involved such that additional opinions actually REGRESS back to the mean. This fact in turns results in the “Iron Law Of Oligarchy” wherein decisions making is delegated in every form of voluntary organization to an elite, which upon attaining the ability to make decisions, always seeks to preserve it, expand it, and to expand it to the point of their necessary ignorance and incompetence.[/callout]

    The problem isn’t the corporation’s size, or the worker interest, it’s the limits of liability granted to the executives, and the limit of liability given to the insurers. These limits were GIVEN by GOVERNMENT with KNOWING INTENT to these companies precisely to avoid the principle of responsibility inherent in Capitalism, to ensure that we would have oil supplies. In other words, the state became the insurer, and did a bad job of quality control, and the insurer, the state (the people) have to pay for taking that risk. WHen they should have maintained liability of all involved. This would have dramatically increased the costs, and made the drilling unprofitable, and it would not have occurred. We transfer risk all over society. Between age groups, between classes, between races. IN fact, that has become the purpose of 20th century government. Transfer. We grant people all sorts of special rights as a means of mutual insurance. THe most controversial is free speech. Much free speech is theft of abstract forms from one person or another (libel and slander). Much of it is erroneous, deceptive, ignorant or intentionally harmful, for the purpose of transferring property from one group to another (Political). We allow one group rights of expression but deny another group the same expression. (Political) Most news opinion for example, upon analysis, is patently false. (Profitable) Most advertising is targeted at the proletariat and middle class, for the purpose of selling the consumer fantasy by appealing to human status senses. We have not (as an absurd example) sued the Bank Of Sweden for awarding Nobel prizes to purveyors of the use of probabilistic Gaussian mathematics in economic theory, which in turn was used to create this debacle of an economy over the past half century or more. So the Nobel Prize was issued and used as a political lever and caused vast harm. The Academy ‘insured’ these theories, and then marketed them. Yet we do not hold them accountable for this damage to society, as we do any other product like hot coffee or ladders. Because we grant them the freedom to err, under the assumption that we are better off this way than the opposite. Capitalism and markets exist to provide calculative capacity to the mediocrity of human minds. Socialist should focus on redistribution and avoid the fallacy of believing their own opinion. Ignorance is mandatory for all human beings. And it is nothing but a childish vanity to think otherwise, and is demonstrable in all fields of human activity. it is even MEASURABLE in most fields of human activity. (in particular, the horrid errors in academic research.) Property rights allow for accountability, because they require risk in order to obtain the rewards from the use of them. It is when we do not respect those rights and their liabilities, and grant limits to the liability for those rights that we have oil spills. **In general there will be no case that you can contrive of where the above sequence of logic does not apply.** That is why the world has adopted capitalism. TOtalitarian capitalism. But capitalism none the less. It’s democracy that’s being abandoned as a goal. Worldwide.

  • Invert The Tax System And Give Control To The States?

    The wealthy states export leftism and money to the poorer states. This redistribution is hidden by the ‘money laundering’ that occurs when taxes are pooled then redistributed through the tax and legal bureaucracies.

    [callout]The wealthy states export leftism and money to the poorer states. This redistribution is hidden by the ‘money laundering’ that occurs when taxes are pooled then redistributed through the tax and legal bureaucracies.[/callout]

    The majority of the federal budget gies to redistributive programs. Effectively an over extended intergenerational insurance company relying upon external uncompetitiveness, internal growth, and internal population The problem with turning programs over to the states is the lack of competence in state and local government. Especially the higher incidence of corruption in local government.

    [callout]People do not hate government. They hate the necessary corruption that comes with human behavior in a bureaucracy whenever the limits of the bureaucrat’s knowledge are exceeded, and the necessary contrivances of bureaucrats who are intentionally isolated from the market and the pricing system, become a predatory liability to the freedoms of the citizens under the rubric of efficiency and practicality – a failure of bureaucracies but not private sector business that is entirely at the service if the pricing system.[/callout]

    What troubles the poorer states despite their receipt of cash benefits is priority given to urban density, urban political gains from immigration, debt expansion., bias against lower productive but self supporting non urban groups, and cultural tyranny. The soution is to limit the federal government to non social programns, to return money to the states as you suggest, and to privatize all possible government services, while increasing audits of the private sector companies. People do not hate government. They hate the necessary corruption that comes with human behavior in a bureaucracy whenever the limits of the bureaucrat’s knowledge are exceeded, and the necessary contrivances of bureaucrats who are intentionally isolated from the market and the pricing system, become a predatory liability to the freedoms of the citizens under the rubric of efficiency and practicality – a failure of bureaucracies but not private sector business that is entirely at the service if the pricing system.

  • Save Bradley? Maybe.

    Save Bradley. The soldier who leaked the video to Wikileaks? Sorry. No dice. People die in war: People kill intentionally in war. All sorts of people die by accident in war. Guilty people die by accident. Innocent people die by accident. Innocent people die because of bad information. Innocent people may die simply because someone used poor judgement. War is dangerous, messy, confusing, frightening, and largely conducted by people who are dehydrated, frightened, under extreme stress, operating largely by instinct and without the time to think, and who are physically and mentally exhausted. Only very silly people think that war is surgical, or manageable, or nice or neat or safe — for anyone at all. And some people are foolish enough to think that soldiers have time to make good judgements. War is scary, dangerous and risky. Thats why people are very cautious of it. And besides that, it’s dangerous for soldiers to behave as if everyone isn’t out to kill them.

    [callout]As a soldier, you are a voluntary, paid, and willing participant in killing, breaking, destroying life and property. And if you don’t believe in it, then you better not join. Because when you join, you give up your right to have an opinion.[/callout]

    As a soldier, you are a voluntary, paid, and willing participant in killing, breaking, destroying life and property. And if you don’t believe in it, then you better not join. Because when you join, you give up your right to have an opinion. That’s how it works. And you’re just trying to steal a paycheck and benefits, or operate as a saboteur if you enter the military without understanding that this is the very purpose and nature of war. We grant soldiers certain special rights when the enter the military. In particular, we allow them to kill people and destroy property. We allow them to do what we allow no others to do. And in exchange for that special right, they lose the right to have an opinion. Just orders are easy to understand. Unjust orders are not. The problem isn’t just or unjust orders. It’s the very fact that there is nothing just or good about war. It’s just war.

    [callout]Immoral orders are one thing. Your choice is not to obey them, resign (accept court martial) and let the military court accept it. That’s the method the military has had for centuries. Accidents, bad judgement, stupidity are part and parcel of war. There isn’t any crime in error, any more than war itself is simply terrible[/callout]

    Immoral orders are one thing. Your choice is not to obey them, resign (accept court martial) and let the military court accept it. That’s the method the military has had for centuries. Accidents, bad judgement, stupidity are part and parcel of war. There isn’t any crime in error, any more than war itself is simply terrible. If you want to leak something, become a journalist. We grant journalists very special rights that we would not grant others. Journalists are more often wrong than write, and create as much bad as good. We simply think the good is worth the bad. If you want to be a journalist, then be one. A journalist’s job is to have a point of view. A soldier’s job is to break stuff and kill people until the other side gives up. Period.

    [callout]If you want to be a journalist, then be one. A journalist’s job is to have a point of view. A soldier’s job is to break stuff and kill people until the other side gives up. Period.[/callout]

    Besides. Telling us that people died by accident, or because someone made an error, or even lost their judgement during a military exercise, is simply stating the obvious. That’s what happens in war. And so the only reason to leak it is to create propaganda for the enemy, and undermine the will of the citizens to support their military. Supporting the military may be a grand game. No one wants to see sausage made. But when you sign up, that’s what you sing up for. And if you break that confidence, those rules, from the inside, then you’re just thief and a criminal, and you deserve to be punished to the fullest extent possible. Now assuming that he leaked it because he’s a young, stupid kid who had not motivations other than to show his friends something cool, is very different from having some cause or purpose. One is bad judgement, one is treason. That’s for the military courts to decide.

  • The Virtue Of Violence

    The Virtue Of Violence: “We do not forego violence in exchange for democracy, we forgo violence in exchange for creating and accessing the market. Democracy is simply a means of hiring and firing the administrators of our markets. We do not exist to serve democracy. Democracy exists to serve the market. And should it cease to do so, it ceases the only reason for its legitimacy or use, and is simply a means of whereby the masses destroy the accumulated prosperity of the market in the greatest act of theft and ruin that a humans can perpetuate. If we are no longer cooperating in order to maintain our market. Then we no longer need to cooperate to maintain our government. And as such, we no longer need to restrain our violence, so that we may recreate a market and a means of administrating it. The principles of non violence and non aggression are a means of stealing from us whenever the market is circumvented by those we hire to administrate it. It is an act of deception and fraud. It is an infinite discount on our contribution of forgone opportunity for the purpose of creating the market. That is the true meaning of the word ‘freedom’: to spend the currency of our violence in creation of the market, our respect for property such that we may cooperate in a division of labor, our time and efforts in the creation of products and services to participate in the market, and our rewards for having done all of the above. Violence is the source of the market, and the market the source of our prosperity, cooperation, and happiness. Violence and it’s use in creating and maintaining the market, is man’s greatest achievement. Violence is a virtue because it is the amount of violence possessed by men, and their creativity in and capacity for using it, and the use of it to create the market, that is the prerequisite for prosperity, and division of labor.” And there is no other argument for the source of the market, our actions in maintaining it, other than we are slaves or children instead of free men, capable of any creative or destructive act we choose. And I will not surrender my violence, and pay the cost of forgone opportunity to create a market from which I, my family, my friends, my tribe, my culture, may prosper, so that someone may enslave me.” – Curt Doolittle Curt Doolittle’s writes on libertarian economics and conservative politics at Capitalism v3.0, and hosts the Libertarian And Conservative Roundtable news feed – a set of syndicated articles opinions and news in the english language from across the web. (From Our Facebook Page)

  • People ‘Earn’ Redistribution By Controlling Their Breeding

    Another Empathic Appeal for the poor on NewsJunkiePost.com, entitled, Poverty: Half The World Lives On Less Than $2.50 A Day Unfortunately, the first prerequisite for prosperity is to control your population’s breeding. The worlds problems are not ‘density’ or ‘pollution’ or ‘capitalism’ but the transfer of life-extending technology to peoples who do not the cultural ability to control their breeding without the limits set on life by agrarian food production. For thousands of years, food production and disease gradients have limited population for people who lack the personal and social technology to control their birth rates so that they may stay within their productive means. Then we in the west, in our compassion, and in our lust to profit, sell these people life extending technologies without demanding that they control their birth rates. Were we to distribute all the wealth of the west to these people they would simply consume it and would match their reproduction to all increases in production, impoverishing the west as well. The division of knowledge and labor, the resulting increases in production, and the virtuous cycle of lowering prices because of this increased production are only one half of the equation. The control of breeding in the (protestant) countries is the other half of the social problem. More countries need a one-child policy, and the infrastructure to support that policy. Unfortunately, corruption is so rampant in these breeding-centers. Thankfully the rate of capitalism’s transformation of the world from agrarianism where children are a productive asset, to industrialization where children are a very high cost, is slowing the overbreeding problem in the ’second world’ of organized states. Incorporation of women into the workforce further controls breeding, and often too much (Japan and Russia). The reason we need women’s participation in the work force, especially in poorer countries, is so that they do not breed their civilizations into permanent poverty. The problem isn’t money. It’s cultural discipline. If we are going to even discuss mobilizing states to correct poverty then we should mobilize states to control breeding. Otherwise, along with our technology of life extension we are simply handing a murder weapon to a madman. “In other words, in 2004 about 0.13 percent of the world’s population controlled 25 percent of the world’s wealth. If we consider the global spending priorities of 1998, the trends were already extremely alarming.” Most people who read have heard of the 80/20 principle. Which means that 20% of the people control resources. This principle was developed by Vilfredo Pareto, for whom it’s named the “Pareto Principle.” He used quite a bit of data to show that in England in particular, 20% of people controlled about everything, and that income was rewarded accordingly. This also supports the value added by people. Despite our rhetoric of egalitarianism and equality, the top third of people are more productive than the bottom two thirds combined. And, at least it appears, that the top twenty percent are more productive (have more impact on generating goods and reducing prices) than the rest combined. The problem for any society is allowing the most productive people to concentrate sufficient capital that they may raise the population into prosperity. After which it’s possible to implement programs of redistribution. you can’t share what you don’t have. Unfortunately, the only value most citizens have in an economy is to provide menial labor and to consume goods and therefore create demand for goods and sevices. Imbalances in assets are needed to allow the creative and productive members of society to concentrate capital (which is the ability to influence others in an organized fashion) so that productivity can be increased. There is no record in history of this system of wealth concentration being abated. If it IS changed, then the vast majority of people on this earth will rapidly die. The problem is instead, to control reproduction and to increase production and continue the ‘virtuous cycle’ while we live within our means, so that we can redistribute something on the order of 20% of our wealth to those who have EARNED that right by the cost of forgoing further reproduction. In other words, you EARN redistribution by controlling your breeding.

  • Pooling Information Is Laundering Information – Governments Are Money Launderers

    What’s the difference between money laundering, general accounting principles as they are currently practiced, the process of taxation, the use of fiat money to create general liquidity, the practice of monthly financial reporting, and the process of electing government officials as proxies for sovereign actions? Nothing. These are all examples of pooling. Pooling information so that causality is removed from that information. They are distortions of the human system of cooperation and coordination. They are an act of money laundering so that the causes and origins of that money can be attributed to mythical causes, rather than identified or deduced to the actual, rational ones. Truth is causality. We can have redistributive government. We can have safe monetary policy. We can disempower the governments ability to generate and foster class and group conflict. We just have to create a form of government that prevents pooling. Pooling is laundering. Laundering is the primary tool of those who commit fraud. Sound incomprehensible to you? It isn’t. It’s actionable. It’s not expensive. It will transform humanity as much as has industrialization. It will radically increase the rate at which humans solve problems together. It will concentrate capital for productive ends, and deliver the results to the populace. We developed libertarianism to stop state theft, and state dissolution of society, and the state’s empowerment of luddite systems of metaphysics like Marxism and Socialism. But in our ambition to do so we lost the purpose of property and trade. We lost our sense of community. Of the general costs of running society that are paid by all men. Of our need to cooperate in groups with others around the world. Libertarianism is a defensive posture. Like conservatism, we need an offensive posture. We need something to promise people in order to maintain our freedom to be the creative class, and to create a competitive society. The answer was laying there since Weber. We were so busy defending ourselves that we didn’t see that answer. Great minds like Hayek and Mises failed. Keynes failed and achieved the opposite of his intent. They were too enamored of the Civic Republican tradition and too optimistic about government. I know that answer. That answer is a program. It will empower conservatives with a message. It will retain a meritocratic society and the propensitiy for hard work, innovation, competitiveness, and retain the most important feature of any culture, it’s symbols of STATUS as those that are founded in the heroic tradition’s self sacrifice and competition for the common good. We can restructure government. We can do it in the USA with amendments. We can rid ourselves of the IRS and the specious justification of government interference in our lives. We can redistribute what is justly the wealth belonging to the people in need. We can. Capitalism 3.0. The Credit Society.

  • Violence Is The Source Of Freedom

    Prior to an important meeting of prominent advocates of freedom, Mises stated roughly, that:

    1) Laissez-faire means ‘let the consumer decide’, it does not mean chaos prevails.

    I translate this more clearly and accurately as ‘a responsible parent forces her child to make decisions’ so that inter-temporal decision making becomes one of the child’s most adept skills. The civic republican tradition states that if a man is successful in life his duty is to help parent, ie: manage and govern, the society, thus spreading his wisdom to others in the community. This is quite contrary to the democratic religion of secular humanism that states that all men have equal merit in political actions.

    2) Hayek’s plan relies upon the support of that segment of the population that is comfortable as they are, but not willing to muster the political effort to preserve the freedom that gives them that comfort.

    I state this fact more simply: ‘Freedom is, has been, and will be, the desire of the creative minority.’

    Civilizations are ruled by minorities willing to use violence or fraud to maintain their positions. Since fraud is expressly what the creative minority seeks to avoid, because trade without recourse to violence requires refraining from fraud, the creative minority can retain it’s freedom only by force, or be constrained by the force or fraud of others.

    It is because violence is both meritocratic and epistemologically fruitful when combined with the need to enfranchise sufficient numbers of the minority to maintain rule. That is why the creative, competitive, and military class built western society. Secular humanism is simply a system of fraud that seeks to transform those costs for maintaining social order into a system of fraud or financial coercion. Violence that is used to defend the system of voluntary trade we call Laissez-Faire, is the most honest of human actions. Pacifism and monotheistic religion are simply a cost reduction effort on the part of the ruling class so that fraud can be supplanted for violence.

    The purpose of the creative class then is to maintain sufficient capacity for violence that it can maintain sufficient capacity to rule, and as rulers, preserve their freedom.

    The use of violence is necessary in order to create the freedom needed to unleash the societies’ creative forces while oppressing its tendency to corruption. Corruption is the normal human response to lower risk and labor in an effort to circumvent the market economy while forcing others to participate in the market economy.

    Violence applied to preserve freedom, that is, voluntary trade and property, is not only honest, it is constructive, and it is the optimum method for human prosperity and cooperation.

    One need not force all men to be free. One need only have sufficient force that he is free.

  • Bad Policy In Democracy Is The Outcome Of War And Revolution Is The Outcome Of Bad Policy

    The war period has been highly controversial, and unfortunately led to a radical minority taking control of our government, and that minority is creating policy that is against the will of the majority of the people. This is another example of the dangers of war. Countries overreach during war. Empires overreach. Democracies, counter to conventional wisdom, are actually very willing to wage war. Yet they are unwilling to continue them. In a democracy, an exaggerated counter reaction develops in response to warfare, because only exaggerated reactions are possible, when the nation consists of opposing forces whose extreme elements determine the candidates. Extremes breed extremes by creating a dichotomy of choice between dramatic positions. These positions then empower the radicals. There is no failure to understand this trend in history among political scientists. There is every reason to advocate it among political theologians. This is because there are very few political scientists that measure what people actually DO, and many political theologians who recommend what people SHOULD do. Evidence is what it is. Democracy is a dangerous construct when government is a debate over the reigns by which one economic class or philosophical class can oppress the other, rather than forming a government where each class has control only over those issues where their class has demonstrated accomplishment. This was the reason for the property requirement in the USA’s founding. While property may be an insufficient requirement in modern society that is no longer dependent upon farming, we do not have houses of government that represent classes and we need a means of empowering houses and regulating participation in the, and we must return to that state of affairs, or continue our decline and class warfare. As I have stated before, we are all unequal in our ability to create violence. Some of us petty interpersonal violence, some of us rabble and protest, some of us revolution and civil war. I only constrain my violence because I feel the state acts justly. But we are nearing a point where I feel that the state has become a means of class oppression, specifically designed to doom me to poverty and dependence in old age, and to do my heritage, my class, and my people to servitude under a false argument for morality. And while I have rejected their please twice now, the next group of people that offers me money to raise a revolution will find me a willing advocate of bloodshed. War is dangerous because it makes a polity and it’s state fragile, and allows radicals to obtain purchase amid the chaos and dissatisfaction, which in turn leads to oppression, which in turn leads to civil war. While the myth of the general strike is a commoner’s revolution, the myth of a violent minority creating a coup is the nobility’s revolution. And I’m getting very close to changing from a public intellectual to a violent revolutionary. It is only marginally more interesting to be personally acquisitive, run companies, and write for a living than it is to wage war. And it is becoming painful enough to pursue the former, that the latter becomes more enchanting by the day. We have an entire american civilization around the great lakes that is in decline, and like china, have coastal areas that oppress the interior. And a southern border under assault because of fear by those in power to protect the southern states. That is our nation’s fragile position. It simply requires fomenting local interests against a universal federal government, and restructuring our government so that it is either representative of the different nations that make up the American empire on the north American continent, or that we destroy our imperial government and restore power to the regions. The world has adopted commercial capitalism. We have completed the act for which our federal government was created: to sell off the american continent. We no longer need to be the world’s policemen. And we are no longer competitive enough and possessed of enough advantage that we can continue to do so. Now we find ourselves the citizens of a corrupt and declining state. It is time to let local areas prosper, and return to the practical matters of civic interest in local development and politics away from our fascination with theocratic democracy, socialism and empire.

  • Credit Funded Jobs Programs

    Another response from “A Shaky Start” on Economists View

    RE: “One way to look at the Bush years is that job growth was lousy so the Fed (and the government policies) subsidized construction jobs by creating a housing bubble. That jobs program abruptly ended. It is now time for a new jobs program. For the longer run, it is time for a different labor policy that will create many more jobs.”

    It’s not just a way to look at it, it’s what happened. THey wanted to create this ownership society as a means of countering the growth of urbanized socialism, and the diminishment of freedom, and competitive prosperity. This is the most important dimension of the multi-dimensional philosophy that they have been following. (We tend to classify them as having a simplistic philosophy but it is not so. It is not useful to underestimate the thought of your competitors.) The rest of it is essentially a universalist christian concept for the material benefit of mankind, (going back to Alexander) that promotes democracy as a means of exporting control over world resources in order to keep prices low, and maintain military and political power. The problem is for their philosophy, that in the end, society has become urbanized, and large and dense. And the epistemology of urbanites is very different from the epistemology of farmers. There is more similarity between the evolutionary tendencies of urbanites and slavery economies, than the evolutionary tendencies of farmers, for precisely these epistemological reasons. THis difference has been understood for a long time, and written about extensively. However, our current status of behavioral economics has not reached a sufficient state of maturity to connect this set of tendencies, with density of population, and availability of opportunity cost at the expense of perceptibility of causality. Furthermore, our calculative institutions (accounting and taxation) as they are currently practiced, effectively launder causality from our information systems, and require us to rely on the farmer vs urbanite dichotomy as a religious or political difference, or ‘taste’, or even as a strategy of class warfare,versus relying upon factual information that allows us to analyze our behavior and make judgments about it. Fortunately we know how to fix these issues, so that the epistemological clarity of farming (visibly of cause and effect) is available to the urbanite. Unfortunately, we have a form of government that distracts us from solving this problem by individual profiteering on the resolution of conflicts between groups and classes. Our biological sensitivity to fairness, which compels us to work hard, and endure costs, in order to punish those who steal from us, or treat us unfairly, seeks to commit violence, control, or punishment between groups in order to feel fairness has been satisfied. However, this masks the underlying problem as one of solving the underlying problem as one of extending human senses, perception, and comparitive and calculative ability such that we can make decisions for collective benefit. There is an argument that such accountability, which would come from epistemological clarity, would still be avoided by the peasantry, because of necessity we much manage consumption through the pricing system. However, redistribution can mollify discontent as it has in much of europe, assuming that there is anything to redistribute, because the population provides competitive value in contrast to other competing groups. I have a more benign view, which is that if a sufficient number of people can understand that this is a problem of providing information, on the scale that was provided by double entry accounting, and the inventory process facilitating taxation, and the standardization of currency, a small number of simple policies can be enacted that will provide us with the information we need, and therefore will allow us to cooperate, profit, and redistribute without the necessity of relying upon democratic negotiation for the purposes of resolving disputes between classes. Capitalism is with us forever as a set of institutions, precisely because humans cannot, in real time, process complexity of information without those institutions. Redistribution is likewise with us forever, since there is a difference between the necessity of incentive and the necessity of calculative power, and the preference for fairness. Likewise, social and economic classes are with us forever, because people requires status differences in order to pursue the mating ritual, and will create them faster than such differences will be redistributed, just as they will create black markets to circumvent anti-capitalist activity. But capitalism and socialism as biases, are only necessary as biases, because we cannot calculate, measure, and compare, the complexity of society in which we live. It may seem simplistic that society can be better managed by implementing changes in accounting, taxes, banking, credit, and the scope of lawmaking, but our society is changing BECAUSE of changes in these things. Instead, these institutions are what made our complex society possible, and our social systems, because they require decision and legislation rather than simply relying on evolution of business practices, simply evolves much more slowly. If we simply correct this problem, we can get away from class warfare, and into cooperating between classes for mutual gain. In other words, we are trying to build a science of economics on testing assumptions because we lack data needed to actually understand causality. We will have a much easier time if we have the data, and we have the technology, in both accounting and record keeping, to maintain causality in our data. Truth=Causality

  • A Note On Argument – A Substitution For Violence

    Paine, We have free speech, logic and rhetoric so that we may make arguments, not a polysyllabic variant of ten year old girls trading insults. I realize that you may resort to these tactics because you are incapable of seeking a truth via argument. I also realize that you post sufficiently in this forum with a small number of other apologists, that you feel justified in your alternate reality, and lack of intellectual rigor. But that does not mean that you are contributing to the dialog, or conducting an argument. Altruism is incalculable (as in unknowable), and does not allow multiple people to cooperate QUANTITATIVELY toward any end requiring risk and action, nor in measuring and understanding outcomes, and it’s result does not produce status differentiation, which is a necessary component of the mating ritual. You are applying the method of the family wherein altruistic actions are perceptible and create an economy of altruistic exchange, rather than the economy wherein such exchanges are imperceptible, and therefore, absent a currency that allows measurement. Calculable ends are not just a matter of preference but of necessity. Status attainment is not just a matter of preference but of necessity. Incentives are not just a matter of preference but of necessity. And the management of the worlds resources in time and space is not a matter of preference but of necessity, since the velocity of that set of exchanges and application in the fulfillment of human needs and wants is just as important as the volume of them. In effect you are simply immature, and are applying the epistemological processes of the family to the extended order of human beings, when numerically, you cannot KNOW about large numbers of people what you can KNOW about a family. Marx was effectively a luddite. And you are as well. We are only similar to one another as farmers and tribal hunter gatherers. But in a vast division of knowledge and labor spread across billions we are increasingly unequal in ability, when ability is judged as the increase in production that decreases prices, and the voluntary coordination of people so that they can act to reduce prices. We can redistribute some of these rewards, as long as the process of doing so is CALCULABLE enough so that status, incentive, and individual calculability are maintained. But we cannot be ‘fair’ as you mean it, because that kind of fairness is not possible to know, comprehend, or calculate. Most often class warriors like yourself simply seek to create a status among their peers by political means that cannot be established by material means. Implicit in your postings (all of them) is a ‘freedom’ that you take for granted, yet do not understand. That is that we grant men free speech, in substitution for withholding our violence, so that we may seek the truth, not simply seek to achieve our ends – violence is a much easier tool for achieving ends. And since a state can only dispense violence — it is its only tool — that violence, and the state, are a continuation of that exchange of violence for seeking truth, not seeking ‘to win’. Therefore if you do not debate rationally, men need not withhold their violence against you. And if they do, they simply allow you to steal from the social order. In other words, if you are not seeking truth and are name calling, then you are both stealing from the public wishing well by which we all pay for the act of free speech so that we may seek truth — not so that we may get what we want. And if it is just to get what we want, then not only can the weak revolt, and return to violence, but so can the strong. Some of us are possessed of petty interpersonal violence, some of us capable of protest and rabblery, some of us capable of slaughter and civil war. That the weak threaten violence is a humor, since the strong are more capable both of its execution, and of paying a minority handsomely to oppress or kill the discontents. You may be one of those people for whom degradation of our ‘group’s’ competitive ability and therefore status and prosperity is acceptable. And if that is the case, then again, you steal from those who seek to perpetuate our advantage and prosperity, by failure to participate in argument. You may be one of those people for whom this is a mask for envy and laziness and simply wants others to take care of you rather than earn for yourself and others. You may be one of those people who is willing to consume cultural capital for current ends, and who is willing to steal from the sacrifices that were made by those generations that came before us. You may be one of those people that thinks, despite the vast ocean of data, that people are infinitely plastic in their behavior, rather than that humans behave in very clear and established manners across all states, nations, civilizations and times, and therefore are a utopian. I don’t know which of these errors you’re making. But I do know that your failure to engage in an argument, is to hide behind an electronic connection as a means of stealing from your fellow man. This may be too subtle for you, but I am casting you as a thief, fool and liar who works against the public good, in order to obtain what you want by deceptive means, rather than what can be obtained by honest voluntary exchange, using the only tools and institutions of cooperation that man has so far invented – those that are calculable, and the institutions that make them so. You are part of the reason democratic capitalism has failed, and why totalitarian capitalism has emerged as the dominant economic force to be employed in the world.