Curt Doolittle

Form: Critique

  • **DON BOUDREAUX SWINGS AND MISSES THE ENTIRE POINT: SOVEREIGNTY** April 27th, 20

    **DON BOUDREAUX SWINGS AND MISSES THE ENTIRE POINT: SOVEREIGNTY**

    April 27th, 2010

    Over on Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux attacks Arizona’s policy, and in doing so, falls into the abyss of economic tyranny: the justification of economic outcome over freedom and sovereignty.

    By demonizing immigrants, these politicians exploit voters’ misinformation about the economic consequences of the alleged devils.

    My response was:

    Don,

    You’re confusing the priority of people’s perceptions of their economic consequences with the priority of people’s perception of their political and cultural sovereignty, as well as their perception of their associated status. These people [Arizonians] have been wronged. They have been wronged by a loss of sovereignty, and a reduction in cultural dominance, and wronged by an ongoing diminution of their status. And people will act far more passionately to defend their social position than they will to an abstract economic benefit. That was, and is, the entire reason behind nationalism. Or did you forget?

    When the use of economic outcomes becomes the primary criteria that one uses to determine all policy, then the economist makes a fundamental error because he ignores the most important of ‘animal spirits’: status and sovereignty. And then the methods of economics become either a religion, or the error of intellectual myopia, or of intellectual vanity.

    Otherwise, economic policies are the tools of tyranny, and the justification of tyranny.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:02:00 UTC

  • **IEA BLOG: UK LIB DEM’S AND ‘TEN YEARS OF SUBSTANTIAL UNEMPLOYMENT’** April 20t

    **IEA BLOG: UK LIB DEM’S AND ‘TEN YEARS OF SUBSTANTIAL UNEMPLOYMENT’**

    April 20th, 2010

    I love reading the UK press, because by and large, the quality of discourse is far beyond that of what occurs in the US. I posted on the IEA Blog, this response to the statement that, coarsely written and paraphrased here as ” Yes the Lib Dem’s may achieve power, but anything is better than ten years of substantial unemployment.” I’m a little cautious about sounding like a critic when I actually think that the IEA produces great thought. But it is far less work to criticize a good idea, than it is to refute an ocean of fantasy and ignorance. Hence I apologize if I come off a critic rather than an advocate.

    Unemployment results from the government’s confusion between consumption and production in that they assume that consumption is equal to production. Their policy of general liquidity that diverted capital from production to consumption and created both recursive asset inflation, and a reduction in competitiveness. This is the broken joint in Keynesian logic. It assumes that increasing liquidity can be put to increases in production. Production means that an activity increases output while decreasing man hours, and costs. The problem for any state is to put captial, not behind consumption, but behind increases in production that cannot be achieved by the private sector.

    … This concentration of capital will create new jobs, and ongoing competitiveness, from which redistributive capital can be siphoned. Private sector production increases will lead to some unemployment. Uncontrolled breeding and immigration will lead to unemployment, and particularly disadvantage second quintile workers. (A step above the bottom). So the state can divert this process by participating in funding international (export) competitiveness. The state must adopt a policy of investment, not liquidity or redistribution. Because only investment allows redistribution.

    (And the government, which consumes such a vast amount of GDP is simply a redistributive system.)

    A free market is a bounded market, because there are LIMITS to private investment. Since all borrowing is, under fiat money, borrowing from the middle and lower classes, and they (as we have just demonstrated) carry the risk of borrowing, then the reward for that investment should be returned to them. As such the state should borrow to create productivity increases (power, transportation, technical innovation, resource exploitation, and education) and return a portion of the profits to the citizenry as redistribution. Laissez faire both puts the citizenry at risk without reward, concntrates capital in the hands of a state sponsored class, and deprives the citizenry of opportunities.

    That is how to prevent ‘ten years of very substantial unemployment’. The party that accomplishes it is meaningless. THe party that ignores it is meaningless.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:00:00 UTC

  • **THE SENTIMENT OF THE BRITISH AND THEIR PSEUDO INTELLECTUAL HYPOCRISY** April 1

    **THE SENTIMENT OF THE BRITISH AND THEIR PSEUDO INTELLECTUAL HYPOCRISY**

    April 18th, 2010

    I read a number of the UK papers every day online. They are better than US papers for a variety of reasons.1

    US papers in general, formed to create homogeneity in the community. That community-centricity is why they’re going out of business in this post-community era. The web allows communities to have disparate voices (like normal people do) rather rather than having a self-centered referee edit, and dramatically bias their opinions toward the fantasy of democratic secular humanism. UK papers are more like the web: they represent factions.

    Our only ‘faction’ is the financial press. The rest, of the papers are almost universally are left-leaning along with our universities, that by and large, teach the religion of democratic secular humanism, as do our grade schools – a notion notion that has something to do with the fact that our children start to lose competitive ground in education about the time we start teaching them the religion of democratic secular humanism.

    If a religion has such a negative competitive impact can it be useful for any productive reason? Is not the measure of any philosophy the competitive standing of it’s practitioners? Of course, these ‘priests of democratic secular humanism’ attribute the a supposed american exeptionalism to their religion. But american exceptionalism is clearly false.

    Differences between US and european productivity are accounted for by differences in the number of working hours. While this productivity generates a lower cost of living in the united states, and while american government consumes less of the GDP than governments do in europe, and while americans live generally better lives, even if they live RISKIER lives, than do europeans, there is no exceptionalism to the culture that is caused by democratic secular humanism. American exceptionalism, which is almost entirely the product of selling off a continent, the military strength to do it, the system of private property rights that allows us to do it quickly and easily, and the use of those profits from selling off the continent being directed to the maintenance of the system of international money, defense and trade and the demand for our primary product: “dollars”, and the profits made by selling those dollars because of that militarily constructed system of money, trade, and soldiery. In other words, “property”, which is the prerequisite for trade, and the conversion of violent efforts at acquisition to peaceful efforts at production and trade, is created by vast military expenditure. The system is prolonged like any social system, by the promise of violence if it is broken. Unlike other systems, it is a system that increases production and makes the ‘pie bigger’ rather than decreases production by wealth transfer.

    Militarism for the purpose of ENFORCING PROPERTY RIGHTS is part of capitalism’s virtuous cycle of dividing labor, increasing granularity of property rights and types, increasing production and decreasing prices, instead of the use of violence to abuse the system of property rights. Militarism is, and can be, a good thing, depending upon how a culture defines it’s property rights. And the more granular the property rights and the better enforced, the more prosperity that people in a culture can generate by virtue of being ABLE to calculate USES of that property.

    People are not pacifist by nature. Humans are the most successful super predator that has ever occupied the planet. People are pacifist because they are weak.2 They are predatory by nature when they are strong. Only by maintaining violence over this system do we make the system one where participation in the game of the virtuous cycle is the only possible solution to the improvement of one’s life and resources. And membership requires two payments: respecting property and control of, and responsibility for, your breeding.

    So, in today’s Times Online there is another article about the desire of the Taliban to start peace talks with americans. The reason for these talks is that Pakistan is no longer allowing the taliban safe haven, and that they are perfectly willing to wait until the Americans leave to reassert their power over their society. By giving the americans a reason for virtuous exit they buy themselves time to regroup, rebuild their numbers, rebuld the poppy and heroin trade, rebuild tehir finances, and retake social positions in the gangster state of afghanistan.

    America took over the British Empire, it’s trade routes, naval bases, currency position, after the first world war. Americas policy difficulties stem almost ENTIRELY from british and french colonial history – the foolish organization of territory by other than tribal boundaries, in the foolish presumption that humans do not act, and prefer to at, according to tribal preferences.

    If America STOPPED maintaining that system, does anyone live under the illusion that there would not be VAST and VIOLENT attempts at filling the vacuum of power? It would be the greatest commercial land grab in human history. It would be bloody. It would be violent. It would involve massive wars, starvation, trade interruption, an the only choice for those that choose not to participate would be to participate or be doomed to poverty and ignorance.

    As an island nation lacking the resources to support itself, with a culture of feminized men so comfortable in their weakness that they have lost the Civic Republican Tradition of the Fraternal Order Of Soldiers (where the British ‘mates’ cultural concept comes from) how would the UK fare in this new world? It would collapse into either switzerland or return to it’s historical position as a backwater.

    Just as there are plenty of silly americans in daily press, there are an almost unlimited of silly, ignorant, self deluding brits commenting as well. And these comments are important because they express popular sentiment.

    One of the comments left on this article is by a nobody named Peter Codner who aside from being a barrister and apparently confusing analytical psychology for something other than another post-christian cult of absurd metaphysics, states that “The semblance to Vietnam which was an humiliating defeat for the americans is uncanny. the yanks will run away.”

    While I understand that short time preference is a result of social class – meaning that we can educate people to use advanced tools and logic but not if we do not extend their time preference so that they can think beyond their experience, and learn that their experience and ability to comprehend that experience is profoundly limited – I fail to understand how one can live in today’s society and not grasp the problem of extending time preference so that we see all actions and outcomes in both their short, medium and long term contexts.

    Running from an unnecessary battle for political reasons is very different from both running away from your history, and your own failure as a nation, and your responsibility as a nation for the problems you created.

    The Yanks won almost every battle in Vietnam. The loss was political, because of home political tensions not a military or economic defeat. And it still achieved it’s strategic ends. As did subverting the soviets in Afghanistan.

    Democracies lack the stomach for sustaining war. And they do so because of people like you. Of course, such sentiment comes comfortably to Brits, who lost their entire empire trying to stop Germany from taking it from them. Frankly the world would be better off if we had let them. Certainly Americans would be – we would not have to become an empire and live under a government-of-empire, if we did not have to take over the British empire when Britain collapsed, like reed. We would not have to protect a world trade and financial system that only served to inflate our entablements. We would not have to deal with the after effects of poor British (and French) judgement that left behind a post colonial Network of violence and poverty around the world.

    Brits are a silly, petty, pointless people who inhabit little more than an empty client state living off it’s heritage, and propping up it’s ridiculous system by immigrating it’s way into a temporary fictitious prosperity, by fomenting consumption at the expense of it’s heritage and culture, at the expense of producing increases in productivity, where the government consumes 50% of GDP, the military is only slightly less of a Potemkin village than is the laughable Canadian.

    I expect this kind of behavior of the french, who ceased being a world power when the effects of killing off their aristocracy and descending into Bonapartism ( democratically justified totalitarianism ) and are happy today to simply rest on past glory, consume their accumulated historical investment in a single century, and who because of it are simply obstructionists – obstruction is the only political power they have – so it is the political power that they exercise.

    Brits are happily self-congratulatory to live under the US common man’s soldierly umbrella of protection, and his society’s necessary militarism while criticizing him on a daily basis. 3 A “thank you” might be more appropriate than your petty slander. But then again, while no man is a hero to his debtors, a decent man does not slander his debtors. Only an indecent one. False wisdom is the last refuge of the weak whose current technique is to hid behind the cloak of intellectual and moral fraud.

    But then, isn’t that the purpose of all religions?

    In the current ‘intelligence system’ it’s recommended that americans read Al Jazeera, Pravda, China News Daily, BBC News as well as the NYT. All are biased but the important issue is to know how biased our own papers are.

    See Kagan in Power and Weakness, as well as Sorel in Reflections On Violence, as well as Keegan’s History Of Warfare.

    What will happen if the middle-american cultures who supply military talent ever figure out how much contempt that they are held in both by their coastal and international critics?

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:59:00 UTC

  • **IEA THINKS TAXIS ARE NOT A PUBLIC GOOD** April 17th, 2010 Over on the IEA Blog

    **IEA THINKS TAXIS ARE NOT A PUBLIC GOOD**

    April 17th, 2010

    Over on the IEA Blog, Eric Masaba asks the question: Why do black cabs cost more than Concorde?

    I couldn’t point out ALL the holes in this article, because the IEA blog limits the number of characters per comment. I find the argument for the virtue of brevity a ‘cute’ one because affirmations are the most brief of comments, while refutations are the longest.

    The state subsidizes the ‘Black Cabs’ of London.

    Hackney cab drivers inexplicably enjoy a rule stating that no one else can describe a taxi service as a “taxi” in their marketing, and the important restriction that no one else can pick up passengers on the street. These regulations have deep historical foundations, dating back to the days of Dick Turpin. In today’s world, they are anachronistic, anti-competitive and pointless.

    London cab drivers are a pleasure to deal with. They are an intrinsic part of the tourist trade. The Danes pay an entire social class to stay home so that the average clerk in a train station is educated, literate, well mannered, and a pleasure to deal with.

    When there are price comparison sites for insurance, airlines, hotels, holidays and office supplies, where we can buy the same product from a myriad of suppliers at different prices, how is it that there are very strict rules requiring that Hackney drivers receive a minimum wage for every mile driven yet private hire drivers do not?

    Because the market is an unlimited physical space and the streets of London are a limited physical space (and the tube is a monopolized space. And therefore Cabs require a very simple set of regulations in order to maintain quality.

    Why is it good for certain stripes of taxi driver to be able to oblige people in London to pay higher rates than the market would support if such a law was not in place?

    Why is it a good for the state to regulate any kind of competition?

    Why do the same drivers, who expect to be able to choose what clothes they wear (and how much they pay for them) and which airlines and car insurance firms they use, want to deny travellers in London the basic freedom to choose another vehicle service they can hail at the airport or on the street?

    They don’t. You can hire a car from the airport. You just can’t pick someone up on the street.

    If people want to pay for the superior knowledge that the Hackney drivers clearly possess, they will do so. If they do not care, they will find cheaper alternatives until the market has informed the black-cab community what customers really think and what price they are willing to pay.

    They are not paying for the knowledge. The state is using a knowledge criteria to create a hurdle for market entry. Just like they do for just about every kind of specialist.

    Many people are disgusted with the special treatment bankers received, but through the price controls and regulations on taxis in London, transport markets are being distorted to favour one type of vehicle provider.

    Bankers recieved special treatment because the state printed money without regulating it and forced banks either to compete for profits or to go out of business. This process of moral hazard created large banks that are pseudo governmental agencies, that were so responsible for subsidizing the national payroll and cash disribution and management system that if they were not rescued then the crash would have been worse. On the other hand, the state CREATED the moral hazard. But it did not have to. The problem has been that creating the ‘rules’ of the fair game in banking (defining the properties of property and it’s rules of transfer) has become extraordinarily complex because the object of definition has become exceedingly plastic. Derivatives and new financial instruments were a new form of property that many of us decried at the time, but that was unregulated because both the state and the purveyors of these new devices foolishly bought the argument that it was possible to insure that kind of risk, and secondly, because

    So, I have to disagree with the IEA’s position. Travel to NYC, Chicago, LA and ask yourself if the London policy is better or worse for everyone involved. And if we subsidize transportation like subways why cant we subsidize Cabs. If price is a concern, then If you want another choice, call a less expensive cab company on your cell phone. Prices aren’t everything. In fact, low prices and full competition in a market often accomplishes the lowest cost service at the lowest quality that is tolerable by consumers, and bars quality from availability within a geography. (Home Depot and Walmart in the US, and superstores versus butchers, bakers and the like in Europe). I am happy that superstores exist to provide additional choice, but only if there is a replacement ‘tax’ for using them by distancing them.

    From this simple analogy of taxis and tubes versus superstores and specialty stores, we can illustrate that reduced prices and a free market within geographic boundaries produce commodities, and thereby prevent societies from capitalizing long term values of aesthetics, choice, and the ’special’ environments we adore across all of europe in favor of a bland, disposable environment.

    We restrain competition in order to raise prices and therefore concentrate capital and we do it in many ways: political subsidy (money transfers like taxation, redistribution, and outright subsidy) constraining the market by qualification (lawyers, doctors and london cabbies), and constraining the market with monopolies (public transportation like Tubes and Buses).

    We unrestrain the market to reverse the concentration of capital and to reduce prices, and we do it in many ways: political subsidy of

    The natural order of man is to attempt to circumvent the market. The free market is a byproduct of the civic republican tradition’s advocacy of meritocratic equality. It is a rebellious movement against the control of markets and the expropriation of wealth by the state. Markets are a solution to corruption that asks us to create fair competition among equals and to maintain that set of ‘rules’ we call “competition in the market”.

    However, the natural behavior of man is to circumvent that market. The means by which he circumvents it are those tools we consider fair market competition: reducing prices, increasing choices, advertising and marketing. Not all cultures have taken this route. In fact, in history, the free market is an exception that concentrates wealth in hte hands of the monied, productive and creative minority. THis concentration benefits all by decreasing prices for nearly everyone. It limits the power of capitalists as long as there is enough money in circulation to create inexpensive competition.

    But since the culture or state determines the definitions of property (the means of calculating the use of opportunities to act) the rules for any ‘game’ are particular to that game. Rules are not universal to all games. They are plastic. And this comparison of Taxis to Tubes is perhaps one of the best ways to illustrate that these rules are inconsistent.

    But what may not be obvious is the DISTORTION that is created by the myth that rules must be equal for some things and unequal for others. Or, that lowest prices are the ultimate virtue to be sought by economsts and political economists.

    As a libertarian, I care that the choices available to me are not constrained by

    Concentrating capital attracts talent to the private sector where it is skimmed by private individuals, and those who lack talent to the public sector where it is skimmed by bureaucracy. Yet this is what most cultures seek to impose: expropriation by the bureaucracy.

    WE also constrain capitalists, and unconstrain capitalists. Capitalists can temporarily distort a market by applying capital that profits one company or anotther, requiring competitors to rely upon capital or depart. They can do this by simply extending debt, so that prices may be decreased in the anticipation of driving competition out of the market, and later increasing their share of the market as these competitors disappear. the problem with this technique is that talent accumulated in the industry is sometimes forced out. Niches are abandoned (the wall mart and home depot effect).

    The state acts like a disruptive capitalist creating temporary price decreases in return for decreased niche services, and in doing so makes it impossible to concentrate capital in niche excellences. It makes it impossible to subsidize a public good: choice of the more expensive, better, prettier.

    The purpose of the London cabbie is largely to create a public ‘good’. It enforces quality so that quality personnel can afford to work in the industry (rather than the horrid service, delivered by the filthy, ignorant and incompetent in US cities).

    Prices would drive down quality, and all that will happen is that you will need additional regulation to managed an impoverished and corrupt network of marginal businesses that deliver cheap but intolerable service that prevents quality competition from competing in the market.

    If you are willing to spend money on the tube. You have no argument against spending money to maintain a quality system of taxis. Just because market mechanics are POSSIBLE for taxis and IMPOSSIBLE for tubes, that doesn’t mean that taxis are not serving the same function as tubes.

    Lowest costs does not generally create a good. It creates a marginal enterprise.

    Aesthetics are forms of capital that are perhaps, the best investment that any civilization can make.

    For a country like the UK, whose history is an industry, you’d think that such a principle would be better understood. For a country that is creating demand through immigration, cash by selling off it’s assets, and the illusion of prosperity by dilution, inflation and redistribution, rather than by increases in productivity, it is understandable why a myth of exceptionalism would be a useful distraction from the fact that the UK is selling off its exceptionalism and it’s heritage, and would do even more so along with it’s taxi subsidies.

    Prices alone do not a world make. The purpose of the market is exploration. The purpose of unbridled market is prevent government exploitation. THe purpose of the regulated market is to capitalize SOMETHING for a social good. And not all social goods are consumables. Some social goods capitalize distortions to create beauty, which is a high return for a society, as all monuments, arts and architecture demonstrate.

    So, instead of universally pursuing consumption as an ultimate good. Instead of the keynesian virtue of spending. Perhaps we should balance our capitalist strategy with the art of saving. It took english civilization a very long time to create a culture of saving, and the institution of interest, so that the middle aged could save until they were old, and the old could lend to the young, in a virtuous cycle of investment that distributed the risk of long term calculation across a vast number of people, and wherein retirement security was an insurance scheme for the underclass rather than a mandate of the majority. This virtuous cycle was undermined. Perhaps we should return to it, and to other forms of capitalizing our civilization, so that we leave something behind for our heirs rather than the record of a visitation by locusts.

    Subsidizing quality is the entire point of aesthetics and the arts. And capitalizing everything from street signs, to cabbies to historic buildings to libraries and museums is an antidote to anti-historicism.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:57:00 UTC

  • **CONSERVATIVES CANNOT ARTICULATE THEIR PROMISE, AND A WARNING IS NOT ENOUGH** A

    **CONSERVATIVES CANNOT ARTICULATE THEIR PROMISE, AND A WARNING IS NOT ENOUGH**

    April 14th, 2010

    The conservative movement lacks skill in articulating it’s position. It does so because it has shifted from the intellectual debate of the 50’s and 60’s to the emotional debate of the post 60’s era. It has, unlike the libertarian movement, failed to provide a vehicle for educating conservatives with POSITIVE statements rather than negative castigations. Conservatives have largely failed to develop a language and ’scripture’ because they do not have a solution other than to return to the nineteenth century classical liberal model.

    That model will never rise again. It only occurred because government was very weak, and the individual entrepreneurial need to expand and populate the continent required both private ambition and private capital. It required the conversion of resources into taxable resources, which would empower the government. Conversion requires business people the way conquest requires soldiers. And therefore commercial society was in control during that period.

    Our current problem is not to convert land into taxable assets. It’s to maintain the international system, and our ability to financially manage the international system. We have been paying for it by trade advantage for some period of time, and then selling dollars for the past forty years. Liberals do not want us to maintain that system but they want the rewards that come from it to be redistributed. Conservatives object to this position. Neither really understands that there is no american exceptionalism except american military exceptionalism.

    Our future problem is that in redistributing the wealth of that military network of trade and banking we have directed too much of the profit to bankers and not enough to the citizenry. Conservatives do not like this privatization of wealth any more than liberals do. But most importantly conservatives do not like being castigated and treated as

    Being conservative simply means taking a gradual approach to social change and particularly with respect to the financial, family and military traditions. It means being skeptical that our visions of the future will come true, and looking at the world as what people ACTUALLY DO not what we WISH they would do.

    We as a nation are notorious for predicting an optimistic future that cannot or has not occurred. The dialog around our prosperity is often inaccurate and self-congratualtory rather than factual. We have transformed our culture of evangelical christianity into one of evangelical democratic secular humanism.

    Conservatives are skeptics. They may speak in antiquated language, because that is their language. They may fail to articulate their position effectively because of that language, but they ACT conservatively, think conservatively, and treat the world conservatively.

    This is why conservatives are, in general, more prosperous – and frankly, happy. And the sacrifices that they make in order to be prosperous are material to them. They remember them. And therefore they resent those sacrifices being ’spent’ by others who do not make the same sacrifices.

    Monetarists and capitalists are not conservatives. They may hide under conservatism. But they are not conservatives. The conservative class is a military, middle and craftsman class and it always has been and always will be. It is the ‘residue’ of the european fraternal order of soldiers at the bottom, and at the top, it’s a ‘residue’ of the middle class movement that revised and adopted civic republicanism during the enlightenment as a way of transferring power from the kings and church to the middle class. it is an alliance of the military and middle class.

    Liberalism (socialism, communism) is a ‘residue’ of a union of the priestly cast and the peasantry. Academia is simply an outgrowth of the church. The peasantry has always allied with the church, and the church has always had power because of it’s support by the peasantry.

    And that said, we do not have a separation of church and state. Our state religion is now democratic secular humanism. We are now a state-run-religion using the myth of division of church and state to oppress (or reform) religions so that we can have a state sponsored church.

    That’s it. That’s the articulated conservative position.

    The republican party collects conservative coalitions. The republican party is not a conservative party. conservatives join the republicans because they have no choice. They see the party as corrupt.

    People are complex and only join parties because of limited choice mandated by our ‘winner takes all’ form of government, which fosters class warfare.

    In fact, all political decisions exist on a spectrum or bell curve. There are a myriad of political decisions to be made. There are a myriad of people with different abilities to understand each political opinion. Each person is interested in a myriad of decisions. Parties are collections of people with opinions. Very skilled people tend to be highly unsatisfied with party choices. Very unskilled people tend to simply support their party of nearest interest. Parties therefore pick platforms that make enough people happy that they can get into power.

    arguing that conservatives want to keep things asa they are, is a silly argument. The objection is simply illogical. The question instead, is whether liberals propose a solution that conservatives can live with, and wether conservatives can propose a solution that liberals can live with.

    If we had listened to the liberals in the last century we would have ended up like either Russia or China. If we had listened to conservatives we would not have had our progressive social changes. It’s the competition of ideas that gives us the choice as a body politic.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:43:00 UTC

  • **Notes On “Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide To Economic Theology”** April 13th, 2010 I’v

    **Notes On “Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide To Economic Theology”**

    April 13th, 2010

    I’ve purchased two books, this one “Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide To Economic Theology”, as well as “Economics As Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond”. There are any number of books on this theme.

    Note: This book was a waste of time and money. It is a silly marxist pamphlet. I can summarize it as “poor people breed too much and capitalism doesn’t care” when in fact, capitalism simply makes it very expensive to have children and those who breed irresponsibly are punished abstractly by enduring poverty rather than forced by village and tribal elders to leave their child exposed and dead. The vast silliness of the logic in this book is unworthy of further commentary.

    I’m surprised that this notion of economic religion is not more commonly discussed in the venal press. But it is too valuable a tool of those who wish to empower a democratic state and it’s politicians who are, quite frankly, at a loss to apply something other than the practicalities of getting elected, or the mysticisms of our founding documents, christian religion, or marxian fantasy.

    I start with Adam’s Fallacy.

    Using the KIndle edition on a mac, and therefore cannot annotate in place, and am not sure of page numbers. (This is a problem we need to fix, because we’re going to increasingly use dynamic text, which requires paragraph numbering not page numbering. Anyone remember wordperfect versus word?)

    PREFACE

    I am not sure I buy the argument that smith created a fallacy by separating market life from personal life. The Wealth Of Nations (TWON) is only the second half of his philosophy. the first is The Theory Of Moral Sentiments. (TOMS) They together represent his insight that the division of labor increases production and that human sentiments to cooperation at both the intimate, interpersonal, local, social and global level. While we are only in the preface, I’m not sure I buy the assumption because it’s too loose an assertion. Instead, I blame Knight and Keynes. Smith is nothing but a moral philosopher.

    “Contemporary economics has grown into a major intellectual industry” I hope this is elaborated further because it’s the the same problem presented by the clergy. People depend on perpetuating the faith.

    “Teaching economics reinforces the world view I call Adam’s Fallacy”. I don’t think so. I think that’s the crowd post 1900.

    “Teaching students to think like economists .. is hard.. and thinking like an economist … is just as value laden as any other way of thinking about society”. The idea in economic reasoning is the broken window problem: the need for all humans to think in terms of secondary causes and to follow the chain of secondary causes. This teaches people to think more deeply about the trade offs of both personal and political decisions. Yes it’s hard for people. Otherwise we wouldn’t need a market.

    CHAPTER 1

    “The moral fallacy of smith’s positin is that it urges us to accept direct and concrete evil in order that indirect and abstract good may come of it.”

    Well, now, we need a definition of evil, don’t we?

    “neither smith nor … his successors have been able to demonstrate rigorously ad robustly how private selfishness turns into public altruism”.

    I don’t think he says that. I think he says that by participating in the market europeans will have fewer wars.

    CH1 – The Division Of Labor

    “Smith leaves unanswered the chicken and egg question of whether it is ultimately the human propensity to truck and barter that lads to the division of labor, or the division of labor that compels people to exchange.”

    Isn’t this a false dichotomy? People have always bartered and exchanged. the division of labor is simply more profitable for the individual. Ask any art-jeweler or craftsperson, who starts out producing one offs, but determines that quality of life depends upon his or her development of a product line that can reliably produce revenue, so that she is free to create those individually interesting pieces.

    The VIrtuous spiral of economic development.

    “Smith puts his faith in the ultimate benefits to be gained from the virtuous spiral to in crease standards of living and enhance the wealth of …. the sovereign.”

    “Smith

    SAYS LAW

    “… rise in labor productivity has at least one immediate and negative effect: a reduction in the demand for labor in the industries undergoing raid rises in productivity. …. unemployment can result.”

    “thus say’s law is based on a belief in the efficiency of the financial institutions of a capitalist economy”

    I don’t think so. I think it’s based on the belief that no other alternative is available while retaining the productivity RELATIVE to other nations, so that wars can be averted, and we can overcome the myth of the fixed-pie.

    “some of these displaced workers will eventually find alternative jobs”

    Yes, they will. They just might not like them. The alternative is that people should subsidize workers to produce goods at increased cost of goods to themselves and/or that the entire enterprise of production that employs ALL workers will fail to compete for market share against people from OTHER nations. In other words, it’s the smallest of three evils.

    “It appears that over long periods of time, says law does operate”

    Well, of course it does. At this point I’m frustrated because I don’t understand the problem. I know marxian fantasy must be in here somewhere by now.

    THEORIES OF VALUE

    I cannot for the life of me discern what point he is trying to make here.

    MARKET PRICE AND NATURAL PRICE

    Well, since the time of smith we understand that the labor theory of value is flawed and we have dismissed this part of smith as an error. So I don’t see this as material.

    he states in many more words ,that natural prices and market prices are in disequilibrium at all times. This makes no sense because a natural price is a tool for us to use to conceptualize movement, and a market price is a thing that comes into existence. So far either he is trying to accumulate a later argument or he’s simply confused.

    “contemporary economics on the the hand, focuses more theoretical attention on the the ideal imaginary state of equilibrium where market price and natural price coincide.”

    At this point he is trying to build an argument upon a falsehood – the labor theory of value and natural price. I hope that this is going somewhere. Either that or he is trying to state that the DSEM construct is a myth, and we all understand that it’s a myth. There is no bell curve. There is no equilibrium. It’s just a construct we use so that we can apply math because without that construct we CANNOT apply math.

    WAGES

    “… wages have the social function of allowing workers to reproduce themselves” (he means have children). “In order for wages to perform this function, they have to be high enough to allow workers to buy a subsistence standard of living”

    Ok, so this is supposed to be that the poor have the right to breed? So when did this become a social good? the problem for mankind since industrialization is that people simply don’t die, and they’re expensive. Our problem is overpopulation not supporting the unproductive people’s fantasy of unrestrained child birth.

    “Smith associates high wages and a high workers standard of living with a growing capital stock”

    Yes, I agree.

    at this point I understand that he is providing contemporary context. I read the rest of chapter1 and move to chapter 2 in the hopes that he is going to provide some insight here. Note to authors. Make your premise first then prove it so we don’t have to guess our way through your fantasy.

    FAR AHEAD

    “Behind this…. lies the unpleasant truth about capitalist social relations. The organization of the social division of labor through commodity exchange and wage labor systematically inverts the ordinary logic of human relationships.”

    What logic is that? That people have not exposed children for years, or even outright murdered them or sold them into slavery if they could not support them? In fact, breeding differences account for large differences in the prosperity of difficult cultures. So is this the author’s point? That he has some fallacious concept of the ‘right to breed’, instead of the ‘responsibility to only breed a child you can afford to feed?”

    Then he goes on to say that marx systematically breaks down and…. helps us understand. What he does instead is create a system of justifying primitivism.

    Look. We converted from hunter gatherers to farmers. We figured out how to control our breeding by creating the ‘family’ and monogamy. This made families economic units that could manage resources.

    We invented the market, and the tools of quantitative cooperation we call money, accounting, numbers, interest and credit. We increased our ability to breed further, but penalized those who have less foresight.

    Capitalism creates temporary extraordinary wealth then forces people to control their breeding in order to participate in the wealth. Those who don’t, suffer because of their choices.

    We just have a more abstract way of controlling population.

    ( INSERT A VAST AMOUNT OF JUSFICATIONISM OF MARX HERE. )

    ESCAPING ADAM’S FALLACY

    “thus we cannot look to capitalism to solve inequality and poverty”

    That is correct. WE can only look to capitalism to provide the incentives for controlling reproduction so that the poor do not doom themselves to perpetual poverty in a world where children do not provide security or comfort but are a drain on resources.

    In other words. This is a silly marxist book, and I wasted two hours reading it. The chinese solved it with the one child policy, and it was a good policy and successful. Rather than redistribute ourselves into mutual poverty and regale the thought leaders of the past, you could simply write a book on the value of the one child policy, or at least, pay men and women to sterilize themselves. Capitalism makes poverty a choice of reproduction.

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    2 Comments

    CurtD

    April 14th, 2010 at 1:27 pm

    From a comment on KVAMS blog. [http://kvams.wordpress.com/…/adams-fallacy-by-duncan-foley/…](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fkvams.wordpress.com%2F2010%2F04%2F08%2Fadams-fallacy-by-duncan-foley%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR2JIAIzxFveUkqUiYKeiTXLXbaLTX6NRJW3Gu5dGWYZNkjzLpjptZEP-XM%23comment-175&h=AT0cL7Q2FG02b8LFg3RbWwsIGmEluDNuns7-dp4ah37K-OSJ1HaEmwC3MPjnfoP24oREXbOQCsVz8P0-FjyFSDjnQ9qObSqGRscqFwH-wEKqL9eAiu2CS179X8FQsPRoK-sTa26txBs1rE4VnwFT1E9DXXkg2wMROqaKhrZojYrIkOfFchcgoEResqkl3Wj3kX2sNC2-Xl3fA6zJkxyPq32Ow0I_6lIdeADuOgttq4wkCzYmLbSfEEh4jquZP5vW8yH7_TkY599HMytmUQbWalSUjwdNNPmLp9V9iBbmXAChS8MI6MMOlUSTBPF6_ih5PnHzucpXllhiGHavTpKkTc8EvPXUgsPpIxG4I53yu_oc9ktUbZ5NVSYrBt9IHnaHOfSOlohFMnxJ0Mx3bgydJgqdZo4CRyQrM5PYfM0aNsCliXpTk6ch-TIdK8-B0gDt-GL7fK0_f2sfosC-luq43UBUDVxaNNv5zVS2vgUDv8uTTZAa-fckdtJ9hRP03IWq8nhnh8rJ4q7bm8fAmmciJjtuUGnBHpX9Xle6C_fDzGXLFa0paNZyvsrOH9WIMhdLAoaIIXg1bbyZMsugQOuJ-3ZcdN3gEziTdvW5hS_4bXq65-5An32STctoRK_65VEjjIU9REv9Yr8ukLXMtXon)

    I’m sorry but I read this book in detail, took copious notes, and it became painfully obvious early on that the authors only criticism is that the division of knowledge and labor that creates the virtual cycle of prosperity does not account for taking care of people who cannot control their breeding and doom themselves to perpetual poverty because of their inability to control their reproduction.

    The author fails to state his own fallacy, that societies no matter how primitive control their populations and punish breeders one way or another. This is his assumption, that primitive societies take care of their young rather than expose them, or outright kill them or control their breeding. And he fails to state that the only reason these people can LIVE today, even if in poverty, is because of the productive virtuous cycle of those people who DO control their breeding.

    The problem for every civilization is creating prosperity (increased production) FASTER than people breed. From that context, the irresponsible breeders are using the virtuous cycle to create steal from and undermine the creators of the virtuous cycle.

    The whole point of capitalism is that it increases quality of life but increases the COST of each human life, and therefore controls population by CHOICE OF PARTICIPANTS rather than by murder and starvation.

    Basically this book is another silly marxist bit of apologist drivel that does nothing to advance anything in society and I’m sorry I wasted two hours working on it.

    CurtD

    April 14th, 2010 at 1:34 pm

    Of course I see this as a ’sex and fertility residue’ which is that women have the silly belief that they have the ‘right’ to have children, and others have the ‘duty’ to pay for their ‘right’. And that children are a ‘good’ rather than a cost. Rather than the obvious reality that children are a good only if you can afford to raise them and not create a burden on society for having done so. And women have that luxury only because increased production has made it possible for women to have their children without having them starve to death, and daeling with the suffering of watching. in other words, they are offloading the responsibility to control their breeding onto someone else. In other words, the market makes it possible for women to irresponsibly bear children without bearing the consequences of providing for or dealing with the emotional pain of the child’s starvation and death.

    (Of course, this is intentionally inflammatory.)

    Now in reality, the point is that we have to and always have had to, control our breeding, and that the path to prosperity is increasing production while decreasing our rate of reproduction.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:41:00 UTC

  • LEGIT AD HOM’S AGAINST DOOLITTLE (via CD) Eric, Just ’cause it’s come up again.

    LEGIT AD HOM’S AGAINST DOOLITTLE

    (via CD)

    Eric,

    Just ’cause it’s come up again. Pls Post. I prefer to stand out in front of criticism rather than let people presume I’m making a moral claim about myself. I’m not.

    List of legitimate Ad Hom’s.

    – Multiple marriages. Put business before family.

    – Multiple relationships. Put business and philosophy before relationship.

    – High risk biz ventures most of which succeeded – not all – producing expected downsides when not.

    – Ruthless biz practices, some of which made others rich, that resulted in various suits, as well as various tremendous windfalls.

    – Continuous civil warfare during and after divorce that will continue for the next four to six years easily.

    – Mid life crisis after near death experiences resulted in a bit of a wild ride for a bit.

    – Obsessively – zero tolerance for ‘slights’.

    – Will fight to the end on ‘principle’ – even if it makes no material sense to do so.

    – More than slightly clueless about normie life and experience, and insensitivity to normie world views.

    – Considers other people subjects in social science experiments.

    – Considers each business an experiment in social science.

    – Wealth is merely a means of financing experiments in social science.

    – Considers people vehicles for achieving success in business or social science.

    – “One cares for domesticated animals and pets, one cannot engage in reciprocity with them.” or more fashionably: “A lion doesn’t concern himself with the opinion of sheep. “

    – Definitely part of the Yuppie-Wall Street Generation.

    These are legit ad homs. They are true. Everyone knows them.

    They also have nothing to do with the work on Natural Law and the Logic and Science of the Social Sciences.

    I am not a good person. I succeed because I am an infovore, competitive, with ruthless, predatory, and driven. That is all. I am however, somewhere between a good and great philosopher of jurisprudence, testimony, and the natural law of cooperation.

    I am also not a normie living a working class lifestyle with little exposure to the power structures and systems of cooperation and conflict in civilizations across the world and across time.

    I am not a good person, and don’t claim to be.

    Truth doesn’t require I be a good person.

    It requires only that my work is not false.

    -CD

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-15 14:56:00 UTC

  • I’ve followed Jon for a long time, and his work has helped me with mine. He crea

    I’ve followed Jon for a long time, and his work has helped me with mine. He creates value from his position popular, intellectual, and organizational. My criticism is of the public virtue signaling – same for all the center-left Jewish authors (Pinker etc) – it’s not their work.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-09 01:28:40 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1159637585549058048

    Reply addressees: @tomfcreo @JonHaidt

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1159634210463735808

    IN REPLY TO:

    Original post on X

    Original tweet unavailable — we could not load the text of the post this reply is addressing on X. That usually means the tweet was deleted, the account is protected, or X does not expose it to the account used for archiving. The Original post link below may still open if you view it in X while signed in.

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1159634210463735808

  • The color of one’s skin does not serve as rhetorical camouflage, from which to i

    The color of one’s skin does not serve as rhetorical camouflage, from which to issue Hate Speech (Yes, you Roseanne) under pretense of virtue signals.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-08 01:29:45 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1159275470287966209

    Reply addressees: @RoArquette

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1159274578126016512

    IN REPLY TO:

    Unknown author

    @RoArquette So, to pose the rude question of the day, as to drive home the point:

    —“If the Ashkenazim are White then was the Holocaust White genocide?”—

    (The Cake Shall Not Be Eaten Twice.)

    Disambiguation of conflationary deceits, is the means of falsifying Pilpul and Critique.

    Original post: https://x.com/i/web/status/1159274578126016512

    IN REPLY TO:

    @curtdoolittle

    @RoArquette So, to pose the rude question of the day, as to drive home the point:

    —“If the Ashkenazim are White then was the Holocaust White genocide?”—

    (The Cake Shall Not Be Eaten Twice.)

    Disambiguation of conflationary deceits, is the means of falsifying Pilpul and Critique.

    Original post: https://x.com/i/web/status/1159274578126016512

  • (Technically speaking Roseanna, you aren’t white: meaning one of the ethnic euro

    (Technically speaking Roseanna, you aren’t white: meaning one of the ethnic european gene pools – and you don’t identify as white, and you never have, and so you’re just POSING, VIRTUE SIGNALING, and a RACIST that hates white people..)

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-07 22:46:37 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1159234416515981313

    Reply addressees: @RoArquette

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1159152878440701952

    IN REPLY TO:

    Original post on X

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    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1159152878440701952