Curt Doolittle

Form: Critique

  • STRANGE CRITICISM FROM BRUCE KOERBER (from elsewhere) –Still not a peep about:

    STRANGE CRITICISM FROM BRUCE KOERBER

    (from elsewhere)

    –Still not a peep about: “Even though it is perfectly true and perfectly logical that humans are subjective beings there are some who cannot fathom a scientific subjective methodology.”– Bruce Koerber

    The question is not whether we can practice a subjective methodology. Nor is it honest to use psychologism as a criticism when the question is whether such a method is a logical possibility or is empirically demonstrable. (It is dishonest actually – and psychological criticism is immoral because it is dishonest.) Instead, the question is whether subjectivity yields results – empirically it doesn’t, empirically it hasn’t, and logically it can’t. This is because of a tragically simple reason: subjective testing is not axiomatic in that it is complete (the distinguishing property of an axiom). But it is instead, that economic laws, constitute “laws” (in the spectrum of intuition, hypothesis, theory and law) meaning that it they are general rules of limited precision, widely accepted, that we cannot find false.

    We can certainly TEST economic statements. But we cannot deduce economic phenomenon, nor can we observe economic phenomenon, particularly emergent economic phenomenon, without empirical methods. We can test data all day long. We do.

    The logical possibility does not exist. We cannot and do not imagine (deduce) economic phenomenon, because economic phenomenon are emergent and inter-temporally equilibrating without every reaching equilibrium. Man is also fraught with an increasing number of cognitive biases. In other words, those phenomenon are too complicated to observe and predict. This is why there are so many outstanding problems in economic theory – it’s terribly complicated.

    So the unique property of economics is that we can test first principles (human subjectivity),rather than resort to purely correlative tests. In this sense we can know if economic theories can be true, in a way that we cannot know if theories in other science can be true. And even if we know that they CAN be true, we do not know if they are ‘true’ in the metaphysical sense, of being the most parsimonious theory possible.

    We can for example, construct a mathematica proof given any set of axioms. this mathematical proof demonstrates that any mathematical expression is can be constructed using mathematical operations. We can also demonstrate a proof in economics if any economic statement can be constructed from sympathetically testable existentially possible, human operations. But mathematical models cannot demonstrate innovation due to self awareness, and intentionally bend or break axioms in order to satisfy self interest – but humans can, and do – that is what even Keyensian economics combined with trade, fiscal and monetary policy attempt to do – and successfully do.

    It is therefore immoral and unscientific (an abuse of science) to claim that economic theories that are not operationally tested are true and moral. Whether we use empirical methods to observe and test our observations of economic phenomenon is merely a necessity of observation, and a necessity of compensating for our cognitive biases that forever jaundice our reason.

    There is no exit from the above box. Sorry.

    (Plenty of ‘peeps’ in there.)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-02 05:05:00 UTC

  • It is far easier to criticize something half right such as praxeology’s error of

    It is far easier to criticize something half right such as praxeology’s error of operationalism in economics. or critical rationalism’s abandonment of cause and costs, than it is to criticize something that is a totally lie such as monotheism’s narrative analogies, or postmodernism’s attempt at deception.

    Its unfortunate but true.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-26 07:16:00 UTC

  • Hoppe’s Misrepresentation of Empiricism

    “This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.” ~Hans/Hermann Hoppe

    —“Logic is powerful enough to expose weak arguments, wouldn’t you say?”— Bruce Koerber 

    —“Curt Doolittle, can you provide a counter to this? At first glance it appears impenetrable.”— Pattern Principle

    [N]othing like asking me to answer a very hard problem in philosophy. I can answer it. But whether it is digestible or not is something else

    To begin with, It’s a straw man argument; which is why its deceptively simple. No one makes the claim that empirical knowledge is the only kind of knowledge we can possess. No one. Rather, only philosophers do, none still do, and scientists certainly don’t.  

    ACTUALLY, WHAT HOPPE ATTRIBUTES TO EMPIRICISTS IS NOT WHAT THE EMPIRICISTS CLAIM.
    One of the reasons why you are misunderstood is that you tend not to confront the topics you deal with head on.Hoppe is a justificationist and so he mines a particular weakness of justificationist empiricism. One you jettison justification, his “argument collapses”- Ayelam Valentine Agaliba
    (Worse, he equates science with empiricism, and empiricism with positivism.)

    And economists do not claim to be philosophers, they claim to be scientists. It is one thing to say philosophers (rationalists) say such a thing and another to say scientists, and in particular economic scientists, would say such a thing (they don’t).

    Instead, they say that we cannot trust our reason except in the most trivial of cases: those at experiential human scale. And the discipline of economics is by definition one beyond experiential human scale, or we would not need prices with which to coordinate our efforts, or property to provide us with incentives – we could just ‘sense it’. But we can’t.

    Instead, we say that, depending upon the domain of inquiry, we require logical(rational), empirical(correspondent), and operational (existentially demonstrable) trials to test our theories, because theories are prone to contain imaginary and erroneous information that must be held separate from causal information. In this sense, we do not create theories justifiably or reasonably, we instead come to theories however we do, and we criticize them by logical, empirical, operational, and falsificational means.

    Examples: in mathematics the means of investigation and the means of proof are nearly identical. But some mathematical deductions are not constructible, so intuitionism requires that once a solution is obtained by whatever means, we go back and explain it operationally, demonstrating that it can be actually constructed by means of possible mathematical operations.

    In economics, we can make empirical observations, but until we go through and describe them as a series of human actions each of which is sympathetically testable then we do not know that the theory is true even if it always produces correlative results.
    in physics we do not know the first principles of the physical world as we do in mathematics (mathematical operations), or in economics (rational human actions in response to stimuli), so we must describe the act of taking the measurements themselves in order to ensure that we are not adding imaginary content to our theories.

    The end of rationalism occurred when Einstein demonstrated that we cannot even take the concepts of time and length for granted in our premises. Bridgman demonstrated that the only want to know when we have crossed the limit of arbitrary precision assumed in the premises of our theories is when we operationally construct them – since repetition of the operations in the new context will expose the failure of prior assumptions. Popper’s falsificationism is an incomplete attempt to demonstrate that falsification is necessary to ‘narrow’ more parsimonious (precise) statements, and that criticism is the means of narrowing theories to ever greater degrees of precision.

    The only thing particularly interesting about economics is that because all human beings are able to cooperate by sympathy with intent, we can also judge whether incentives are rational (with very imprecise limits). As such we are able to subjectively test economic statements for rationality (decidability is the correct term).

    Now once we have stumbled upon a theory, in order to make a truth claim, we must demonstrate that some subset of this set of tests have been satisfied: in other words, we must warranty our statements in order to claim that we speak the truth.

    0) Sensible (intuitively possible)
    1) Meaningfully Expressible ( as an hypothesis )
    2) Internally Consistent (logically consistent – rational)
    3) Externally Correspondent, and Falsifiable ( physically testable – correlative)
    4) Existentially Possible (operationally construct-able/observable)
    5) Voluntarily “Choose-able” (voluntary exchange / rational choice)
    6) Market-Survivable (criticism – theory )
    7) Market Irrefutable (law)
    8) Irrefutable under Original Experience (Perceivable Truth)
    9) Ultimately Parsimonious Description (Analytic Truth)
    10) Informationally Complete and Tautologically Identical (Platonic Truth – Imaginary)

    ..yet not all theoretical systems necessitate most of these claims. In economics for example, we must satisfy 5, but in mathematics we solve this same problem by the axiom of choice (adding additional information), and in physics it’s meaningless.

    But the net is that if ‘knowledge’ refers to truth claims, and if all non-tautological premises are context dependent – a degree of precision – (they are), and if we cannot know the boundaries of that precision (we can’t), then all premises are theoretical(they are), and if all knowledge is then theoretical (it is) and the means of discovery are irrelevant (they are), and operational construction is instead the test of true statements, not the statements themselves, (it is), and if economic principles must be operationally constructed – praxeologically – (they must), yet not all emergent phenomenon are deducible (they aren’t) and the degree of arbitrary precision available to economic theories is extremely limited (it is), then instrumentation is necessary to measure phenomenon within the limits of arbitrary precision (it is), and minor actions will produce uncertain effects within the boundaries of arbitrary precision (they do), and that we can experiment within those bounds (we can and do). (In fact all human action takes place within the universe’s boundaries – which is why we can act in the first place.)

    Now that said, no scientist says that only empirical knowledge is true, we say only that man’s reason is frail and we require instrumentation to test it. It is irrelevant how we come to a theory, and irrelevant if we can justify it if it works, but it is through criticism that we progressively increase the content of a theory until it is the most parsimonious that we can manage for the context we consider, given the logical and physical tools at our disposal.

    FLIPPING IT AROUND
    Now, in Propertarianism I argue that scientists discovered the means of truth telling, and that philosophers(rationalists) did not – instead I argue -which isnt very hard given the twentieth century- most often, that philosophers are usually the best liars. And that the weakness in scientific argument is, that as producers of a luxury good, scientists ignore costs in the description of their theories. Whereas in economics we consider costs. So by adding our understanding of costs back into the scientific method, we discover that it’s the best truth-telling method in general that we have discovered. And that by struggling to speak the truth scientists made dramatic progress in all of their fields. This is why the scientific method is not a method, but a set of moral prescriptions for what we may claim to truthfully say and what not.

    Conversely, rationalism has been used systemically to create the most complex and destructive lies and pseudosciences known to man – most of which are moral, legal political and economic. Because it is profitable to create complex lies in those industries just as it is (often, not always) unprofitable to create complex lies in science. It’s just that by the time someone figures it out in economics and politics, the opportunity to correct it has passed, while in science their is no expiration date on the damage that can be done to one’s reputation (capital of scientists).

    So it is not just that we can come to knowledge by any means possible and criticize it by all necessary means available to us, but that rationalism has been used to lie and steal and murder more than any other discipline and that it is far more error prone than truth telling, and truth telling is a very hard thing to do.

    It is one thing to say ‘this works’ or “i can say this’ and it is another to say that you are speaking it truthfully: meaning scientifically. When you speak scientifically it is possible to be fairly certain your statements are truthful, and when you speak rationally we know only that they may be meaningful, but not necessarily truthful (scientific.)

    The world has adopted scientific language as the language of truth speaking in all fields, almost entirely because it is less prone to deception and error than rationalism.

    So in my work, I want to take what is useful from Hoppe: the reduction of all moral propositions to property rights – but I feel I must rescue liberty from the language of liars, thieves, mystics, and authoritarianism, and translate it into scientific language: the language of truth-speaking: science.

    Because while you may not be aware of it, the central reason for western superiority was our discovery of truth telling. No one else did it. And it is the reason the west separated from the rest.

    Truth speaking creates trust, trust reduces transaction costs, reduced transaction costs create economic velocity, economic velocity creates prosperity, prosperity gives us choices, and the greatest variety of choices means the satisfaction of the most subjective values.

    Truth is very expensive. It is the most expensive normative commons in the world.

    And that is why it is so rare.

    SUMMARY
    All non tautological knowledge is theoretical and contextual, and we determine what we can testify to by criticizing it, not by the means of obtaining it. The means of obtaining it is irrelevant.

    Economics, like all disciplines that investigate that which is beyond human scales of perception is a ratio-empirical discipline because we cannot observe phenomenon without instrumentation and measures, and we cannot test internal consistency without reason. The correct interpretation of praxeology is that all observable phenomenon must be open to rational construction by the decisions and actions of human beings. This applies to all disciplines. Without exception. The general hypothesis of Austrians is that distortionary activity is amplified and extended in time. this appears to be true, but at a very imprecise level and the current debate is over the trade-offs, which is why it remains unsettled. But the empirical investigation into economic phenomenon within that degree of precision (which is enormously imprecise) is necessary, and by any and all definitions, scientific. Interference in such an economy is immoral, but it is scientific, and investigation of interstitial phenomenon it is scientific. Not all phenomenon (regular patterns) are deducible from first principles, however, they must be explainable by means of deduction once discovered to be claimed as truthful.

    CLOSING
    I think i should have done a fair job of criticizing the straw man argument, providing the explanation for the fundamental questions of how science rather than the straw man of ‘empiricism’ operates, demonstrating the importance of it, and why I am working so hard to convert Hoppe’s rationalism into scientific argument – to protect it from irrelevant nonsense arguments and justifiable marginalization. I had only a few hours to work on this on and off, and I can probably improve it. But I promise that I am very good at what I do and if you work with it, you should find it very helpful. If not and I failed you I am sorry but I will keep trying to simplify the arguments further over time.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine

  • Hoppe’s Misrepresentation of Empiricism

    “This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.” ~Hans/Hermann Hoppe

    —“Logic is powerful enough to expose weak arguments, wouldn’t you say?”— Bruce Koerber 

    —“Curt Doolittle, can you provide a counter to this? At first glance it appears impenetrable.”— Pattern Principle

    [N]othing like asking me to answer a very hard problem in philosophy. I can answer it. But whether it is digestible or not is something else

    To begin with, It’s a straw man argument; which is why its deceptively simple. No one makes the claim that empirical knowledge is the only kind of knowledge we can possess. No one. Rather, only philosophers do, none still do, and scientists certainly don’t.  

    ACTUALLY, WHAT HOPPE ATTRIBUTES TO EMPIRICISTS IS NOT WHAT THE EMPIRICISTS CLAIM.
    One of the reasons why you are misunderstood is that you tend not to confront the topics you deal with head on.Hoppe is a justificationist and so he mines a particular weakness of justificationist empiricism. One you jettison justification, his “argument collapses”- Ayelam Valentine Agaliba
    (Worse, he equates science with empiricism, and empiricism with positivism.)

    And economists do not claim to be philosophers, they claim to be scientists. It is one thing to say philosophers (rationalists) say such a thing and another to say scientists, and in particular economic scientists, would say such a thing (they don’t).

    Instead, they say that we cannot trust our reason except in the most trivial of cases: those at experiential human scale. And the discipline of economics is by definition one beyond experiential human scale, or we would not need prices with which to coordinate our efforts, or property to provide us with incentives – we could just ‘sense it’. But we can’t.

    Instead, we say that, depending upon the domain of inquiry, we require logical(rational), empirical(correspondent), and operational (existentially demonstrable) trials to test our theories, because theories are prone to contain imaginary and erroneous information that must be held separate from causal information. In this sense, we do not create theories justifiably or reasonably, we instead come to theories however we do, and we criticize them by logical, empirical, operational, and falsificational means.

    Examples: in mathematics the means of investigation and the means of proof are nearly identical. But some mathematical deductions are not constructible, so intuitionism requires that once a solution is obtained by whatever means, we go back and explain it operationally, demonstrating that it can be actually constructed by means of possible mathematical operations.

    In economics, we can make empirical observations, but until we go through and describe them as a series of human actions each of which is sympathetically testable then we do not know that the theory is true even if it always produces correlative results.
    in physics we do not know the first principles of the physical world as we do in mathematics (mathematical operations), or in economics (rational human actions in response to stimuli), so we must describe the act of taking the measurements themselves in order to ensure that we are not adding imaginary content to our theories.

    The end of rationalism occurred when Einstein demonstrated that we cannot even take the concepts of time and length for granted in our premises. Bridgman demonstrated that the only want to know when we have crossed the limit of arbitrary precision assumed in the premises of our theories is when we operationally construct them – since repetition of the operations in the new context will expose the failure of prior assumptions. Popper’s falsificationism is an incomplete attempt to demonstrate that falsification is necessary to ‘narrow’ more parsimonious (precise) statements, and that criticism is the means of narrowing theories to ever greater degrees of precision.

    The only thing particularly interesting about economics is that because all human beings are able to cooperate by sympathy with intent, we can also judge whether incentives are rational (with very imprecise limits). As such we are able to subjectively test economic statements for rationality (decidability is the correct term).

    Now once we have stumbled upon a theory, in order to make a truth claim, we must demonstrate that some subset of this set of tests have been satisfied: in other words, we must warranty our statements in order to claim that we speak the truth.

    0) Sensible (intuitively possible)
    1) Meaningfully Expressible ( as an hypothesis )
    2) Internally Consistent (logically consistent – rational)
    3) Externally Correspondent, and Falsifiable ( physically testable – correlative)
    4) Existentially Possible (operationally construct-able/observable)
    5) Voluntarily “Choose-able” (voluntary exchange / rational choice)
    6) Market-Survivable (criticism – theory )
    7) Market Irrefutable (law)
    8) Irrefutable under Original Experience (Perceivable Truth)
    9) Ultimately Parsimonious Description (Analytic Truth)
    10) Informationally Complete and Tautologically Identical (Platonic Truth – Imaginary)

    ..yet not all theoretical systems necessitate most of these claims. In economics for example, we must satisfy 5, but in mathematics we solve this same problem by the axiom of choice (adding additional information), and in physics it’s meaningless.

    But the net is that if ‘knowledge’ refers to truth claims, and if all non-tautological premises are context dependent – a degree of precision – (they are), and if we cannot know the boundaries of that precision (we can’t), then all premises are theoretical(they are), and if all knowledge is then theoretical (it is) and the means of discovery are irrelevant (they are), and operational construction is instead the test of true statements, not the statements themselves, (it is), and if economic principles must be operationally constructed – praxeologically – (they must), yet not all emergent phenomenon are deducible (they aren’t) and the degree of arbitrary precision available to economic theories is extremely limited (it is), then instrumentation is necessary to measure phenomenon within the limits of arbitrary precision (it is), and minor actions will produce uncertain effects within the boundaries of arbitrary precision (they do), and that we can experiment within those bounds (we can and do). (In fact all human action takes place within the universe’s boundaries – which is why we can act in the first place.)

    Now that said, no scientist says that only empirical knowledge is true, we say only that man’s reason is frail and we require instrumentation to test it. It is irrelevant how we come to a theory, and irrelevant if we can justify it if it works, but it is through criticism that we progressively increase the content of a theory until it is the most parsimonious that we can manage for the context we consider, given the logical and physical tools at our disposal.

    FLIPPING IT AROUND
    Now, in Propertarianism I argue that scientists discovered the means of truth telling, and that philosophers(rationalists) did not – instead I argue -which isnt very hard given the twentieth century- most often, that philosophers are usually the best liars. And that the weakness in scientific argument is, that as producers of a luxury good, scientists ignore costs in the description of their theories. Whereas in economics we consider costs. So by adding our understanding of costs back into the scientific method, we discover that it’s the best truth-telling method in general that we have discovered. And that by struggling to speak the truth scientists made dramatic progress in all of their fields. This is why the scientific method is not a method, but a set of moral prescriptions for what we may claim to truthfully say and what not.

    Conversely, rationalism has been used systemically to create the most complex and destructive lies and pseudosciences known to man – most of which are moral, legal political and economic. Because it is profitable to create complex lies in those industries just as it is (often, not always) unprofitable to create complex lies in science. It’s just that by the time someone figures it out in economics and politics, the opportunity to correct it has passed, while in science their is no expiration date on the damage that can be done to one’s reputation (capital of scientists).

    So it is not just that we can come to knowledge by any means possible and criticize it by all necessary means available to us, but that rationalism has been used to lie and steal and murder more than any other discipline and that it is far more error prone than truth telling, and truth telling is a very hard thing to do.

    It is one thing to say ‘this works’ or “i can say this’ and it is another to say that you are speaking it truthfully: meaning scientifically. When you speak scientifically it is possible to be fairly certain your statements are truthful, and when you speak rationally we know only that they may be meaningful, but not necessarily truthful (scientific.)

    The world has adopted scientific language as the language of truth speaking in all fields, almost entirely because it is less prone to deception and error than rationalism.

    So in my work, I want to take what is useful from Hoppe: the reduction of all moral propositions to property rights – but I feel I must rescue liberty from the language of liars, thieves, mystics, and authoritarianism, and translate it into scientific language: the language of truth-speaking: science.

    Because while you may not be aware of it, the central reason for western superiority was our discovery of truth telling. No one else did it. And it is the reason the west separated from the rest.

    Truth speaking creates trust, trust reduces transaction costs, reduced transaction costs create economic velocity, economic velocity creates prosperity, prosperity gives us choices, and the greatest variety of choices means the satisfaction of the most subjective values.

    Truth is very expensive. It is the most expensive normative commons in the world.

    And that is why it is so rare.

    SUMMARY
    All non tautological knowledge is theoretical and contextual, and we determine what we can testify to by criticizing it, not by the means of obtaining it. The means of obtaining it is irrelevant.

    Economics, like all disciplines that investigate that which is beyond human scales of perception is a ratio-empirical discipline because we cannot observe phenomenon without instrumentation and measures, and we cannot test internal consistency without reason. The correct interpretation of praxeology is that all observable phenomenon must be open to rational construction by the decisions and actions of human beings. This applies to all disciplines. Without exception. The general hypothesis of Austrians is that distortionary activity is amplified and extended in time. this appears to be true, but at a very imprecise level and the current debate is over the trade-offs, which is why it remains unsettled. But the empirical investigation into economic phenomenon within that degree of precision (which is enormously imprecise) is necessary, and by any and all definitions, scientific. Interference in such an economy is immoral, but it is scientific, and investigation of interstitial phenomenon it is scientific. Not all phenomenon (regular patterns) are deducible from first principles, however, they must be explainable by means of deduction once discovered to be claimed as truthful.

    CLOSING
    I think i should have done a fair job of criticizing the straw man argument, providing the explanation for the fundamental questions of how science rather than the straw man of ‘empiricism’ operates, demonstrating the importance of it, and why I am working so hard to convert Hoppe’s rationalism into scientific argument – to protect it from irrelevant nonsense arguments and justifiable marginalization. I had only a few hours to work on this on and off, and I can probably improve it. But I promise that I am very good at what I do and if you work with it, you should find it very helpful. If not and I failed you I am sorry but I will keep trying to simplify the arguments further over time.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine

  • Libertine Argument Makes Libertarians Look Stupid And Hurts The Liberty Movement – Every Single Time It Is Written Or Uttered


    http://mises.org/library/should-economics-emulate-natural-sciences

    [P]seudoscience hurts us. Conspiracy theory hurts us. Immoralism hurts us. Rothbard hurts us every day. MI has got to stop their absurdity. Cosmopolitanism, Marxism, Socialism, Postmodernism, Libertinism, and Neoconservatism are all dead campaigns from the era when we assumed democracy would prevail, and ideologies were needed to use the voting booth or revolution in order to sieze power. They were lies. Very complex lies. The high art of lying was invented in the construction of monotheism, and mastered over many generations to emerge as german rationalism and cosmopolitan pseudoscience.

    FALLACIES
    The argument in the article is false. We *MAY* not be able to ascertain the first principle, or principles of the physical universe – although that appears increasingly likely that we can. Certainly Hawking thinks we are less than a century away from it. It is becoming difficult to understand how we might even fail to understand it.

    Laws in physics can absolutely be established at given scales, newton’s laws are precise enough for all human action at human scale. Einstein’s laws are precise enough for all possible human actions that we are currently capable of. But just as Einstein did not falsify newton’s laws within human scale, it is very unlikely that any further advancement in theoretical physics will invalidate Einstein’s theories at the scale in which he applied them. THe fact that we can use plasma cutters does not mean carpenters were engaged in error, only that they were working at lower degrees of precision – at human scale.

    We have observed many laws in the physical universe that are constant within a given scale, and since all actions take place within a given scale, we require only precision within a scale necessary for action. (this is a profound statement that is easily overlooked in our search for a single rule (an ideal type) rather than a spectrum of rules applicable for actions at any given scale.)

    We may also, in the future, see odd permutations in the physical universe that we cannot explain, but that we need not repeat study of once those laws are understood. Except that is, when we pass beyond one scale or another. This is the reason for experimentation, NOT CONFIRMATION. The reason science requires operational demonstration is that we cannot anticipate the limits (scale) of any set of premises. And as we saw with time and length, very basic assumptions about the world change at different scales of precision. The subatomic world may seem very small and imaginary but we reach that scale far more quickly than we seem to think – and we toss around numbers that represent quantities, and mathematical measurements, that are far larger than than the smallest possible physically existential meaning of the term ‘length’.


    HUMAN AFFAIRS
    In human affairs we may reduce economic propositions to a sequence of necessary human actions, and all such human actions are decidable – at least in the aggregate. This is true. Because we ourselves are identical enough in our ability to sympathize with one another’s decisions to make rational choices. But we cannot yet make the same claim about the physical universe.
    We cannot say the same about groups of humans either – except at general, and abstract scale. So when we make a statemetn about commercial human action, that tells us very little. Prices are most often marginally indifferent, and for other than commodities, we make most of our decisions by other means. The general behavior of populations varies significantly from country to country (Russian tolerance for suffering, and American tolerance for change as interesting examples.) And these biases are not deducible from first principles even if, under some scrutiny and with some work, they are explainable (operationalizable).


    We still do not now for example, how long it takes and under which conditions a minimum wage will propagate through the economy, we only know that as a general rule that it will have some negative affect on some people or other. We can deduce (and frequently measure) that it produces permanently unemployable who miss bottom entry into the workforce.
    But this does not tell us much of value, it is like saying the wind blows most often from the west, but tells us nothing how we should navigate the sea from bristol to the cape this season.


    We may never be able to model gasses or protein foldings or economies particularly well other than in the aggregate. We may not be able to make general statements about human beings either except in the aggregate. But it is very likely that we can make general statements about humans and gasses sufficient for all necessary, possible, and affordable human action regarding humans and gasses.


    Just as new property rights applications must be invented (laws), in human affairs, just as in the physical universe, the consequences of complexity are vast, and require constant empirical measurement, because humans are always inventing new ways of doing things and any action we took yesterday has produced multiple adaptations. The universe is not. It cannot try to outwit itself, but man is constantly benefitting from outwitting the course of events and capturing the difference in states for his benefit.


    I could go on, but I have beaten this particular rothbardian fallacy to death already – not that I needed to since Einstein did it himself.

    To know anything of any scale that is not directly experiential we must make use of different technologies to compensate for our limited cognitive and perceptive abilities:


    Instrumental (measurable if not observable)
    Empirical (observable and recordable)
    Operational (existentially demonstrable)
    Logical (internal consistency)
    Decidable (sufficient information to make a decision)
    Theoretical ( Hypothesis->Theory->Law)

    THE CORRECT ARGUMENT – REPAIRING THE ROTHBARDIAN FALLACY

    1) All economics is empirical, just as all sciences are empirical. It is just that we do not require hypothetical or instrumental means of testing propositions in economics – we ourselves are the instrument and as such are capable of determining whether propositions are decidable and how.

    2) Economists do not try to understand man except as a byproduct of their work – they try to understand how to use Fiscal, Monetary, Trade, Educational, Cultural, and institutional Policy to produce economic velocity. To cast their work as the study of action is dishonest, and to cast economics as the study of human action is dishonest, since human action is primarily subjective, cooperative, moral and reproductive and only economic as a consequence, of being subjective, cooperative, moral and reproductive

    3) Economic interference IS IMMORAL when it causes involuntary transfers (independent of prohibiting free riding), or negative externalities. It is not unscientific. It’s just immoral. We don’t need to make pseudoscientific nonsense-arguments based upon absurd marxist and german rationalism in order to criticize redistributive economics in an attempt at imitating marxist socialist and postmodern methods of argumentative deception. Economic interference is immoral. it’s theft. It’s involuntary transfer. It’s not unscientific. It’s just theft. That’s all. Theft is just as open to scientific analysis as is voluntary exchange.

    The opposite is true: it is unscientific to claim that economics isn’t instrumental, empirical, operational, decidable and theoretical – just like all human knowledge. It’s dishonest (and false) to state that economic premises are apodictically certain at other than very large scale and in unpredictable time frames. Einstein demonstrably killed apriorism for non-reductio cases forever – and economics is not a reductio domain.

    4) The study of MORAL Economics would be the discipline of political economy and the institutional means by which to facilitate voluntary exchanges between individuals for the construction of commons without the need for involuntary redistribution to produce commons. This is what I have tried (and I think succeeded) in doing in Propertarianism.

    It is non-rational to adopt the ghetto ethic of denying the competitive value of commons, when hight rust and property rights themselves are commons that were only producible in the west because the west’s primary competitive advantage is in the production of COMMONS. As such an attack on commons is an attack on the west. (Which is in no small part the cosmopolitan strategy.) And it is this immorality that I chastise in rothbardians on a daily basis.

    A government of voluntary exchanges in the production of commons is no more immoral than a market of voluntary exchanges for the purpose of production, trade, distribution and consumption. None.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine

  • Libertine Argument Makes Libertarians Look Stupid And Hurts The Liberty Movement – Every Single Time It Is Written Or Uttered


    http://mises.org/library/should-economics-emulate-natural-sciences

    [P]seudoscience hurts us. Conspiracy theory hurts us. Immoralism hurts us. Rothbard hurts us every day. MI has got to stop their absurdity. Cosmopolitanism, Marxism, Socialism, Postmodernism, Libertinism, and Neoconservatism are all dead campaigns from the era when we assumed democracy would prevail, and ideologies were needed to use the voting booth or revolution in order to sieze power. They were lies. Very complex lies. The high art of lying was invented in the construction of monotheism, and mastered over many generations to emerge as german rationalism and cosmopolitan pseudoscience.

    FALLACIES
    The argument in the article is false. We *MAY* not be able to ascertain the first principle, or principles of the physical universe – although that appears increasingly likely that we can. Certainly Hawking thinks we are less than a century away from it. It is becoming difficult to understand how we might even fail to understand it.

    Laws in physics can absolutely be established at given scales, newton’s laws are precise enough for all human action at human scale. Einstein’s laws are precise enough for all possible human actions that we are currently capable of. But just as Einstein did not falsify newton’s laws within human scale, it is very unlikely that any further advancement in theoretical physics will invalidate Einstein’s theories at the scale in which he applied them. THe fact that we can use plasma cutters does not mean carpenters were engaged in error, only that they were working at lower degrees of precision – at human scale.

    We have observed many laws in the physical universe that are constant within a given scale, and since all actions take place within a given scale, we require only precision within a scale necessary for action. (this is a profound statement that is easily overlooked in our search for a single rule (an ideal type) rather than a spectrum of rules applicable for actions at any given scale.)

    We may also, in the future, see odd permutations in the physical universe that we cannot explain, but that we need not repeat study of once those laws are understood. Except that is, when we pass beyond one scale or another. This is the reason for experimentation, NOT CONFIRMATION. The reason science requires operational demonstration is that we cannot anticipate the limits (scale) of any set of premises. And as we saw with time and length, very basic assumptions about the world change at different scales of precision. The subatomic world may seem very small and imaginary but we reach that scale far more quickly than we seem to think – and we toss around numbers that represent quantities, and mathematical measurements, that are far larger than than the smallest possible physically existential meaning of the term ‘length’.


    HUMAN AFFAIRS
    In human affairs we may reduce economic propositions to a sequence of necessary human actions, and all such human actions are decidable – at least in the aggregate. This is true. Because we ourselves are identical enough in our ability to sympathize with one another’s decisions to make rational choices. But we cannot yet make the same claim about the physical universe.
    We cannot say the same about groups of humans either – except at general, and abstract scale. So when we make a statemetn about commercial human action, that tells us very little. Prices are most often marginally indifferent, and for other than commodities, we make most of our decisions by other means. The general behavior of populations varies significantly from country to country (Russian tolerance for suffering, and American tolerance for change as interesting examples.) And these biases are not deducible from first principles even if, under some scrutiny and with some work, they are explainable (operationalizable).


    We still do not now for example, how long it takes and under which conditions a minimum wage will propagate through the economy, we only know that as a general rule that it will have some negative affect on some people or other. We can deduce (and frequently measure) that it produces permanently unemployable who miss bottom entry into the workforce.
    But this does not tell us much of value, it is like saying the wind blows most often from the west, but tells us nothing how we should navigate the sea from bristol to the cape this season.


    We may never be able to model gasses or protein foldings or economies particularly well other than in the aggregate. We may not be able to make general statements about human beings either except in the aggregate. But it is very likely that we can make general statements about humans and gasses sufficient for all necessary, possible, and affordable human action regarding humans and gasses.


    Just as new property rights applications must be invented (laws), in human affairs, just as in the physical universe, the consequences of complexity are vast, and require constant empirical measurement, because humans are always inventing new ways of doing things and any action we took yesterday has produced multiple adaptations. The universe is not. It cannot try to outwit itself, but man is constantly benefitting from outwitting the course of events and capturing the difference in states for his benefit.


    I could go on, but I have beaten this particular rothbardian fallacy to death already – not that I needed to since Einstein did it himself.

    To know anything of any scale that is not directly experiential we must make use of different technologies to compensate for our limited cognitive and perceptive abilities:


    Instrumental (measurable if not observable)
    Empirical (observable and recordable)
    Operational (existentially demonstrable)
    Logical (internal consistency)
    Decidable (sufficient information to make a decision)
    Theoretical ( Hypothesis->Theory->Law)

    THE CORRECT ARGUMENT – REPAIRING THE ROTHBARDIAN FALLACY

    1) All economics is empirical, just as all sciences are empirical. It is just that we do not require hypothetical or instrumental means of testing propositions in economics – we ourselves are the instrument and as such are capable of determining whether propositions are decidable and how.

    2) Economists do not try to understand man except as a byproduct of their work – they try to understand how to use Fiscal, Monetary, Trade, Educational, Cultural, and institutional Policy to produce economic velocity. To cast their work as the study of action is dishonest, and to cast economics as the study of human action is dishonest, since human action is primarily subjective, cooperative, moral and reproductive and only economic as a consequence, of being subjective, cooperative, moral and reproductive

    3) Economic interference IS IMMORAL when it causes involuntary transfers (independent of prohibiting free riding), or negative externalities. It is not unscientific. It’s just immoral. We don’t need to make pseudoscientific nonsense-arguments based upon absurd marxist and german rationalism in order to criticize redistributive economics in an attempt at imitating marxist socialist and postmodern methods of argumentative deception. Economic interference is immoral. it’s theft. It’s involuntary transfer. It’s not unscientific. It’s just theft. That’s all. Theft is just as open to scientific analysis as is voluntary exchange.

    The opposite is true: it is unscientific to claim that economics isn’t instrumental, empirical, operational, decidable and theoretical – just like all human knowledge. It’s dishonest (and false) to state that economic premises are apodictically certain at other than very large scale and in unpredictable time frames. Einstein demonstrably killed apriorism for non-reductio cases forever – and economics is not a reductio domain.

    4) The study of MORAL Economics would be the discipline of political economy and the institutional means by which to facilitate voluntary exchanges between individuals for the construction of commons without the need for involuntary redistribution to produce commons. This is what I have tried (and I think succeeded) in doing in Propertarianism.

    It is non-rational to adopt the ghetto ethic of denying the competitive value of commons, when hight rust and property rights themselves are commons that were only producible in the west because the west’s primary competitive advantage is in the production of COMMONS. As such an attack on commons is an attack on the west. (Which is in no small part the cosmopolitan strategy.) And it is this immorality that I chastise in rothbardians on a daily basis.

    A government of voluntary exchanges in the production of commons is no more immoral than a market of voluntary exchanges for the purpose of production, trade, distribution and consumption. None.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine

  • CRITICISM OF HOPPE’S ARGUMENT AGAINST RIGHT TO VALUE Regarding: All property mus

    CRITICISM OF HOPPE’S ARGUMENT AGAINST RIGHT TO VALUE

    Regarding:

    http://kinsella.liberty.me/…/hoppe-on-property-rights-in-p…/

    All property must represent value to its owner or the statement ‘own’ has little sense.

    –“a common mistaken belief is that one has a property right in the value, as opposed to the physical integrity of, one’s property.”–

    Correctly stated:

    Others cannot promise you that the value of any property will remain constant. However, likewise, they *CAN* promise you that they will take no criminal (physical), unethical, immoral or conspiratorial action to damage that value or transfer that value to themselves.

    –“the basis of many fallacious notions of property rights, such as the idea that there is a right to a reputation because it can have value.”–

    This is unclear at best, false under scrutiny. I can, and do value my reputation; and my reputation demonstrably has value to me and to others. But that is not to say that I can control that reputation – it is information. Only that I may act to claim restitution for the use of false statements in the actions of defamation, libel and slander. Just as I cannot claim to control the market price of an asset, but I can act to protect against others damage to it.

    –“According to this understanding of private property,”–

    That statement contains no truth proposition. It posits a straw man as a means of criticism. This is a marxist technique developed in the art of deceptive argument we call “Critique”. The author posits a straw man as a vehicle for criticism of an opposing position rather than defending one’s proposition as incontrovertibly true. (See Rockwell’s most recent book which promises an hypothesis but never delivers, just consists of chapter after chapter of critique.)

    –“property ownership means the exclusive control of a particular person over specific physical objects and spaces.”–

    -and-

    —“property rights invasion means the uninvited physical damage or diminution of things and territories owned by other persons.”–

    There is no evidence of this anywhere in the world. Humans demonstrate universally that they consider the following categories of relations their property: physical and mental, kin, allies and useful relations, and private property, corporeal property, common property, and normative property.

    So to state that any definition of property is other than those demonstrated by man requires that we define some utility – some purpose, for which we select some subset of demonstrated property to be enforced by consent (under law); or even that some subset of demonstrated property is only possible to enforce by consent under law. But we cannot without dishonesty state that the definition of property is other than that which is demonstrated by man to be evidentially categorized as property.

    As for the entire paragraph: –“According to this understanding … …complete ignorance of others’ subjective valuations.”–

    It is difficult to tell if this is a disingenuous argument (politically utilitarian), an incomplete argument, or a mistaken argument. Why?

    Let’s start with what humans demonstrate to be non-parasitic beneficial cooperation: the prevention of imposed costs (what term free-riding) expressed as the requirements for: (a) Productive, (b) Fully informed, (c) Warrantied, (d) Voluntary Exchange free of (e) Negative Externality.

    In various polities, one or more of these attributes can be violated for the purpose of practical expediency. The less conformity to these properties the lower the trust and slower the economic velocity, and the greater conformity the higher the trust and higher economic velocity. And this is in fact what we see.

    Now, why do people tolerate competition on price, when competition on price causes losses? Well, they don’t. In fact, it was very hard to break natural ‘price’ cartels, and in many agrarian cultures the trend persists. Humans naturally seem to tolerate competition on quality but not on price.

    Early market owners understood by practice what we have learned through the study of economics: that competition forces positive incentives to innovate, which rewards all consumers while increasing stress on producers. Just as we have learned that suppression of unethical and immoral activity increases trust.

    So, now lets look at Hoppe’s argument: he talks about the market effects that we cannot control, and that we had to learn are positive consequences of what we may intuit as unethical and immoral.

    But he falsely categorizes ALL activity under the EXCEPTION of competition – which produces beneficial externalities, instead of under the RULE of the prevention of free riding – which we evolved as cooperative organisms to prevent negative actions and externalities. He conflates the minor exception with the major rule.

    So his argument is either dishonest or false: just because we cannot control and do not want to control prices, does not mean that we cannot control and do not want to control criminal, immoral, and unethical actions, particularly those actions which impose costs upon one another.

    Just as we bear a cost by forgoing opportunities for personal gain by engaging in criminal, unethical, immoral and conspiratorial behavior, and in doing so we construct property rights, we bear the cost of forgoing opportunities for prosecution of competition on prices in order to create the normative incentive, and the consumer economy.

    As such, price competition is the exception to moral intuition, not the rule from which moral intuition can be deduced. **Period.**

    Furthermore, since prices are the exception to the prohibition on parasitism necessary for the rational formation of cooperation and the abandonment of violence in exchange for the benefits of trade, then all other non-price, non-production assets retain their prohibition on criminal, ethical, moral, and conspiratorial actions that cause the involuntary imposition of costs; and therefore the use of violence for the purpose of punishment and restoration is categorically ethical, moral, and rational. Because cooperation is not logical or in one’s interest, and violence is useful and necessary preference in order to prevent parasitism.

    The virtue of suppression of criminal, unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial imposition of costs other than those conducted under the constraints of productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary, exchange, is that individuals are forced exclusively into productive activity rather than parasitism. Whether that parasitism be physical, deceptive, indirect, or conspiratorial.

    By contrast, Rothbardian ethics, argue for the expressed legalization of unethical, immoral, conspiratorial parasitism, because such moral rules, embodied in law, by logical necessity, legalize and prohibit retaliation for unproductive, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, actions.

    Quod erat demonstrandum.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine

    December 2014

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-21 10:27:00 UTC

  • WILLIAM BENGE ON MORAL BLINDNESS – LIBERTINES JUSTIFYING LIBERTINISM 1. The NAP

    WILLIAM BENGE ON MORAL BLINDNESS – LIBERTINES JUSTIFYING LIBERTINISM

    1. The NAP does not repudiate nor constrain libertinism.

    2. The libertine is remiss to self-identify. ( I suspect this is due to a lack of self-awareness, and consequentially, ignorance of this and other negative externalities created by the libertine)

    3. The libertine’s defense of the NAP is really a defense of the libertine.

    (*edited) (reposted)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-20 01:15:00 UTC

  • Another Nail In Rothbard’s Abuses of Praxeology

    [P]raxeology: is Mises’ failed attempt at discovering Operationalism in economics, as it was discovered in psychology (Operationism), Intuitionism (mathematics) and Operationalism (physics). Regardless of field it is reducible to the statement that we cannot know whether we are discussing (or whether one testifies to) the imaginary or the existential unless it can be described as a set of operations – even if limited to measurements.

    All knowledge is theoretical because all premises other than the reductio are theoretical. The construction of a theory is immaterial. It is whether we can operationalize that theory that determines whether we can claim it is stated truthfully. This is how scientists function and have functioned – and is the reason for their success.

    And the discipline of Science is misunderstood: it is the only known technique for speaking truthfully regardless of subject matter. If one cannot speak scientifically, then one is not speaking truthfully – only analogically – in allegory and metaphors. Only operationally demonstrable statements refer to the existential. All others are allegorical, not existential. They may be meaningful, and meaning may be helpful – but they are not TRUE.

    Mises was unfortunately not enough of a scientist or mathematician, and was too much fascinated by German verbalism to make the leap that Anglos and Netherlander’s did. He would have been easily corrected by someone like myself earlier, if he had not been so firmly associated with Rothbard and his reputation damaged so severely by that association.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • Another Nail In Rothbard’s Abuses of Praxeology

    [P]raxeology: is Mises’ failed attempt at discovering Operationalism in economics, as it was discovered in psychology (Operationism), Intuitionism (mathematics) and Operationalism (physics). Regardless of field it is reducible to the statement that we cannot know whether we are discussing (or whether one testifies to) the imaginary or the existential unless it can be described as a set of operations – even if limited to measurements.

    All knowledge is theoretical because all premises other than the reductio are theoretical. The construction of a theory is immaterial. It is whether we can operationalize that theory that determines whether we can claim it is stated truthfully. This is how scientists function and have functioned – and is the reason for their success.

    And the discipline of Science is misunderstood: it is the only known technique for speaking truthfully regardless of subject matter. If one cannot speak scientifically, then one is not speaking truthfully – only analogically – in allegory and metaphors. Only operationally demonstrable statements refer to the existential. All others are allegorical, not existential. They may be meaningful, and meaning may be helpful – but they are not TRUE.

    Mises was unfortunately not enough of a scientist or mathematician, and was too much fascinated by German verbalism to make the leap that Anglos and Netherlander’s did. He would have been easily corrected by someone like myself earlier, if he had not been so firmly associated with Rothbard and his reputation damaged so severely by that association.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine