http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35540/Wendy-McElroy-A-Letter-to-My-Father/#sthash.Rfi3Umvi.dpufCOWARDS LEAVE, INNOVATORS REPLACE
Wendy McElroy threatens to leave the movement. But I’ll do her one better. I want to de-legitimize it, destroy it, and replace it with one that will succeed. One based upon liberty, not libertinism masquerading as liberty.
Source date (UTC): 2014-08-16 16:29:00 UTC
Rothbardian Libertarians are totalitarian.
Because the source of their ideas is totalitarian.
Rothbardian Libertarianism is a cult.
It is a cult that causes damage tot he brand of liberty.
Because Rothbardian libertarianism has nothing to do with aristocratic liberty.
It’s the antithesis of aristocratic liberty.
Aristocrats create a commons. They make the commons possible.
The west’s competitive advantage is our high trust enables us to build commons.
And Rothbardianism is an outright attack on creating commons’.
Rothbardian Libertarianism is just an elaborate pseudoscientific word game.
Rothbard’s purpose is to provide justification for immoral libertinism – and nothing more.
Rothbardianism is an attempt to create a license to lie cheat and steal.
Totalitarian, cult, libertinism – the very opposite of liberty.
Source date (UTC): 2014-08-13 06:59:00 UTC
https://www.quora.com/What-are-biggest-misconceptions-about-postmodernism
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/the-new-normal-109616.html#ixzz39bR1AUm1WHY CONSERVATIVES ARE RIGHT AND LIBERTARIANS ARE NOT ONLY WRONG BUT ***STUPID AND DANGEROUS***
In an article on July 25, the Nobel Laureate economist Michael Spence put it this way:
—“[A]t this moment in history, the main threats to prosperity … are the huge uncontained negative spillover effects of regional tensions, conflict, and competing claims to spheres of influence. The most powerful impediment to growth and recovery is not this or that economic imbalance; it is a loss of confidence in the systems that made rising global interdependence possible.”—-
FIRST ENGLAND, THEN USA, CREATED GLOBAL STABILITY THAT MAKES CREDIT POSSIBLE.
And by abandoning that role, we have sent the world into the international equivalent of lawlessness. Americans cannot ‘save’ by decreasing the military. That is the argument I have been now making for the better part of a decade.
Libertarian’s and progressives aren’t only wrong, they aren’t only ignorant, they aren’t only stupid – they’re catastrophically dangerous.
The world order is artificial. The mistake is in not separating aristocratic military services from national boundaries. IN stead, we have the US government functioning as BOTH global guarantor of property rights, AND oppressor of domestic peoples.
Worse, instead of splitting off the empire into a corporeal police body, under the law of property rights, we construct a socialist organization (the UN) whose entire purpose is to DISMANTLE property rights and FIGHT AGAINST the imposition of the aristocratic order of property rights that has forced the entire world to modernize – leaving behind its ignorance mysticism and poverty.
Might is not a bad. Violence is a good. It is a product. It’s a valuable product. The question is only whether the violence is used to construct property rights or used violate property rights.
The moral use of violence is in the construction and maintenance of property rights.
COMMUNISTS WERE THE WORLDS GREATEST MASS MURDERERS. PROGRESSIVES AND LIBERTARIANS WILL BE SHORTLY SHOWN TO BE THE NEXT PEOPLE TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MOST MURDER AND SUFFERING.
Property rights are unnatural. They are an unnatural institution. They are our most difficult and expensive commons. And to construct that commons we must construct testimonial truth. And to do that we require violence to insure it.
The Cosmopolitan revolution that created the 20th century has been the worst ideological movement since the creation of abrahamic monotheism.
MURDER BY WORDS
Source date (UTC): 2014-08-06 05:41:00 UTC
ON TUCKER’S HUMANITARIANISM
Tucker may lack a rational argument with which to articulate his position, and may argue with sentiments rather than rationalism, but his sentiments are correct expressions of his intuitions, and as usual, his intuitions are correct: there is something rotten in Rothbard’s Ghetto and it has harmed the cause of liberty long enough.
Sentimental arguments may be less articulate than rational and empirical arguments; but then again, the number of people who can grasp and be persuaded by sentimental arguments vastly outweighs those who can manage rational and empirical arguments. If I wanted to devote more time to criticism than creativity I could spend the full circuit of my day trying to correct the arguments of libertarians employing moralism masquerading as rationalism, and never see an end to it.
We have few intellectuals left, and the few we do are third tier, because rothbard (and mises) was wrong. Tucker may not have a rational or empirical answer, nor be able conduct a debate with people like me, but he is taking liberty in the right direction – away from those who have demonstrably failed.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2014-08-01 06:22:00 UTC
http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35519/Wendy-McElroy-Relationship-of-Politics-to-Morality/#comment-1516520727MORE EVISCERATION OF ROTHBARD AND MISES
FROM THE DALY BELL
(Continued Debate)
http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35519/Wendy-McElroy-Relationship-of-Politics-to-Morality/
OPPONENT’S POSITION
————————————–
—“” I don’t know Rothbardian ethics, but I do know Rothbardian economics as an extension of Miseian economics. Ratiocination is the process by which a conscious animal, known as a human, attempts to substitute his present circumstances for better future circumstances. It is a means. Subjective valuation is what determines the ultimate judgments of value, the ends for which means are selected; so, any institution which purports to push people into or away from certain behaviors relies on a necessarily arbitrary application of force.
We can ask, for instance, why a Christian takes the time to go to church on Sunday, which is time that could be better used producing the material factors of wealth or by relaxing, to which the Christian can only respond that the ends satisfied is not an earthly one. This is not irrational and in fact, based on the premise that a Christian god rewards his followers who worship him in the afterlife, is quite a small opportunity cost for such an eternal payoff.
The problem is epistemological. The universe is filled with an infinite amount of data of which the human senses can only filter a tiny portion. Given this limitation for humans as to knowing the ultimate ends sought by nature, he must substitute his own and rely on his experience to give him feedback about its efficacy and whether it was desirable.
Thus, when you say, “it is rational,” or “it is not rational,” what you mean is that based on your premise about desirable ends, the means taken would be ineffective.
I believe Rothbard merely made his ethics an extension of subjective value theory. Given the unknowability of the ends of nature, and given that any consciously derived ends must be individual and that any application of force is thus made arbitrary, the question becomes, when is force acceptable among peaceable human beings?
Granted that anarcho-capitalism would not be a utopia; but, given the oft-proved aspect of human nature that power corrupts and bureaucracies create crazy incentives to be a parasite, it would certainly seem a clever alternative to the ever failing institutions of top-down hierarchy.””—
———–
CURT’S RESPONSE (Devastating as it is)
—“I don’t know Rothbardian ethics,”—
NAP where property is defined as IVP. It is pretty hard NOT to know them since one of the reasons “Libertinism” is attractive is its simplicity. However it’s simplicity is seductive since we europeans are cognitively biased to altruism, which while increasing trust and economic velocity also makes us vulnerable to everything from pseudoscience to ideological conversion. Rothbardian ethics originated in the ancient Levant, and were reinforced in the ghettos. Crusoe ethics ironically, are an analogy to the ghetto, where the sea performs the function of the wall, and non-aggression is imposed by the people outside the wall (the authorities).
–church—
People go to church so that the feel the pack submission response – its a reward. All congregational religions are based upon this human preference. Islam is the best example because it places the most emphasis on repetition. The longest surviving cults require the greatest behavioral investments from their members, in exchange they obtain psychic benefit of pack response. Or as marx would say, security from “alientation”.
–the problem is epistemological– AND –economics– AND –rational–
All of misesian economics and praxeology is constrained to the materialist in scope and recognizes only that which is open to intersubjective testing – as a means of ignoring subjective values (because they are invisible to other parties). That doesn’t mean only material things have value, it means that only material things exchanged are visible to analysis.
However the existence of the praxeological hypotheses depends without exception, on the marginal indifference of human choice in the aggregate: that we are extremely similar, and can sympathize with (meaning *understand* one another’s choices if they are explained to us). Without this a praxeology would be impossible.
It is non-rational for individuals to choose to live in a low trust polity,and humans demonstrate preference for moving to high trust polities, OR to authoritarian polities that use violence to create order where high trust is impossible,
The “economic way of thinking” requires that for every proposition you supply the equilibrating limits that govern it, not treat it as an ideal without limit. This is a superior definition to that of considering a chain of opportunity costs alone. It is true that we must consider not only opportunity costs, but that those opportunity costs cause accumulation of opposite opportunities that equilibrate against the initial action. Just as locals oppose the Free State Project, once it has any impact whatsoever.
–utopia–
Fallacious argument. It does not matter whether it would be a utopia. The question is whether it would be possible or whether it would be preferable. And all the evidence from all possible sources overwhelmingly demonstrates that rothbardian ethics are not reducible to a law sufficient for the formation of a voluntary polity that would be preferable for all but criminal fringe, and even for that criminal fringe, such a polity would be persecuted and prosecuted, Furthermore, that since governments hold other governments accountable for the actions of peoples over which they have no control, that polity would rapidly be rendered impoverished as other than a financial center. and as a financial center it would only survive in the service of black markets.
So Rothbard, like all the monotheistic philosophers before him, creates little more than a distracting cult narrative with the promise of salvation. But like the gnostics who argued the malfeasance of Jehova, Rothbardianism is in reality, seducing one into economic, social, political, and even genetic suicide.
The conservatives, who lack a rational language for their antiquarian social order, cannot articulate why they are repulsed by rothbardiansm, but because they have been acclimated to mental models that extrapolate individual actions into social consequences, they correctly see rothbardian ‘libertinism’ as unethical, immoral, and destructive.
The only ‘liberty’ that has gained an traction has been classical liberal constitutionalism which constrains the government. Rothbardianism has been a 40 year record of failure. A disaster. A self congratulatory cult where members gain a sense of solace and superiority in empty verbalisms. Rothbardianism has harmed the brand of “liberty’ so seriously that every institution other than “the fruitcake fringe” has tried to distance itself from the term ‘Austrian’, and has attempted to liberate ‘libertarianism’ from its association with the fruitcake fringe – something which we should crown Tucker with laurels for. And Likewise, Misesian economics, and praxeology as currently constructed are pseudosciences, conflating axiomatic and consistent statements with scientific and correspondent statements to seduce those who understand the meaning of neither. (Something which I have written about extensively.)
–I believe rothbard–
Rothbard was a member of the cosmopolitan enlightenment and his purpose, as was the purpose of all members of that philosophical movement, was to advance cosmopolitan (jewish enlightenment) inbreeding tribal philosophy of the ghetto to a majoritarian universal philosophy, just as the germans beginning with Kant proposed their inland nuclear family cultural philosophy as a majoritarian universalist philosophy, and just as the French proposed their inland traditional family cultural philosophy as a majoritarian universalist philosophy – all of them in reaction to the anglo enlightenment which was an attempt to seize political power from the landed aristocracy in both its church and private government forms, by creating a corporation controllable by the emergent middle class of bankers, traders and manufacturers.
(in other words, try not to imagine too much, and to read more widely. Rothbardians are similar to marxists and cults in that they read within the cult literature and hypothesize themselves, despite their pervasive ignorance rather than study economics, philosophy and history.)
Conservatives understand as much about morality as we understand about economics. We are wrong. Rothbard was wrong. Mises was wrong. Hoppe is wrong.
The only liberty that is possible is the the one the protestants and their ancestors invented: the suppression of criminal(thefts) AND ethical(deception) and immoral(externalities) actions under the the common law. This is the only possible means of reducing demand for the state. And the only means of obtaining ethical and moral property rights under the law, is ethical and moral homogeneity.
Under polycentric law, we may construct different **contractual rights**, because of the complex risks involved in the mitigation of disputes in different patterns of sustainable specialization and trade (PSST) but we cannot construct polycentric ethical and moral standards, since this merely increases the demand for authority.
So no, rothbardian and misesian attempts to preserve dualist ethics, and dualist culture, are just another example of the attempt of a group – in this case the cosmopolitans – just like the french and the germans, to assert their preferred evolutionary strategy, that is a bias in favor of their reproductive strategy, over that of other groups just as surely as colonization and war are attempts to do the same. And given the lack of success of the cosmopolitan strategy prior to the enlightenment era, and that in the enlightenment era that cosmopolitanism has produced not only “Rothbardian libertinism”, but Straussian neoconservatism and Marxist socialism, and Frankfurt school’s postmodernism and progressivism, are reflections of that attempt to preserve poly-moral and poly-cultural, and poly-legal rules, and has produced the equivalent of colonization or warfare by a destructive philosophy not seen since the invention of monotheism. Rothbardian Libertinism is just another excuse to create multi-culturalism, and turn the west into a factionalized Levantine polity. And we know how badly that turns out. These are bad ideas.
That we should reverse the corporeal state and return to the common law as our anarchic form of government. That we should re-institute local regiments or militias for defense in an era where we possess small arms capable of defeating an aggressor. That we should privatize public services. That we should replace a monopoly legal regulation with competing insurance organizations. That we we should return to small homogenous nations with different preferences. These are all true. They reflect our aristocratic egalitarian heritage – the heritage that gave us and maintained our freedom.
That we should construct poly-moral multi-cultural society is nothing more than an attempt to devolve us into levantine primitivism. And it is contrary to the theory that we can reduce all rights to property rights, since we PAY FOR NORMS every time we do not take an opportunity to lie, cheat, harm or steal or make choices that force others to pay our costs.
So Rothbardianism must be discarded as another product of cosmopolitanism that has conducted yet another destructive ideological war from progressive, libertarian and conservative to reduce us to primitivism.
Return to the liberty of aristocracy. The only liberty, and the only anarchy, that is, was or ever will be, possible.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2014-08-01 03:19:00 UTC
http://disq.us/8ji084KICKING ROTHBARDIANS IN THE TEETH AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY
—In his article “Myth and Truth About Libertarianism,” Murray Rothbard addresses the lie that “[l]ibertarians are libertines”—
Wendy,
It doesn’t matter what libertarians CLAIM to be. That’s an obfuscatory statement, like many of Rothbards obfuscations. It matters what society would evolve under rothbardian ethics. And rothbardian ethics are reduced to statements of property rights. And the only thing that matters in an anarchic polity is what property rights are defensible under polycentric law. Rothbard defined property as that which is intersubjectively verifiable (ISV). He not only abandons all notions of a normative commons, or even the material commons itself, but most importantly, Rothbard’s definition of property as that which is ISV, explicitly licenses conduct that is unethical (deceptions) and immoral (externalizations) and prohibits not only legal recourse, but any form of retaliation for immoral and unethical conduct . First, unethical and immoral actions – so common outside of our out-bred, out-wed, high trust northern european civilization – raise transaction costs rapidly. And it our western competitive advantage over the rest of the world would evaporate rapidly as transaction costs, economic velocity, and wealth rapidly declined. Second, it is irrational for people to choose a high transaction political order under Rothbarian anarchy to a costly state that suppresses immoral and unethical conduct by a multitude of legal means. It is rational to choose high trust low transaction cost polities with high bureaucratic overhead costs, over low trust, high transaction cost polities without high bureaucratic transaction costs. Because while expensive, at least economic velocity and local trust and culture can evolve under such a state. So Rothbardian Anarchy is impossible because it is irrational to choose to live in such a polity. Third, even if a polity did form somehow, against all rational analysis, a polity that acted with such low trust could not compete. Fourth, even if it could compete it would be rapidly ostracized, punished or exterminated by neighbors who will not tolerate low-trust unethical parasitism. Which has been demonstrated repeatedly in history by both the Gypsies and pre-enlightenment if not pre-war Jews. Both of whom practice high trust ethics in-group but low-trust ethics out-group. Or more recently, the tolerance for limited offshore banking, but the recent suppression of that industry by both European and American governments.
So, no. Rothbard was either dishonest or he profoundly erred. Which is a frequent question any serious philosopher has to ask himself in any study of Rothbard.
As for Tucker, like most of the left libertarians, they have little more than intuitions that something is wrong with Rothbardian ethics. But equipped only with classical liberal psychology, and micro economics, they appeal for a kinder gentler liberty without any program, argument or philosophy, other than what appears to be a secular restatement of christianity. Which doesn’t give them much argumentative power in ideology, philosophy or political economy. As such they resort to ideas such as buying off the citizenry in an effort to get people to like them. Which while a tried and true technique of all points of the ideological compass, doesn’t really contribute anything new to the debate.
However, if it’s a further criticism of Rothbardianism and it diminishes the negative impact that the Rothbardians have on the tradition of western aristocratic liberty, criticism of rothbardian immorality is good enough for me, and the rest of mankind as well.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-31 15:35:00 UTC
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/richard-dawkins/richard-dawkins-rape-tweets_b_5633885.htmlDEAR RICHARD DAWKINS. THAT’S NOT PHILOSOPHY. IT’S ENTERTAINMENT
(I love it when I can out-do one of the big guns.)
It is most interesting that none of these supposed dilemmas are dilemmas at all, but framings that take advantage of cognitive biases. If instead, we say that we insure one another as a means of ensuring voluntary cooperation between large numbers of super-predators, and that without trust, none of the circumstances where the above supposed moral dilemmas can exist. So we are far more conscious of, and respectful, of norms (the terms of reciprocal insurance) than we are of any other factor, and if we were not, then no ‘society’ would be possible.
Morality is not a subjective matter, as we have supposed for millennia. But reducible to statements of necessity given the requirements for humans to rationally choose to cooperate in numbers greater than direct kin. The error is the application of enlightenment universal individualism to what are necessary rules of cooperation – without which cooperation is not rational, utilitarian or possible.
I have attacked these moral fallacies in philosophy everywhere I find them. They are no more than victorian parlor games. That doesn’t mean they aren’t fun. It means that the answer is not contained in the framing of the question, but external to it.
It’s a form of entertainment, a demonstration of the power of suggestion, but it’s not science. And it’s not good philosophy or psychology either. 🙂
–Curt Doolittle . The Propertarian Institute . Kiev, Ukraine.–
Source date (UTC): 2014-07-31 04:15:00 UTC
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Human-Action-by-Ludwig-von-Mises-considered-a-great-book
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Human-Action-by-Ludwig-von-Mises-considered-a-great-book