The supreme court is just fine with undermining the constitution, undermining the rule of law, destroying the family, and creating special inegalitarian rights for minorities. But god forbid they should limit the power of the other two branches of government. If we have a revolution I want the privilege of pulling the gallows lever for Roberts. I assume there is too much competition ahead of me for both Ginsberg and Sotomayor.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-29 07:27:00 UTC
http://www.quora.com/Genius-and-Geniuses/How-long-before-we-have-another-Einstein/answer/David-Minott/comment/5201426?srid=u4Qv&share=1THE NEXT EINSTEIN?
This enthusiastic fellow thinks (Einstein was somehow both rare and unique.)
We have many people as smart or smarter than Einstein today. There is never a shortage of geniuses.
To create a bach/mozart, aristotle/hume, maxwell/einstein requires three prior generations to attempt to solve a significant problem, so that the knowledge accumulated is sufficient for an individual to synthesize it. We have known this at least since Durant argued for it, and more recently and thoroughly by Murray.
You may not know that Einstein’s chief role in relativity was not so much of innovator as it was communicator since the ideas had already been disussed by others. Just as the lightbulb, calculus, and the television had multiple inventors. We pick a hero to single out. But great inventions are the product of many people over many years.
It apprars that I myself may have solved a century old problem in philisophy that is profoundly important for ethics, economics and politics. But I was only able to do so because of the accumulated effort of hundreds of people in the last century who did the vast majority of the work, while only failing to put the last few pieces together. Even my work was only possible because the internet dramatically teduced the time neede to conduct resrarch across multiple disciplines. And it still took me fifteen years.
To flip it around, intellectual historians have noted, not infrequently, that Einstein was a very naive individual, and that it is a credit to our civilization that such a soul could survive in it and still contribute a great achievement.
There is an organization dedicated to propagandizing Einstein’s mythos. His heroism is as much the result of their publicity efforts than his achievements.
And as Bridgman noted, and fought his whole life for: the reason we did not discover relativity earlier (its discovery was delayed) was an intellectual error that invaded physics from mathematics, and had been in mathematics since at least the invention of geometry – cured by proof of construction: the scope of measures.
A problem that remains with us today, and which is responsible for most pseudoscience – especially the pseudoscience remaining in our most respected sciences.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-29 04:17:00 UTC
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/06/hans-hermann-hoppe/entrepreneurs-are-moral-heroes/REVIEW OF HOPPE’S NEW “ENTREPRENEURS ARE MORAL HEROES”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/06/hans-hermann-hoppe/entrepreneurs-are-moral-heroes/
More of the same. He remains consistent. I have a few clarifications and one criticism of a significant logical contradiction.
—“In the most fundamental sense we are all, with each of our actions, always and invariably profit-seeking entrepreneurs.”—
This is an imprecise analogy for the purpose of ideological conflation. We are, if an described by any analogy, advantage-seeking hunters. Entrepreneurship is merely one of the many venues for seeking advantage. The most important reproductive advantage is status. Status grants us access to associations, opportunity, discounts, rents, and mates. Under monogamy we pursue status for its own sake. Profit is a means of calculating and measuring of the use of complex resources. Humans have to be taught to seek profits. We seek advantage. We seek acquisitions. Profit is merely a means of measuring whether we have obtained advantage (acquisitions). We do not seek the measure. We seek the advantage that we are measuring.
With this in mind, much of the rest of section I is translatable into valuable insight.
—“It is only necessary that every good be always and at all times owned privately, i.e., controlled exclusively by some specified individual (or individual partnership or association), “—
This is not precise enough. It should instead be correctly stated that the transaction costs of decision making, the opportunity costs in time, and the opportunity for free riding, increase with the number of decision makers. If the decision makers (owners) are not fixed in number (calculable) then a calculable (true) decision cannot be made, nor can rent seeking (free riding) be prevented, nor can profits from complex actions be rationally redistributed by apportionment. One cannot calculate ratios without denominators. As such fixed membership (shareholder listings) are necessary for the purpose of retaining calculability, and calculability is necessary for the purpose of preventing thefts (free riding, privatization of the assets of the private commons).
So, because of these multiple factors, the degree of trust (rational ability to take risks) and therefore the velocity of production (frequency of risk taking), is determined by the ability to conduct rational calculation, and rational calculation requires fixed apportionment of ownership, and delegation of decision making.
The individual is less valuable than the collective, however, the allocation of property rights is the only CALCULABLE means of cooperation while at the same time preventing free riding.
With this in mind, sections II+ are tolerable.
—“Justice”—
Well, this is breaking down into logical contradiction.
I think I have persuasively argued that we pay for property rights by forgoing opportunities to commit crimes, obtain unethical rewards, obtain immoral rewards, and obtain conspiratorial rewards. Each time we refrain from these things is a cost to us. We voluntarily pay this cost to pay for the norm of property rights in all its forms, including those of morals rules, rituals and conventions.
I think, also that most of us understand these costs, and willingly pay them.
When all of us are agrarian farmers, the relationship between our respect for rights, and our productivity is constant. But under modern industrialism, where we can no longer provide for ourselves by living off the land, some people are able to respect property rights, and therefore pay for membership in creating the voluntary structure of production, yet these people are not able to participate profitably in the work force, and obtain income from the voluntary structure ofp roduction that they create by observing property rights.
if they are paying a membership fee, but receive no benefit for doing so it is not rational for them to continue to pay the fee once they are no longer able to obtain benefits for it.
So if there is value in the contributions of these people to the voluntary organization of production that we call ‘capitalism’, then we must either pay them for their services in constructing the voluntary organization of production, or cease asking them to pay a membership fee (a tax in forgone opportunities or consumption) for benefits that it is impossible for them to collect.
As such the argument for justice does not hold – it is a logical contradiction.
As such people must have some CALCULABLE (commission) on the performance of the market which they contribute to by respecting property rights, rituals, norms, manners etc, or it is both irrational to expect them to continue to pay the costs of forgoing consumption, and it is a violation of their property rights by failing to return to them compensation in exchange for their actions.
How they obtain those benefits is up to them. They may prefer their benefits in cash, or in commons. But it is not unjust for them to obtain those benefits. It is unjust that those benefits are involuntarily extracted, rather than contractually negotiated in exchange for their policing of themselves and others for adherence to property rights in all their forms, as well as rituals, norms habits, and traditions.
Every forced redistribution is a lost opportunity for mutually beneficial exchange. And the problem that the state creates is the use of legislation under the presumption of a common good among relatively equal producers, rather than the negotiation of contracts between the productive and the unproductive, for their service in facilitating the voluntary organization of production which does benefit us all.
DISINGENUITY OR ERROR?
Recently, Critical Rationalists have criticized Hoppe as “Disingenuous”. But I won’t link to that here, just to avoid that conversation for the moment.
I had always considered Hoppe an evangelical propagandist using absurdity for the purpose of interjecting humor into his arguments for the benefit of entertaining his students. However, his obsession with obscurantist Kantian rationalism, with Marxist emotive loading of his arguments, with ideological contextualization and framing of arguments, and with his persistent cultish hero worship, all accumulate in an unscientific body of work.
His accomplishments, as far as I am able to tell, are limited to his use of property rights and economics to argue the full scope of ethics and politics, his theory of capitalism and socialism, his application of incentives to critique democracy, his articulation of property as necessary and sufficient (despite his reliance on the insufficiency of aggression and IVP), and most importantly of all, his transformation of government as monopoly insurer of last resort, to competing insurers incapable of formation of monopoly. These are significant contributions to political theory, political economy, and political institutions. However, his perpetual obscurantism, framing and loading severely limit his practical value, and his position as a contributor to the history of thought.
I hope to extract the scientific from the rationally framed and loaded, and to extend his work from ideological to scientific. Because it is of extraordinary value in developing alternatives to the predatory bureaucratic state. But his dedication to his past investment in ghetto ethics, cosmopolitan obscurantism (double speak), and continental rationalism are difficult to overcome.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-26 05:36:00 UTC
HAIDT VS HAYEK (ET AL) : WHAT THEY FAILED TO GRASP
(reposted from a comment to boettke)
First, Haidt provides the first empirical comparison of competing moral codes. Second he demonstrates that they are evolutionary in origin. Third that each represents a conflict in the male female reproductive strategy – with us as male outliers. Fourth, that this reproductive strategy is heritable, and not voluntary.
Fifth that our political preferences reflect our reproductive strategies. And that we vote our moral codes and nothing more. And do nothing but attempt to justify them. So our arguments are futile. (This reflects the trend for pragmatic and empirical governments to evolve into empirical and moral -ie: pseudoscientific – governments – even in China)
And sixth that democracy gives voice to those competing reproductive strategies.
What he fails to grasp, but Emmanuel Todd does, is that the family structure, is a compromise between these competing strategies.
What neither grasps is that universal democracy under redistribution allows the female majority to exercise their reproductive strategy to undermine the family, and the compromise, between the genders that the family constructs.
So redistributive democracy without the universal absolute family, and with the immigration of traditional non-nuclear families en mass, creates a competition between family structures, which must, without question, and against all possible argument, create demand for the expansion of the state, a reduction in willingness to redistribute, and increase in political over competing morals, friction, and the necessity for an authoritarian government.
We must realize that cosmopolitan libertinism and open immigration are fallacies if the jewish enlightenment just as much as Kant’s apriorism is a continental justification for german authoritarianism and duty, just as much as the anglo enlightenment’s fallacy of an aristocracy of everybody is a justification for naval merchants to seize political power from agrarian gentry.these are necessary strategies to justify the needs if unlanded, landed, and island peoples – and the family structures they employ.
The conservatives were right that normative capital is the requirement for the high trust society that reduces transaction costs sufficiently that free trade and universal property rights and a weak state are possible and rational. Without those aristocratic egalitarian norms, and the absolute nuclear family that suppresses all free riding and provides a universal reproductive compromise , liberty is neither possible nor preferable.
Libertine cosmopolitan libertarians were wrong.
Unfortunately, Hayek, mises, popper and their followers failed, just as did their peers in logic, math and physical science to solve the problems of epistemology, ethics and politics when our ethics math and science had to accommodate greater than human scale at the end of the nineteenth century.
When I publish this fall (fingers crossed) I will fill in the blanks. And solve the problem.
If you want to chat about Haidt, and the implications of current research on politics, then I’ll put the time in.
There is a reason western families produced armies and muslims had to rely on slave armies. There is a reason Catholics are poorer than Protestants: family structure.
Family matters.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-24 04:21:00 UTC
ALL INCREASE IN THE INTEREST IN LIBERTY HAS BEEN IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM: BECAUSE IT”S MORAL, AND LIBERTINISM (ROTHBARDIANISM) ISN’T
(reposted from a comment to Boettke)
As far as I know, all movement toward the libertarian spectrum over the past decade has been toward the Classical Liberal values, which are of psychological and normative construction, rather than toward the anarchic, economic and empirical.
Morals move political orders, not utility. If utility moved political orders the protestant countries would have spent, not engaged in austerity. But humans will suffer great losses to punish the immoral. We could not have evolved as a species otherwise.
Economic universalism was one thing under homogenous polities. But, particularly after Rawls, and the postmodern assault on the west, academia, in no small part because it appealed to the new broader customer base, and its willingness to pay for access to universities, proposed universal morality instead of recognizing that moral codes reflect reproductive strategies, and that no universal moral code is expressible in politics across morally heterogeneous peoples. Not unless we invert Pareto and simply agree to punish the most moral people and fund the least moral peoples. (Which is what we do, which is why redistribution is dysgenic, and politically factionalizing.)
So until economics re-incorporates morality into the study of political economy, economics (particularly the aggregation ‘dishonest socialism’ of the Keynesians) will remain a tool of state expansion and friction creation rather than a ‘science’ which corresponds to long term reality.
We do what we measure. A fortune 1000 company can burn its brand value for short term profits. A people an burn its normative capital for short term consumption. But in the end, the ability both the brand and the polity to survive competition long term is harmed by that consumption of accumulated capital.
We have to put morality back into economics.
This is what Mises got wrong – or at least, never managed to get right.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-24 04:17:00 UTC
(intellectual arms dealing) (retaking the brand of liberty from the lunatic fringe) [R]othbardians are relying upon and spreading numerous fallacies: (a) the fallacy of the NAP/IVP as the moral and legal basis for an anarchic polity, (b) the fallacy of aggression rather than the necessity of trust, (c) and the fallacies of the origin of property rights as either intrinsic or augmentative, (d) and the fallacy that economics is aprioristic rather than empirical and operational. And because of these fallacies, all Rothbardians – and in practice, all anarcho-libertarians who subscribe to these fallacies – expend politically wasted effort themselves, distract from more productive efforts of others, perpetuate ideas that have been demonstrated to fail in the market for political preference, materially harmed the brand of liberty, and hindered our possibility of obtaining liberty by confusion, misdirection and delay. Rothbardian ethics are objectively immoral under rational analysis, and the market has deemed them immoral by experience, consideration and intuition. All forward motion on liberty has been toward classical liberalism and classical liberal ethics, and decidedly against rothbardian ethics – contrary to the claims of rothbardians. Since libertarian leaders have worked for and achieved a cult language and cult status that is insulated from criticism and innovation by faith in these principles; then the only alternative is to make rothbardian and misesian arguments intellectually embarrassing, and argumentatively impossible to use in public discourse, by arming opponents with the means to defeat them. At the very least this will limit the damage that they can do. But it will also cleanse the liberty movement, and the brand name ‘libertarian’ of its acquired continental and cosmopolitan absurdity, and allow classical liberals, aristocratic egalitarians, and private government advocates, all of whom advocate for high trust societies, to return the discourse on liberty to rational, empirical, and historical grounds. CONTRARY TO ROTHBARDIAN AND MISESIAN COSMOPOLITAN FALLACIES:FREE RIDING -free riding vs natural rights- 1) Upon agreeing to cooperate, one takes upon the moral hazard of free riding. Free riding is an logical antagonist to cooperation. If free riding is present, then it is not logical to cooperate. Property emerged prior to economic production as a prohibition on free riding prior to the division of labor and most likely as monogamy. The property rights constitute a precise, positive legal articulation of the general negative necessity of preventing free riding such that cooperation is a rational choice. MINIMUM RIGHTS – minimum necessary set of property rights- 2) The minimum necessary prohibitions on free riding include both the criminal and the ethical, with the option for negotiation on the moral. Otherwise transaction costs are too high for the rational choice of an anarchic polity over an authoritarian one. No ingroup polity of any kind exists without inclusively criminal, ethical, and moral prohibitions. It is possible to construct a federation of polities, as the medieval monarchies demonstrated, wherein cooperation between factions is limited to low trust – enforcement of merely criminal prohibitions – but it is not possible to form a voluntary polity without prohibition of at least criminal and ethical, if not some modicum of moral prohibitions. People demonstrate that they will demand an authority to suppress immoral action, or to mandate universal moral behavior, if the common law does not provide a means of preventing immoral behavior. (Where immoral behavior constitutes an involuntary transfer of costs by moral hazard, most commonly in the form of free riding.) In other words, the jewish quarter and the transient gypsies can only survive if they constitute small minorities at the will of an omnipotent host ruler – which we saw under both byzantine, muslim and aristocratic european societies. That is not liberty. That is merely a form of tolerance used to reduce costs. INSUFFICIENCY OF NAP – the NAP/ISV is insufficient in scope for the formation of a voluntary polity – 3) The NAP under ISV only prohibits criminal, but not unethical or immoral or conspiratorial, or conquest behaviors. For this reason it is insufficient basis for the discipline of cooperation: ethics and morality, and as basis for the institution of law: the definition of property rights. Instead, property rights must address all ethical and moral conflicts that are necessary to eliminate market demand for authoritarian intervention. And since all objective moral arguments and corresponding property definitions, consist of involuntary transfers that violate the prohibition on free riding, we can construct no libertarian argument against it. Unless the scope of prohibitions on free riding is sufficient, transaction costs render demand for the state preferable to demand for liberty. IGNORING TRUST -the degree of trust determines economic velocity: wealth- 4) Secure, and extensive Property rights, that suppress free riding, such that all are required to contribute to production, rather than survive off of parasitism, create trust: the ability to take risks, and to increase the velocity of production and trade, by reducing transaction costs. The level of trust corresponds directly to the degree of suppression of free riding created by the scope of prohibition of property rights, enforceable under law. The economic velocity of an economy corresponds directly to the degree of trust formed in a polity by the legal enforcement of property rights. FAILED CONSTRUCTIVISM -Mises’ legacy is that he failed to produce a constructivist argument- 4) During the late nineteenth century a movement to prevent a newly emergent form of logical mysticism (platonism) emerged under various names: intuitionistic and constructivist mathematics, operationalism in science, various linguistic movements in logic, and misesian praxeology in economics. All of these movements correctly intuited some problem with the emerging platonic concept of truth, but failed to accomplish it. This is because, constructive proof, correspondent proof (testing) and correspondent hardening (falsification) were not understood as ethical prohibitions on truth claims – and that truth was performative. That the act of testimony required demonstration of construction (internal consistency) demonstrating knowledge of construction, in addition to correspondence (external correspondence which demonstrates knowledge of use), and attempted falsification (demonstrating knowledge of durability). Mises intuited correctly, like intellectuals in other fields, that something was erroneous with the work of positivist (correlative, but not causal) economists. But he failed to grasp that praxeology was a problem of empirical observation, reduction to operations, testing those operations by sympathetic experience, before one could make a truth claim about any economic phenomenon. Mises simply failed. He failed worse than the advocates of operationalism and intuitionism. Who only failed to overcome objections. But his failure was compounded by the fact that had he correctly identified the problem of performative truth – that the constraint upon economic statements was one of testimony (truth telling), rather than deduction from first principles, it is possible that the leaders of other fields would have understood their predicament, and correctly distinguished between performative truth, constructive truth, correspondent truth, and ultimate truth. ETHICAL AND EMPIRICAL NOT LOGICAL -praxeology is both an empirical, and an ethical constraint- 5) As such, praxeology, whether we constaint it to action (rational action), cooperation (ethics), or economics (the voluntary organization of production) is a scientific process like all other epistemic processes, where we make observations, construct a theory, test it for proof of correspondence, falsify it for proof of durability, test our knowledge of construction for proof construction, and testify that we have proofs of correspondence, falsification, construction, and therefore possess the ethical right to make a truth claim. Once we have made such a claim we have a theory. If we, as all specialists, cannot find a means of falsifying it, then we have a law. All empirical concepts must follow this process. All technological innovation must follow this process. All acts of production must follow this process. All pursuit of knowledge must follow this process. (Note: I am not sure if falsification is a test of parsimony or not. I think that may be the correct terminology – or something close.) CONFLATION OF THEORETICAL AND SCIENTIFIC -Conflation of Theoretically Descriptive Science with Axiomatically Prescriptive Logic- 6) The conflation of theoretical systems which are limited to their correspondence to reality, and axiomatic systems which are limited only to their statements. Theoretical systems consist of descriptive statements constrained by reality, and axiomatic systems consist of *prescriptive* statements, not constrained by reality. Mises claim that economics is both aprioristic, axiomatic and scientific is by definition a pseudoscientific statement, since the definition of a science is that which adheres to the scientific method. Models may be constructed by axiomatic declarations, but any correspondence with reality requires that we accept that those axiomatic declarations, constitute analogies to theoretical descriptions whose basis is always empirical. FALLACY OF A PRIORISM VS EMPIRICISM -Analysis of human behavior is an empirical pursuit- 7) Praxeology (the study of action) , The Logic of Cooperation (the study of ethics), and Economics (the study of the voluntary organization of production) meet the criteria for empirical sciences, under which, through observation, we can reduce to hypothesis, theory and law. And with these laws we can construct axioms, for use in models, which function as logical instruments that allow us to contemplate what our limited cognitive abilities cannot contemplate without the use of various logical instruments: language, narrative, Operationalism, logic, numbers, mathematics. We can then test the truth of these axioms operationally and attempt to deduce whether it is possible for rational actors to perform according to the hypothesis, theory and law. If we cannot operationally describe those actions, and validate them through sympathetic experience as being rational, then they are not true. (This is the technique used in intuitionist mathematics.) -constancy of relations vs arbitrary precision- While cooperative relations are inconstant, and arguably each action is unique, patterns of relations are not inconstant and unique, and because of chaotic distribution of information, information, incentives and actions (changes in state) organically distribute (evolve) at different rates. Therefore we can predict trends of patterns, but not individual actions, any more than we can predict the position of any given physical entity at the subatomic level. That we cannot predict anything other than as a probability over a given period of time, does not render something unobservable, or unscientific. We need only be able to demonstrate that in fact, regularity exists at some given level of precision over some period of time. That is what determines whether a deductive statement is expressible as an hypothesis, theory or law: whether we can determine some regularity at some **scale** – some level of precision. Infinite precision is not possible, but the standard of precision is determined by the maximum utility we can obtain at the minimum level of regularity we can observe and describe. This constitutes “the problem of arbitrary precision”: General rules (theories) require us to adopt the available level of precision. Pure mathematics uses completely arbitrary precision, which is why it scales infinitely. But once we apply any general mathematical rule, to any particular description of reality, we include the necessary level of precision in the context. Machining valve, sawing a 2×4, navigating a ship, navigating an interplanetary satellite, and measuring the distance to the farthest observable object require different levels of precision, and we can only achieve certain levels of precision. That does not mean we cannot perform those operations using the same mathematics. It merely means we must apply contextual precision. -the scope of newton’s laws- Newton’s laws for example, and geometry for that matter, remain constant at human scale. But at very large and very small scale, due to the problems of velocity and immeasurability these rules fail. There are no universal statements expressible as operations that are not reductio fallacies. All hypotheses, theories and laws are subject to increases in precision or loss of utility by replacement with other hypotheses theories and laws. -the unpredictability of gasses- We cannot predict the course of any particular molecule when releasing a gas, but that does not mean that we cannot predict the overall distribution of molecules upon their release, and the rate of its dispersion. -the neutrality of money- We argue that money is neutral, but only over long and unpredictable periods of time. Is that an empirical question, or a logical one? We can deduce it, and it appears logical, but is our evidence sufficient to consider it a Law, Theory or Hypothesis. At present it is merely an hypothesis. But it is certainly not a law. -the minimum wage- We argue that minimum wage increases unemployment. Is that a logical or empirical question but it does not increase unemployment for all of those employed, and it occurs over unpredictable periods of time. -emergent phenomenon: the stickiness of prices- We did not deduce that prices would be as sticky as they are. We discovered it empirically – by observation. Is the stickiness of prices sufficient to meet the standard of hypothesis, theory or law? At present it is a theory that is widely accepted. -the non-deducibility of emergent phenomenon- We cannot deduce nor have we deduced emergent economic phenomenon. We can validate economic propositions deductively by reducing them to a series of actions, each of which is subject to sympathetic experience, and as such open to a subjective test of rationality. But that too is an empirical test. We observe and sense our reactions. ARGUMENTATION (I don’t state this well enough yet) -The fallacy of argumentation ethics- 8) Argumentation Ethics are fallacious because the choice of the strong is always between the use of violence to obtain what one desires, or the value of voluntary exchange, or boycott of worthless interactions. Human choice is always ternary: violence, cooperation or boycott, and never, under any condition, reduced to the binary choice of cooperation or boycott – argumentative contradiction is a fallacy since and agreement to temporarily cooperate on a given scope is merely utilitarian, and conveys nothing beyond the matter in question. Whereas, a contract for cooperation consists of a gamble that long term cooperation will be more beneficial, even if it results in various profits and losses. Numerous authors have stated similar arguments in non operational means. But Operationalism tells us that argumentation is empty – because we never surrender our violence, and as such never enter into a contradiction, merely demonstrate a preference. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev Ukraine.
(intellectual arms dealing) (retaking the brand of liberty from the lunatic fringe) [R]othbardians are relying upon and spreading numerous fallacies: (a) the fallacy of the NAP/IVP as the moral and legal basis for an anarchic polity, (b) the fallacy of aggression rather than the necessity of trust, (c) and the fallacies of the origin of property rights as either intrinsic or augmentative, (d) and the fallacy that economics is aprioristic rather than empirical and operational. And because of these fallacies, all Rothbardians – and in practice, all anarcho-libertarians who subscribe to these fallacies – expend politically wasted effort themselves, distract from more productive efforts of others, perpetuate ideas that have been demonstrated to fail in the market for political preference, materially harmed the brand of liberty, and hindered our possibility of obtaining liberty by confusion, misdirection and delay. Rothbardian ethics are objectively immoral under rational analysis, and the market has deemed them immoral by experience, consideration and intuition. All forward motion on liberty has been toward classical liberalism and classical liberal ethics, and decidedly against rothbardian ethics – contrary to the claims of rothbardians. Since libertarian leaders have worked for and achieved a cult language and cult status that is insulated from criticism and innovation by faith in these principles; then the only alternative is to make rothbardian and misesian arguments intellectually embarrassing, and argumentatively impossible to use in public discourse, by arming opponents with the means to defeat them. At the very least this will limit the damage that they can do. But it will also cleanse the liberty movement, and the brand name ‘libertarian’ of its acquired continental and cosmopolitan absurdity, and allow classical liberals, aristocratic egalitarians, and private government advocates, all of whom advocate for high trust societies, to return the discourse on liberty to rational, empirical, and historical grounds. CONTRARY TO ROTHBARDIAN AND MISESIAN COSMOPOLITAN FALLACIES:FREE RIDING -free riding vs natural rights- 1) Upon agreeing to cooperate, one takes upon the moral hazard of free riding. Free riding is an logical antagonist to cooperation. If free riding is present, then it is not logical to cooperate. Property emerged prior to economic production as a prohibition on free riding prior to the division of labor and most likely as monogamy. The property rights constitute a precise, positive legal articulation of the general negative necessity of preventing free riding such that cooperation is a rational choice. MINIMUM RIGHTS – minimum necessary set of property rights- 2) The minimum necessary prohibitions on free riding include both the criminal and the ethical, with the option for negotiation on the moral. Otherwise transaction costs are too high for the rational choice of an anarchic polity over an authoritarian one. No ingroup polity of any kind exists without inclusively criminal, ethical, and moral prohibitions. It is possible to construct a federation of polities, as the medieval monarchies demonstrated, wherein cooperation between factions is limited to low trust – enforcement of merely criminal prohibitions – but it is not possible to form a voluntary polity without prohibition of at least criminal and ethical, if not some modicum of moral prohibitions. People demonstrate that they will demand an authority to suppress immoral action, or to mandate universal moral behavior, if the common law does not provide a means of preventing immoral behavior. (Where immoral behavior constitutes an involuntary transfer of costs by moral hazard, most commonly in the form of free riding.) In other words, the jewish quarter and the transient gypsies can only survive if they constitute small minorities at the will of an omnipotent host ruler – which we saw under both byzantine, muslim and aristocratic european societies. That is not liberty. That is merely a form of tolerance used to reduce costs. INSUFFICIENCY OF NAP – the NAP/ISV is insufficient in scope for the formation of a voluntary polity – 3) The NAP under ISV only prohibits criminal, but not unethical or immoral or conspiratorial, or conquest behaviors. For this reason it is insufficient basis for the discipline of cooperation: ethics and morality, and as basis for the institution of law: the definition of property rights. Instead, property rights must address all ethical and moral conflicts that are necessary to eliminate market demand for authoritarian intervention. And since all objective moral arguments and corresponding property definitions, consist of involuntary transfers that violate the prohibition on free riding, we can construct no libertarian argument against it. Unless the scope of prohibitions on free riding is sufficient, transaction costs render demand for the state preferable to demand for liberty. IGNORING TRUST -the degree of trust determines economic velocity: wealth- 4) Secure, and extensive Property rights, that suppress free riding, such that all are required to contribute to production, rather than survive off of parasitism, create trust: the ability to take risks, and to increase the velocity of production and trade, by reducing transaction costs. The level of trust corresponds directly to the degree of suppression of free riding created by the scope of prohibition of property rights, enforceable under law. The economic velocity of an economy corresponds directly to the degree of trust formed in a polity by the legal enforcement of property rights. FAILED CONSTRUCTIVISM -Mises’ legacy is that he failed to produce a constructivist argument- 4) During the late nineteenth century a movement to prevent a newly emergent form of logical mysticism (platonism) emerged under various names: intuitionistic and constructivist mathematics, operationalism in science, various linguistic movements in logic, and misesian praxeology in economics. All of these movements correctly intuited some problem with the emerging platonic concept of truth, but failed to accomplish it. This is because, constructive proof, correspondent proof (testing) and correspondent hardening (falsification) were not understood as ethical prohibitions on truth claims – and that truth was performative. That the act of testimony required demonstration of construction (internal consistency) demonstrating knowledge of construction, in addition to correspondence (external correspondence which demonstrates knowledge of use), and attempted falsification (demonstrating knowledge of durability). Mises intuited correctly, like intellectuals in other fields, that something was erroneous with the work of positivist (correlative, but not causal) economists. But he failed to grasp that praxeology was a problem of empirical observation, reduction to operations, testing those operations by sympathetic experience, before one could make a truth claim about any economic phenomenon. Mises simply failed. He failed worse than the advocates of operationalism and intuitionism. Who only failed to overcome objections. But his failure was compounded by the fact that had he correctly identified the problem of performative truth – that the constraint upon economic statements was one of testimony (truth telling), rather than deduction from first principles, it is possible that the leaders of other fields would have understood their predicament, and correctly distinguished between performative truth, constructive truth, correspondent truth, and ultimate truth. ETHICAL AND EMPIRICAL NOT LOGICAL -praxeology is both an empirical, and an ethical constraint- 5) As such, praxeology, whether we constaint it to action (rational action), cooperation (ethics), or economics (the voluntary organization of production) is a scientific process like all other epistemic processes, where we make observations, construct a theory, test it for proof of correspondence, falsify it for proof of durability, test our knowledge of construction for proof construction, and testify that we have proofs of correspondence, falsification, construction, and therefore possess the ethical right to make a truth claim. Once we have made such a claim we have a theory. If we, as all specialists, cannot find a means of falsifying it, then we have a law. All empirical concepts must follow this process. All technological innovation must follow this process. All acts of production must follow this process. All pursuit of knowledge must follow this process. (Note: I am not sure if falsification is a test of parsimony or not. I think that may be the correct terminology – or something close.) CONFLATION OF THEORETICAL AND SCIENTIFIC -Conflation of Theoretically Descriptive Science with Axiomatically Prescriptive Logic- 6) The conflation of theoretical systems which are limited to their correspondence to reality, and axiomatic systems which are limited only to their statements. Theoretical systems consist of descriptive statements constrained by reality, and axiomatic systems consist of *prescriptive* statements, not constrained by reality. Mises claim that economics is both aprioristic, axiomatic and scientific is by definition a pseudoscientific statement, since the definition of a science is that which adheres to the scientific method. Models may be constructed by axiomatic declarations, but any correspondence with reality requires that we accept that those axiomatic declarations, constitute analogies to theoretical descriptions whose basis is always empirical. FALLACY OF A PRIORISM VS EMPIRICISM -Analysis of human behavior is an empirical pursuit- 7) Praxeology (the study of action) , The Logic of Cooperation (the study of ethics), and Economics (the study of the voluntary organization of production) meet the criteria for empirical sciences, under which, through observation, we can reduce to hypothesis, theory and law. And with these laws we can construct axioms, for use in models, which function as logical instruments that allow us to contemplate what our limited cognitive abilities cannot contemplate without the use of various logical instruments: language, narrative, Operationalism, logic, numbers, mathematics. We can then test the truth of these axioms operationally and attempt to deduce whether it is possible for rational actors to perform according to the hypothesis, theory and law. If we cannot operationally describe those actions, and validate them through sympathetic experience as being rational, then they are not true. (This is the technique used in intuitionist mathematics.) -constancy of relations vs arbitrary precision- While cooperative relations are inconstant, and arguably each action is unique, patterns of relations are not inconstant and unique, and because of chaotic distribution of information, information, incentives and actions (changes in state) organically distribute (evolve) at different rates. Therefore we can predict trends of patterns, but not individual actions, any more than we can predict the position of any given physical entity at the subatomic level. That we cannot predict anything other than as a probability over a given period of time, does not render something unobservable, or unscientific. We need only be able to demonstrate that in fact, regularity exists at some given level of precision over some period of time. That is what determines whether a deductive statement is expressible as an hypothesis, theory or law: whether we can determine some regularity at some **scale** – some level of precision. Infinite precision is not possible, but the standard of precision is determined by the maximum utility we can obtain at the minimum level of regularity we can observe and describe. This constitutes “the problem of arbitrary precision”: General rules (theories) require us to adopt the available level of precision. Pure mathematics uses completely arbitrary precision, which is why it scales infinitely. But once we apply any general mathematical rule, to any particular description of reality, we include the necessary level of precision in the context. Machining valve, sawing a 2×4, navigating a ship, navigating an interplanetary satellite, and measuring the distance to the farthest observable object require different levels of precision, and we can only achieve certain levels of precision. That does not mean we cannot perform those operations using the same mathematics. It merely means we must apply contextual precision. -the scope of newton’s laws- Newton’s laws for example, and geometry for that matter, remain constant at human scale. But at very large and very small scale, due to the problems of velocity and immeasurability these rules fail. There are no universal statements expressible as operations that are not reductio fallacies. All hypotheses, theories and laws are subject to increases in precision or loss of utility by replacement with other hypotheses theories and laws. -the unpredictability of gasses- We cannot predict the course of any particular molecule when releasing a gas, but that does not mean that we cannot predict the overall distribution of molecules upon their release, and the rate of its dispersion. -the neutrality of money- We argue that money is neutral, but only over long and unpredictable periods of time. Is that an empirical question, or a logical one? We can deduce it, and it appears logical, but is our evidence sufficient to consider it a Law, Theory or Hypothesis. At present it is merely an hypothesis. But it is certainly not a law. -the minimum wage- We argue that minimum wage increases unemployment. Is that a logical or empirical question but it does not increase unemployment for all of those employed, and it occurs over unpredictable periods of time. -emergent phenomenon: the stickiness of prices- We did not deduce that prices would be as sticky as they are. We discovered it empirically – by observation. Is the stickiness of prices sufficient to meet the standard of hypothesis, theory or law? At present it is a theory that is widely accepted. -the non-deducibility of emergent phenomenon- We cannot deduce nor have we deduced emergent economic phenomenon. We can validate economic propositions deductively by reducing them to a series of actions, each of which is subject to sympathetic experience, and as such open to a subjective test of rationality. But that too is an empirical test. We observe and sense our reactions. ARGUMENTATION (I don’t state this well enough yet) -The fallacy of argumentation ethics- 8) Argumentation Ethics are fallacious because the choice of the strong is always between the use of violence to obtain what one desires, or the value of voluntary exchange, or boycott of worthless interactions. Human choice is always ternary: violence, cooperation or boycott, and never, under any condition, reduced to the binary choice of cooperation or boycott – argumentative contradiction is a fallacy since and agreement to temporarily cooperate on a given scope is merely utilitarian, and conveys nothing beyond the matter in question. Whereas, a contract for cooperation consists of a gamble that long term cooperation will be more beneficial, even if it results in various profits and losses. Numerous authors have stated similar arguments in non operational means. But Operationalism tells us that argumentation is empty – because we never surrender our violence, and as such never enter into a contradiction, merely demonstrate a preference. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev Ukraine.
RENDERING ROTHBARDIAN FALLACIES INTELLECTUALLY EMBARRASSING, AND ARGUMENTATIVELY IMPOSSIBLE.
(intellectual arms dealing) (retaking the brand of liberty from the lunatic fringe)
Rothbardians are relying upon and spreading numerous fallacies: (a) the fallacy of the NAP/IVP as the moral and legal basis for an anarchic polity, (b) the fallacy of aggression rather than the necessity of trust, (c) and the fallacies of the origin of property rights as either intrinsic or augmentative, (d) and the fallacy that economics is aprioristic rather than empirical and operational.
And because of these fallacies, all Rothbardians – and in practice, all anarcho-libertarians who subscribe to these fallacies – expend politically wasted effort themselves, distract from more productive efforts of others, perpetuate ideas that have been demonstrated to fail in the market for political preference, materially harmed the brand of liberty, and hindered our possibility of obtaining liberty by confusion, misdirection and delay. Rothbardian ethics are objectively immoral under rational analysis, and the market has deemed them immoral by experience, consideration and intuition. All forward motion on liberty has been toward classical liberalism and classical liberal ethics, and decidedly against rothbardian ethics – contrary to the claims of rothbardians.
Since libertarian leaders have worked for and achieved a cult language and cult status that is insulated from criticism and innovation by faith in these principles; then the only alternative is to make rothbardian and misesian arguments intellectually embarrassing, and argumentatively impossible to use in public discourse, by arming opponents with the means to defeat them.
At the very least this will limit the damage that they can do. But it will also cleanse the liberty movement, and the brand name ‘libertarian’ of its acquired continental and cosmopolitan absurdity, and allow classical liberals, aristocratic egalitarians, and private government advocates, all of whom advocate for high trust societies, to return the discourse on liberty to rational, empirical, and historical grounds.
CONTRARY TO ROTHBARDIAN AND MISESIAN COSMOPOLITAN FALLACIES:
FREE RIDING
-free riding vs natural rights-
1) Upon agreeing to cooperate, one takes upon the moral hazard of free riding. Free riding is an logical antagonist to cooperation. If free riding is present, then it is not logical to cooperate. Property emerged prior to economic production as a prohibition on free riding prior to the division of labor and most likely as monogamy. The property rights constitute a precise, positive legal articulation of the general negative necessity of preventing free riding such that cooperation is a rational choice.
MINIMUM RIGHTS
– minimum necessary set of property rights-
2) The minimum necessary prohibitions on free riding include both the criminal and the ethical, with the option for negotiation on the moral. Otherwise transaction costs are too high for the rational choice of an anarchic polity over an authoritarian one. No ingroup polity of any kind exists without inclusively criminal, ethical, and moral prohibitions. It is possible to construct a federation of polities, as the medieval monarchies demonstrated, wherein cooperation between factions is limited to low trust – enforcement of merely criminal prohibitions – but it is not possible to form a voluntary polity without prohibition of at least criminal and ethical, if not some modicum of moral prohibitions. People demonstrate that they will demand an authority to suppress immoral action, or to mandate universal moral behavior, if the common law does not provide a means of preventing immoral behavior. (Where immoral behavior constitutes an involuntary transfer of costs by moral hazard, most commonly in the form of free riding.) In other words, the jewish quarter and the transient gypsies can only survive if they constitute small minorities at the will of an omnipotent host ruler – which we saw under both byzantine, muslim and aristocratic european societies. That is not liberty. That is merely a form of tolerance used to reduce costs.
INSUFFICIENCY OF NAP
– the NAP/ISV is insufficient in scope for the formation of a voluntary polity –
3) The NAP under ISV only prohibits criminal, but not unethical or immoral or conspiratorial, or conquest behaviors. For this reason it is insufficient basis for the discipline of cooperation: ethics and morality, and as basis for the institution of law: the definition of property rights.
Instead, property rights must address all ethical and moral conflicts that are necessary to eliminate market demand for authoritarian intervention. And since all objective moral arguments and corresponding property definitions, consist of involuntary transfers that violate the prohibition on free riding, we can construct no libertarian argument against it.
Unless the scope of prohibitions on free riding is sufficient, transaction costs render demand for the state preferable to demand for liberty.
IGNORING TRUST
-the degree of trust determines economic velocity: wealth-
4) Secure, and extensive Property rights, that suppress free riding, such that all are required to contribute to production, rather than survive off of parasitism, create trust: the ability to take risks, and to increase the velocity of production and trade, by reducing transaction costs.
The level of trust corresponds directly to the degree of suppression of free riding created by the scope of prohibition of property rights, enforceable under law.
The economic velocity of an economy corresponds directly to the degree of trust formed in a polity by the legal enforcement of property rights.
FAILED CONSTRUCTIVISM
-Mises’ legacy is that he failed to produce a constructivist argument-
4) During the late nineteenth century a movement to prevent a newly emergent form of logical mysticism (platonism) emerged under various names: intuitionistic and constructivist mathematics, operationalism in science, various linguistic movements in logic, and misesian praxeology in economics.
All of these movements correctly intuited some problem with the emerging platonic concept of truth, but failed to accomplish it. This is because, constructive proof, correspondent proof (testing) and correspondent hardening (falsification) were not understood as ethical prohibitions on truth claims – and that truth was performative. That the act of testimony required demonstration of construction (internal consistency) demonstrating knowledge of construction, in addition to correspondence (external correspondence which demonstrates knowledge of use), and attempted falsification (demonstrating knowledge of durability).
Mises intuited correctly, like intellectuals in other fields, that something was erroneous with the work of positivist (correlative, but not causal) economists. But he failed to grasp that praxeology was a problem of empirical observation, reduction to operations, testing those operations by sympathetic experience, before one could make a truth claim about any economic phenomenon.
Mises simply failed. He failed worse than the advocates of operationalism and intuitionism. Who only failed to overcome objections. But his failure was compounded by the fact that had he correctly identified the problem of performative truth – that the constraint upon economic statements was one of testimony (truth telling), rather than deduction from first principles, it is possible that the leaders of other fields would have understood their predicament, and correctly distinguished between performative truth, constructive truth, correspondent truth, and ultimate truth.
ETHICAL AND EMPIRICAL NOT LOGICAL
-praxeology is both an empirical, and an ethical constraint-
5) As such, praxeology, whether we constaint it to action (rational action), cooperation (ethics), or economics (the voluntary organization of production) is a scientific process like all other epistemic processes, where we make observations, construct a theory, test it for proof of correspondence, falsify it for proof of durability, test our knowledge of construction for proof construction, and testify that we have proofs of correspondence, falsification, construction, and therefore possess the ethical right to make a truth claim. Once we have made such a claim we have a theory. If we, as all specialists, cannot find a means of falsifying it, then we have a law.
All empirical concepts must follow this process. All technological innovation must follow this process. All acts of production must follow this process. All pursuit of knowledge must follow this process.
(Note: I am not sure if falsification is a test of parsimony or not. I think that may be the correct terminology – or something close.)
CONFLATION OF THEORETICAL AND SCIENTIFIC
-Conflation of Theoretically Descriptive Science with Axiomatically Prescriptive Logic-
6) The conflation of theoretical systems which are limited to their correspondence to reality, and axiomatic systems which are limited only to their statements. Theoretical systems consist of descriptive statements constrained by reality, and axiomatic systems consist of *prescriptive* statements, not constrained by reality. Mises claim that economics is both aprioristic, axiomatic and scientific is by definition a pseudoscientific statement, since the definition of a science is that which adheres to the scientific method. Models may be constructed by axiomatic declarations, but any correspondence with reality requires that we accept that those axiomatic declarations, constitute analogies to theoretical descriptions whose basis is always empirical.
FALLACY OF A PRIORISM VS EMPIRICISM
-Analysis of human behavior is an empirical pursuit-
7) Praxeology (the study of action) , The Logic of Cooperation (the study of ethics), and Economics (the study of the voluntary organization of production) meet the criteria for empirical sciences, under which, through observation, we can reduce to hypothesis, theory and law.
And with these laws we can construct axioms, for use in models, which function as logical instruments that allow us to contemplate what our limited cognitive abilities cannot contemplate without the use of various logical instruments: language, narrative, Operationalism, logic, numbers, mathematics.
We can then test the truth of these axioms operationally and attempt to deduce whether it is possible for rational actors to perform according to the hypothesis, theory and law. If we cannot operationally describe those actions, and validate them through sympathetic experience as being rational, then they are not true. (This is the technique used in intuitionist mathematics.)
-constancy of relations vs arbitrary precision-
While cooperative relations are inconstant, and arguably each action is unique, patterns of relations are not inconstant and unique, and because of chaotic distribution of information, information, incentives and actions (changes in state) organically distribute (evolve) at different rates. Therefore we can predict trends of patterns, but not individual actions, any more than we can predict the position of any given physical entity at the subatomic level.
That we cannot predict anything other than as a probability over a given period of time, does not render something unobservable, or unscientific. We need only be able to demonstrate that in fact, regularity exists at some given level of precision over some period of time. That is what determines whether a deductive statement is expressible as an hypothesis, theory or law: whether we can determine some regularity at some **scale** – some level of precision. Infinite precision is not possible, but the standard of precision is determined by the maximum utility we can obtain at the minimum level of regularity we can observe and describe.
This constitutes “the problem of arbitrary precision”: General rules (theories) require us to adopt the available level of precision. Pure mathematics uses completely arbitrary precision, which is why it scales infinitely. But once we apply any general mathematical rule, to any particular description of reality, we include the necessary level of precision in the context. Machining valve, sawing a 2×4, navigating a ship, navigating an interplanetary satellite, and measuring the distance to the farthest observable object require different levels of precision, and we can only achieve certain levels of precision. That does not mean we cannot perform those operations using the same mathematics. It merely means we must apply contextual precision.
-the scope of newton’s laws-
Newton’s laws for example, and geometry for that matter, remain constant at human scale. But at very large and very small scale, due to the problems of velocity and immeasurability these rules fail. There are no universal statements expressible as operations that are not reductio fallacies. All hypotheses, theories and laws are subject to increases in precision or loss of utility by replacement with other hypotheses theories and laws.
-the unpredictability of gasses-
We cannot predict the course of any particular molecule when releasing a gas, but that does not mean that we cannot predict the overall distribution of molecules upon their release, and the rate of its dispersion.
-the neutrality of money-
We argue that money is neutral, but only over long and unpredictable periods of time. Is that an empirical question, or a logical one? We can deduce it, and it appears logical, but is our evidence sufficient to consider it a Law, Theory or Hypothesis. At present it is merely an hypothesis. But it is certainly not a law.
-the minimum wage-
We argue that minimum wage increases unemployment. Is that a logical or empirical question but it does not increase unemployment for all of those employed, and it occurs over unpredictable periods of time.
-emergent phenomenon: the stickiness of prices-
We did not deduce that prices would be as sticky as they are. We discovered it empirically – by observation. Is the stickiness of prices sufficient to meet the standard of hypothesis, theory or law? At present it is a theory that is widely accepted.
-the non-deducibility of emergent phenomenon-
We cannot deduce nor have we deduced emergent economic phenomenon. We can validate economic propositions deductively by reducing them to a series of actions, each of which is subject to sympathetic experience, and as such open to a subjective test of rationality. But that too is an empirical test. We observe and sense our reactions.
ARGUMENTATION (I don’t state this well enough yet)
-The fallacy of argumentation ethics-
8) Argumentation Ethics are fallacious because the choice of the strong is always between the use of violence to obtain what one desires, or the value of voluntary exchange, or boycott of worthless interactions.
Human choice is always ternary: violence, cooperation or boycott, and never, under any condition, reduced to the binary choice of cooperation or boycott – argumentative contradiction is a fallacy since and agreement to temporarily cooperate on a given scope is merely utilitarian, and conveys nothing beyond the matter in question.
Whereas, a contract for cooperation consists of a gamble that long term cooperation will be more beneficial, even if it results in various profits and losses. Numerous authors have stated similar arguments in non operational means. But Operationalism tells us that argumentation is empty – because we never surrender our violence, and as such never enter into a contradiction, merely demonstrate a preference.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-20 13:03:00 UTC
(Hillary is trying to be likable rather than competent. Bad campaign advice. She isn’t likeable. She’s unpleasant, with a dishonesty she learned from Alinsky like Obama. She’s not even a very good person. Her reputation was closer to the Iron Lady’s: one of decisive seriousness, than to likability. And while one can fake competence one cannot really fake likability. Personally I think she’d be even worse than Obama has been. But at least we’d have her husband as a proxy in the white house. I can’t really see her surviving much longer. But Bill is pretty smart. We’ll see.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-19 10:22:00 UTC
Unfortunately, libertarians tend not to be well read outside of their dogma, and are thus uninformed.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 10:03:00 UTC