Form: Critique

  • NAME-CALLING It used to be a problem. I mean. Before we had data. Before we had

    NAME-CALLING

    It used to be a problem. I mean. Before we had data. Before we had empirical evidence. It used to be hard to defend conservatives.

    They are so buried in multi-axial moral spaghetti that they dont themselves know what they’re saying.

    But that just mean’s their A-RATIONAL, it doesn’t mean they’re IRRATIONAL. There is a difference.

    But you know, the data is just piling up. Mountains of it. Daily. Since about 1990. And we’ve got pretty much critical mass now.

    They’re right about just about everything – except, obviously, homosexuality. That’s what the data says.

    Clear as day.

    The left has got to use every race, gender, and culture card possible while they carry any weight at all. Personally I love getting them now. ‘Cause we have data. We have lots of it.

    WELCOME TO THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT.

    Those damned conservatives were mostly right.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-21 12:41:00 UTC

  • NON-ANSWER: ON ECONOMICS AS A SCIENCE I was actually offended by the hypocrisy o

    http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/robert-j–shilleron-whether-he-is-a-scientistANOTHER NON-ANSWER: ON ECONOMICS AS A SCIENCE

    I was actually offended by the hypocrisy of Shiller’s post, given that economists, at least those who act as public intellectuals, by speaking and writing, do almost nothing EXCEPT advocate or criticize policy. They do little BUT legitimize the state’s conduct of involuntary experiments on us while maintaining plausible deniability, statements of clean hands, and outright denial.

    I drafted an essay on this topic to point out the reasons for confusion, as to which statements, concepts actions and methods in economics are scientific and which are not.

    I’m tempted to call it, for marketing reasons ‘THE FINAL WORD ON …” economics as a science.

    Since nothing can actually ‘be’ anything, the correct question is: “Which actions and propositions practiced by people who work in the field of economics reflect the actions and propositions demonstrated by scientists in the hard sciences, and which are not?”

    I just tried to sketch the different ideas here, and I can’t do it quickly and put any meaning into it. So that will just have to wait until I have a weekend to work on it. But the answer is obvious: Its really useful investigation. But whether it uncovers constant relations is questionable, and whether it has predictive power is certainly false, and where it embraces moral hazard with bloody hands is damning.

    FURTHERMORE

    On the same lines, the more interesting question is, given any problem, are mathematical statements or computer science statements more scientific?

    Given mathematical platonism, and that mathematical platonism is an empty verbalism obscuring causality (yes it is) because no mathematical statement is free from representation in operational language, are mathematical statements made in math department language true, or are they falsified, or are they merely analogies or riddles?


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 16:22:00 UTC

  • THROW OUT THE LIBERTARIAN BABY WITH THE PROGRESSIVE BATHWATER LIBERTARIAN != ROT

    http://blog.jim.com/politics/the-dark-enlightenment-critique-of-libertarianism.htmlDONT THROW OUT THE LIBERTARIAN BABY WITH THE PROGRESSIVE BATHWATER

    LIBERTARIAN != ROTHBARDIAN ANARCHO CAPITALIST. Classical liberals are also ‘libertarians’. Rothbardians via the Mises institute adopted the tactics of the marxists, but this time, using the internet – so they’re ‘everywhere’. Anarcho capitalism was structured like the marxist IDEOLOGY. It is a MORAL, not scientific argument, for ideological rather than political purposes.

    The anarcho capitalist program DID give us:

    a) the incentives of a bureaucracy are worse than the incentives of a monarchy.

    b) the critique that democracy was simply a slow road to communism,

    c) propertarian ethics that make all moral codes commensurable and

    d) the use of competing insurance companies to replace monopoly bureaucracy.

    e) the sufficiency of the common law, and the necessity for it.

    f) the state as the cause of ‘evil corporations’.

    g) the required prohibition on law-making, and the constraint of government to contract negotiation between groups.

    What it did not give us is:

    a) means of investments in commons (government)

    b) means of preventing free riding, fraud by omission, theft via externality, privatization of gains and socialization of losses.

    c) a means of accommodating the collectivism of women in their effort to restore the sex economy in favor of the productive economy (but that’s too long a discussion.)

    Thankfully others have given us:

    a) lottocratic representation

    b) direct democracy

    And hopefully I’m trying to fix that. I think I have. But I’m not sure.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 07:24:00 UTC

  • DID THE LEFT LEARN FROM THE FINANCIAL CRISIS? (They never learn anything. As Bra

    http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/11/justin-fox-what-weve-learned-from-the-financial-crisis-noted.htmlWHAT DID THE LEFT LEARN FROM THE FINANCIAL CRISIS?

    (They never learn anything. As Brad Delong demonstrates yet again.)

    What “we” Learned is more interesting.

    (a) Capital flows were catastrophically risk producing.

    (b) Regulation of financial instruments was too weak to prevent fraud on a massive scale, and government created the incentive to commit systemic fraud, and the need to conform to systemic fraud because of a lack of regulation.

    (c) That the state allowed, and encouraged, the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses.

    (d) That the state still prevents individuals and organizations from suing individuals and institutions from regulating company, and financial system behavior via the courts, by declaration of standing, as a means of preserving the political right and responsibility for regulation of those institutions – and thereby creating the incentive for political influence and corruption. That they both create the problem and then offer to solve it isn’t lost on some of us.

    (e) The Austrian theory of the trade cycle is correct, yet again. Expanding credit causes misallocation and eventually, structural unemployment.

    (f) That the left blocked attempts to produce a compromise deal for spending that suited left leaning supporters, and reforms that suited right wing supporters. And that this block continues today.

    (g) We tried very hard, and, it looks as though it is possible to bankrupt the state if we work at it long enough. And either we bankrupt it or it bankrupts us and our families. Our view is that our families are family and that the state is an arbiter, not that all citizens are ‘family’.

    BUT THEN AGAIN, We aren’t positivists. 🙂 And the left is. Because it’s convenient.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-10 10:51:00 UTC

  • THE SOURCE AND PURPOSE OF PAUL KRUGMAN’S INTELLECTUAL CORRUPTION (explanatory po

    THE SOURCE AND PURPOSE OF PAUL KRUGMAN’S INTELLECTUAL CORRUPTION

    (explanatory power)(important)

    “The Conscience Of An Immoral Man”

    In a series of recent articles, Krugman suggests that there is only one answer for Europe and the world, and that is, for the Germans to redistribute to the periphery.

    But that’s false. The opposite answer is that the periphery borrow to REFORM themselves. And when I say something is ‘moral’ I mean that it forces an involuntary transfer – a theft. One cannot dismiss morality unless one dismisses theft. That’s what it means to be immoral: to steal indirectly, and anonymously.

    Once we include opportunity costs and the subset of social capital we now call ‘moral capital’, we see that material trade and consumption is just a minority of the human economy. And that the economy that makes material trade and consumption possible is the social and moral economy. And that theft of opportunity, or the various forms of free riding, or theft by immorality, are all equivalent forms of theft.

    So, Krugman’s solution is immoral. The conservative solution is of course. moral. Because conservatism in the west is a defense of moral capital. Incentives are incentives. Actions have cumulative consequences. Money is only a unit of measure. Human beings keep account of not only money but opportunity costs. And what Krugman is saying is that Germans pay opportunity costs and should involuntarily transfer them to the periphery.

    The trade is only IMBALANCED because of BEHAVIOR then it is not a trade imbalance, it is an incentive.

    ANALYSIS

    There is a very great difference between the imbalances in trade, education, technology, resources, and infrastructure and the imbalances in trust, discipline, time preference, and hard work.

    And it is IMMORAL and COUNTER PRODUCTIVE if we do NOT use trade imbalances to transform those who have less trust, less discipline, work less.

    The ongoing evolution of social capital requires that we punish free riders. And Free Riding IS THE PROBLEM that all societies must suppress. It is necessary for cooperation.

    SOURCE OF HIS IMMORALITY

    Paul studied trade between different STATES – plus he has deeply internalized both jewish ghetto ethics, and the need to justify the failure of his people to hold land through adoption of land-holder moral codes. (Albeit as a survival strategy.) Furthermore, for cultural reasons, he is an anti-aristocratic activist.

    Like many people with specialized knowledge he uses overwhelming bis in all his arguments to mask the very simple, but catastrophic errors he makes on a daily basis: that it is necessary to conform to germanic high trust behavior and institutions if one desires a high trust society, and the economic productivity of the anglo-german sphere.

    Conversely, and much more importantly, it is IMPOSSIBLE TO MAINTAIN THE HIGH TRUST SOCIETY by policy and will rather than culture and incentive. Free riding is the primary problem of economic and social development and why the nuclear family is so important (if fragile.) If people see free-riding, then they will punish it. If free riding is pervasive, people will STOP over-contributing.

    I cannot really tell if Krugman understands the importance of the high trust ethic, or if his ghetto ethics, hatred of white europeans, and his fascination with states and trade simply serve blind him to it.

    But given his obvious joy at expressing ridicule, and his facility with intentionally OBSCURING the moral and necessary constraint of free riding, with the status signals obtained from using charity as a means of conspicuous consumption, I would say that Krugman is nothing more than one more exceptionally verbally talented man, using loaded and obscurant language, as a means of conducting MacDonald’s insight into the damaging nature of

    Each expression of Krugman’s rhetorical glee, is a status perk he obtains, demonstrating both his conspicuous consumption, and therefore his status, while at the same time destroying the western high trust society by encouraging, in every way possible, free riding, rent seeking.

    THE BROADER CONTEXT

    If Noam Chomsky is the high priest, then Paul Krugman is the parliamentary head of the “Culture Of Critique” that, by use of obscurant language, is a systemic means of conducting intentional fraud: it is ‘the prestige’ in the verbal sleight of hand; the gesture that hides the true action: **Obtaining status by demonstrating conspicuous consumption using other people’s money, to increase free riding and rent seeking, in order to destroy the high trust society – which is the FIRST CAUSE OF ECONOMIC EXCELLENCE.**

    Once the speaker is possessed of status, then the ‘virtuously destructive’ cycle is complete. He has free reign to use that status, obtained by fraud and theft, to continue and expand his theft.

    Understood in this light, we see both the legitimacy of Paul Krugman’s insight into interstate trade, and the moral criminality of his rhetoric as an expression of the ongoing damage of the Cultural of Critique to western civilization and the high trust society.

    One can use verbal intelligence to articulate the truth. Or one can use verbal intelligence to construct obscurant language that by ‘the prestige’ – the award of status – under the rubric of care-taking, by encouraging people and policy makers to do just the opposite of what they intend: to destroy their high trust society by facilitating in every way possible the rent seeking and free riding that make the high trust society possible.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    ——–

    Note: I’ll improve this argument a bit. This is my first draft. But I’ve pretty much got the idea down. And I think I’ve united finally, Popper and Praxeology through operational language, fixing both of them. I am not sure how successful that I will be with the argument that obscurant (unscientific, non-operational) language is required for moral speech, because operational language places a high barrier for knowledge on any speaker. But if one makes public speech, about public matters, he is offering a product to the market, and is bound by warrantee.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-06 03:20:00 UTC

  • FOR THE DECLINE OF THE HUMANITIES (good)(attack on academia) (Disclaimer: I have

    http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7629REASONS FOR THE DECLINE OF THE HUMANITIES

    (good)(attack on academia)

    (Disclaimer: I have a fine art degree: art history and theory. Aesthetic philosophy. Although I am also educated in economics, philosophy, history and computer science.)

    [Warning: Harsh words follow.]

    1) COST. Now, if I paid 10K for this degree, or even 20K, that would be one thing. But these degrees are too expensive for the cost of the education. Humans make cost benefit analyses and the data is in: there isn’t a return on them.

    2) CONTENT. Philosophy departments can alight with the humanities and religion (which is a death sentence) or align with science, economics, politics, business and law (where it is terribly useful).

    3) FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL PROGRAM. The academic humanities bear much of the responsibility for their plight having tried fitfully to prove via the metaphysical program on one hand (a demonstrated failure), via the logical program on the other (a demonstrated failure), by the mathematical program (a failure at least at the set level to correct mathematical platonism rather than justify it), that philosophy is a science in itself, rather than the means by which we interpret the findings of the sciences and therefore to inform and alter our perception and understanding, such that we adapt our actions to the new knowledge. Philosophy then is a moral discipline, where morality is the study of action. It is not a means of attempting find justification that philosophy is a science. It is not. It cannot be. Because science requires that we use instrumentation to confirm our senses.

    4) REPLACING THE CHURCH: It is not lost on those of us who are critics (even those few of us who write philosophy nearly full time), that Academia, originating as an extension of the church, has sought to replace the church’s influence over moral and political life. It has done so. It has done so largely by a) promoting both socialism, communism, postmodernism and totalitarian humanism, social democracy, and therefore bearing the responsibility of both the decline of the west’s aristocratic mythos, and the death of nearly one hundred million people. If that is not an indictment I don’t know what is. And rather than extend rights to all, academics encouraged extraordinary rights, and in particular supported feminism as a means of increasing revenues and attracting women to previously male dominated universities.

    However, the feminist program has been successful in undermining the nuclear family, and are the voting force that allows socialists, democratic socialists, and totalitarian humanists produced by the university system, to obtain political power, by which to both undermine the 14th amendment, the Absolute Nuclear Family which is the necessary component of the high trust society, and to undermine the western model through forcible large scale immigration. Even now, the supreme court is populated by non-protestants. And that matters. Because protestants are the keepers of the Absolute Nuclear Family, and the High Trust, Individualist, Risk taking, Experimental society.

    5) FRAUDULENT PRODUCTS: The source of much of our political trouble is the fascination in the humanities introspection and self reinforcement rather than external evidence and adaptation, combined with its fascination with totalitarian humanism, and philosophy with postmodernism and socialism. Economics departments don’t teach Marx. It’s bad economics, and really bad philosophy. Furthermore, the evidence is in, and is decidedly against democracy – we cannot seem to make all men aristocrats. So much of the philosophical tradition is not only demonstrably false. It is not only false. But it is harmful.

    6) CRIMINALLY DEFECTIVE GOODS: It is not lost on us that academic wares are not warranted, any more than religious wares are warranteed. If they were I suspect academia would rapidly change. The fact that the state gives license to academics who sell faulty goods, but punishes ‘thought crimes’, is evidence enough to demonstrate that academic humanities has in fact, succeeded in replacing the mystical religion of christianity, discrediting the church, only to replace aristocratic egalitarianism and christianity, with totalitarian state humanism – effectively communism by other means.

    7) INCENTIVES: It is not lost on any of us that the INCENTIVES in academia are (in economic terms ) ‘perverse’. That we have spent two generations now exchanging personal retirement accounts of parents, for overpriced education of children, most of which ends up in rapid expansion of academic administration, diversion from teaching professors to research faculty, physical capital, and endowments. That graduate students are little more than slave labor, that their work products are almost universally shoddy, that the quality of writing in the humanities is offensively bad, and that obscurant language is used consistently to mask weak, false and unsupported thought.

    SO BEFORE YOU JUSTIFY THE HUMANITIES PERHAPS AN *EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS** WOULD HELP YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THE BENEFITS ARE SOLELY RESERVED FOR ACADEMICS AT TRAGIC COST TO SOCIETY. AND THAT BY AND LARGE, THE HUMANITIES HAS BEEN THE SOURCE OF MORE HUMAN SUFFERING AND CORRUPTION THAN THE CHURCH EVER MANAGED TO MUSTER.

    That’s what SCIENCES tell us. So choose whether you will be part of another tragic religion, or move into hard science with the rest of us. 🙂

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-05 05:52:00 UTC

  • S.E.P. ENTRY IS A TRAVESTY OF CONFUSION– There is no correspondence with NECESS

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/–THIS S.E.P. ENTRY IS A TRAVESTY OF CONFUSION–

    There is no correspondence with NECESSITY in this article. We are silent on the most important topic of our times: that is, that liberty is necessarily dependent upon property rights, and that is all.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-03 09:58:00 UTC

  • CRITICIZING HALF BAKED LIBERTARIAN NONSENSE (from elsewhere) (natural rights) AC

    CRITICIZING HALF BAKED LIBERTARIAN NONSENSE

    (from elsewhere) (natural rights)

    ACK!

    Natural rights are those that we MUST GRANT EACH OTHER to live happily and prosperously together. They aren’t given by god, it’s just that because we evolved as we did, we NATURALLY TO GRANT THEM TO EACH OTHER. God in this sense, is evolution, the universe, or fate, depending upon your favorite analogy.

    Natural rights are just property rights. And the property rights that we MUST grant one another.

    Human rights, are AMBITIONS that states hold one another accountable for striving for.

    Libertarians are too comfortable with half baked theories. Science is better than reason. And science uses evidence. Evidence is that morality is similar but varies by reproductive strategy (class and gender), reproductive organization (family structure) and the structure of production (economics).

    Leave religion and justification to theology. We’re libertarians. We’re supposed to be the smart guys. Science, reason and falsification. Not morality, analogy and justification.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-31 06:23:00 UTC

  • “OUR POLITICAL NATURE”: PAPER MACHE INTELLECTUALISM. (book review) (criticism) =

    “OUR POLITICAL NATURE”: PAPER MACHE INTELLECTUALISM.

    (book review) (criticism)

    ========

    This review is from: Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

    Trivial, biased regurgitation of Haidt’s work without credit.,

    October 29, 2013

    Amazon Verified Purchase

    1.0 out of 5 stars

    I understand the business of writing money-making books by regurgitating the works of others for fun and profit. And I understand the need to simplify works for less academic readers. But I also understand not giving credit to the people who you’re copying. Especially when it’s by attempting to avoid references to them. I also understand the use of obscurant language, bias as propaganda, and oversimplification via analogy as a means of inserting deception.

    This is a weak attempt by an also-ran author to insert his political bias into the political discourse as a substitute for scholarship. It’s not plagiarism per se. Because that would add insult to the prior work.

    Read Haidt instead. It is a balanced work by the leading academic in the field. If you read “The Righteous Mind”, “Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social System”, “The Red Queen”, and “Demonic Males” you will know pretty much the moral origins of human beings. If you read Andrew Heywood’s “Political Ideologies : An Introduction” that will explain political discourse.

    The fact is, that moral codes are largely genetic. What isn’t genetic is determined by the structure of the family (absolute nuclear, nuclear, traditional, extended or tribal). What isn’t determined by family structure is determined by economics. However, this is all misleading because MORAL sensibilities are different from VOTING PATTERNS.

    American voting patterns can be reduced to this single statement, and nothing else matters:

    —“93% of blacks, 70% of Latinos, 60% of those under 30, and 62% of single people, voted for Obama. And white married couples over 30 years of age voted for Romney. Not much else matters.”—

    -Dick Morris”

    NOTHING ELSE MATTERS – WE ARE TRIBAL CREATURES.

    ========


    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-29 07:31:00 UTC

  • DANIEL KEUHN : OBFUSCATORY LANGUAGE —“The greatest hesitation I have about the

    http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/donald-kuehn-none-of-them-along-the-line-know-what-any-of-its-worth-noted.htmlCONTRA DANIEL KEUHN : OBFUSCATORY LANGUAGE

    —“The greatest hesitation I have about the market economy is the wedge between demand and the willingness to pay that is the ability to pay.” —

    Curtd said…

    Hmm…

    (a) What is incorrectly allocated in the structure of production that allows people to desire to consume, but have nothing to exchange?

    (b) It is probably true that if we bypassed the financial system, and inflated the currency, by directly, say, crediting people’s debit cards – as long as it was done equally, that this would increase activity in the economy by redistributing savings and investment that are not moving, to consumers who desire to spend. We’ve been talking about this for a couple of decades now.

    (c) But why is there structural misallocation in the first place, and what misallocations are we creating this way?

    — We are creating poor single parent households. Would this activity increase the rate of creation of single parent households?

    — We are clearly failing at education of our work force compared to the Germans

    — We are clearly transforming old age savings into academic institution equity, and long term student debt, without performing any useful education other than sortition.

    — We are clearly immigrating vast numbers of low wage workers rather than employing our young and old at higher cost, and therefore creating two dependent classes.

    — We are clearly destroying the system of intergenerational cooperation of savings and borrowing, and the information system that goes with it.

    — We are clearly depending upon future anticipated growth, based upon a five hundred years of the spread of anglo absolute nuclear families, accounting, law, money and prices around the world by forcible conquest and unforced competition.

    (d) Instead: WHAT TROUBLES ME IS THE MISALLOCATION OF ACTION, CAPITAL, CREDIT, and POLICY THAT PREVENTS PEOPLE WHO DESIRE TO PAY FROM EARNING SOMETHING TO PAY FOR IT.

    One can use the artful word ‘wedge’ as a means of obfuscation: As OBSCURANT LANGUAGE, in order to obfuscate the underlying CAUSAL RELATIONS. This is what it means to speak as a leftist: using obscurant, and therefore, unscientific language. 🙂

    At least the right’s religious people speak in analogy not obfuscation. 🙂 The left’s religious people simply use obfuscatory language, and artificially select short time horizons so that they can ignore externalities. 🙂


    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 19:17:00 UTC