Curt Doolittle

Form: Critique

  • must-read) YOU CAN’T OWN YOUR TERMS: “OVER-LEARNING” AND “SPECIALIZATION”; WHY A

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/08/libertarianism_3.html(libertarian must-read)

    YOU CAN’T OWN YOUR TERMS: “OVER-LEARNING” AND “SPECIALIZATION”; WHY ARE LIBERTARIANS MORAL SPECIALISTS?

    (An attack on Caplan’s Progressive Libertarianism as organized privatization of the commons.)

    Bryan Caplan tries yet another attempt at framing. This one partly successful. But like many of his arguments, partly a failure – for moral reasons he cannot seem to grasp.

    This exceptionally good post, from August, positions libertarians as moral specialists because they ‘overlearn’ that morality. Now, he seems to not like my redefinition of his pseudo-objective label ‘overlearning’ as ‘specialist’. (At least in a PM to me that is what I gathered.) But I just view this

    [quote] “The fundamental difference between libertarians and non-libertarians is that libertarians have over-learned common-sense morality. Non-libertarians only reliably apply basic morality when society encourages them to do so. Libertarians, in contrast, deeply internalize basic morality. As a result, they apply it automatically in the absence of social pressure – and even when society discourages common decency.”[end]

    I’m going to rephrase that ‘authorization to steal’ that Caplan is trying to justify, and say that non libertarians place a greater concern on externality. The Caretaker left sees her as exploited, and resorting to prostitution out of desperation. (Something I agree with, but only in the minority of cases.) The Tribal Right sees her as corrupting the family that is the core of society (something I agree with but also only in the minority of cases). As far as I can tell, prostitution serves the needs of two groups of people who have too few alternatives. But that is different from saying that it’s either a ‘good’ or should be visible. I mean, sex is undeniably pretty awesome, but I don’t’t want to see people doing it in public. Or any other terribly hedonic activity for that matter. The public is the market and the rules of conduct are no different from a shopping mall – because the ‘public commons’ is a shopping mall. It’s just a very large one.

    [quote]: “For example, non-libertarians routinely say, “A woman has a right to use her own body as she likes.” But it never even occurs to them that this implies that prostitution should be legal. Why? Because non-libertarians only apply this principle in the exact situations where their society encourages them to do so. They learn the principle without over-learning it. Libertarians, in contrast, can’t help but see the logical connection between a woman’s right to use her own body and the right to have sex for money.”[end]

    Of course, I think this is a perfect example of the difference between ‘progressive (jewish) ghetto libertarianism’ and ‘conservative (european) aristocratic libertarianism’. That is. that in aristocratic ethics, we are responsible for externalities created by our actions. In jewish (Rothbardian) ethics of the ghetto, we are not. Our responsibility ends at the voluntary exchange.

    In fact, if we look at history, the more external consequences to ghetto ethics, the better, and the fewer external consequences to aristocratic ethics the better. That every time we do NOT take advantage of an opportunity to profit from an externality, or profit despite externality, we are creating the commons of the high trust society, where morals and norms are our primary form of capital, is not understood. But it is the reason for the western high trust society.

    In the context of a woman’s rights to her body, It is not that prostitution is not a woman’s choice. It is whether we can see and hear it, and are aware of it, and therefore it becomes part of the normative commons, or whether it is an invisible interpersonal activity that is not visible in and part of the normative commons.

    We westerners hold that normative capital is material capital, and that obtaining a discount on your personal for-profit activities, cannot privatize (steal) the commons. It’s not that you don’t have the choice to engage in prostitution. It’s that you don’t have the right to create a hazard in the commons.

    Conservatives don’t know how to EXPRESS that. They just say it’s wrong or immoral. but that’s because conservative property rights are 4500 years old, and, over that period of time, they’ve been habituated as traditions and norms to such a degree that they are ‘over-learned’ – precognitive.

    So I’ll go on record as correcting Bryan Caplan, and say that in fact, he’s correct that libertarianism is a moral specialization. He may be correct in that libertarians over learn it. He may be correct in that libertarians use autistic applications of those rules.

    But he is very, very wrong, in advocating theft from the normative commons. It is IMPOSSIBLE to construct property rights as a norm that must not be violated in any degree, while at the same time saying that norms are not property. This is logically inconsistent, and it’s demonstrably false.

    We need to criticize, ridicule, and eliminate the progressive libertarian fantasy brought about by Rothbard, and drawn from the anti-social ethics of the ghetto, and restore liberty to its cultural origins in aristocratic western culture. You have property rights as, because you respect others property. And the normative commons is property, It costs us to respect property. It costs us to respect norms. We pay for private, common, and normative property by our actions.

    And that is what we have done with propertarianism. Propertarianism is a universal descriptive ethical system for describing and rendering commensurable all ethical models by making transparent all voluntary and involuntary transfers.

    And using propertarian reasoning, makes visible that the progressive libertarian argument is in fact, advocating theft from the normative commons as a means of privatizing an existing public good. It is theft.

    End Progressive Rothbardian Libertarianism as the same as progressive leftist theft. Progressives leftists want to steal your physical assets and prevent development of the normative commons. Progressive libertarians want to steal the commons and make it impossible to have a normative commons.

    The uniqueness of the west is its high trust normative commons which extends familial altruism to all, in all exchanges by forbidding involuntary transfer in all means in all conditions, in all forms, of all forms of property whether private, common or normative. Period.

    So it is all well and good that we have progressive libertarians trying to make self-congratulatory terminology to obscure their advocacy of theft of the hard won commons. but it is even better that we end this divisive campaign and focus instead on uniting aristocratic libertarians with aristocratic conservatives. Because that way we can restore the normative commons and the high trust society that Progressives on the left and progressive libertarians are out to destroy.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-12 14:23:00 UTC

  • PRAXEOLOGY REQUIRES SCIENCE AND EMPIRICISM (From Elsewhere) This is going to be

    http://keirmartland.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/empiricism-versus-praxeology/NO. PRAXEOLOGY REQUIRES SCIENCE AND EMPIRICISM

    (From Elsewhere)

    This is going to be one of those necessary intellectual battles that I just don’t want to have. Praxeology, Rothbardian Ethics, and Hoppian argumentation.

    They’re all half right. That’s a lot better than anyone else has done. But it’s only half right. Praxeology is incomplete and backwards, Rothbardian ethics are incomplete, and Hoppian argumentation is a symptom, not a cause.

    I’d rather innovate on institutions, or criticize the opposition. But without correcting where we’ve been, I can’t argue for where we must go.

    =====REPLY TO POST====

    Science is necessary to compensate for our cognitive biases, cognitive limitations, an the limits of our perception. We need instrumentation, measures and numbers for the same reason we need money, prices and numbers. We cannot think without them. Because we cannot think about what we cannot reduce to analogy to experience.

    Praxeology is only a test. We can test what we can sense. With science, can test what we can reduce to analogy to sensation. And given that our biases and limitations are what define us as human, because we have them in common, we can test incentives produced by those experiences, whether sense perception, or analogies to experience, which we call measurements. That is what praxeology tells us.

    But what we can DEDUCE from praxeology is limited. And evidence has proven that to be true.

    To say that humans will respond to incentives produced by any given policy is true. To say that the multitude of interweaving externalities is deducible from those incentives is not.

    I don’t really desire to correct praxeology or rothbardian ethics, but we must if we are to mature libertarian philosophy.

    http://keirmartland.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/empiricism-versus-praxeology

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 05:08:00 UTC

  • GAY MARRIAGE IS ‘JUST’ In response to: (The argument in the post was based upon

    http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7581WHY GAY MARRIAGE IS ‘JUST’

    In response to:

    http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7581

    (The argument in the post was based upon a definition that I feel is arbitrary.)

    RESPONSE:

    Of course the definitional argument is flawed as stated.

    One performs the following analyses, not an arbitrary definition.

    1) what is the history of the institution – why did it arise, and what caused it to evolve?

    2) what properties does the institution of marriage have that are unique to the institution?

    3) of those properties, which are necessary and which are either optional or preferential?

    4) What are the incentives of the individuals who wish to be married?

    The purpose of marriage is to prevent violence over access to mates. Most violence in the world (statistically speaking) is mate, or mating related.

    When property rights were developed by indo europeans, the control of reproduction moved from the matrilineal line (exchange for sex) to the paternal line (exchange for access to resources.).

    When property became necessary under agrarianism, in effect, the marriage contract became a corporation for the control of physical assets and inheritance, not just for access to reproduction (sex).

    Under agrarianism and property the responsibility for the economic support and care for children became a family matter not a tribal matter. (something women are still trying to reverse.)

    Marriage represented both wealth and legitimacy, and evolved to become a status symbol as well as solve the problem of access to sex. Most cultures permit polygamy, however, in all cultures, very few men were, or are, wealthy enough to afford more than one wife. Monogamy solves the problem of the danger to every culture and civilization of single men – the source of all revolutions.

    Under Manorialism, marriage evolved into more of a status symbol, because one could not only obtain access to reproduction, but could also gain access to land, and a household for farming. The family became both a reproductive and an economic unit.

    Legal institutions developed to resolve conflicts over property in the event of death – wills etc.

    When divorce became an option, the state intervened as the monopoly arbiter of conflict because there were disputes over the distribution of property during divorce as well as death.

    When the state became the provider of services, those services were provided to the ‘corporation’ we call a ‘marriage’ which is a union of assets for the purpose of self sustenance, and reproduction.

    It is unpleasant, but the relationship between property, marriage, mating is and reproduction is eternal. It is inescapable. Morality in EVERY culture is constructed by the relationship between the structure of the reproductive unit and the structure of the economic unit. While monogamous marriage is unnatural to man, almost all cultures, under agrarianism, adopted monogamous moral codes because it was such an economic and reproductive advantage to do so.

    We are leaving that era of agrarian monogamy behind and returning to serial monogamy which is the natural (as we understand it) behavior of mankind when given longer life spans.

    The reason homosexuals want access to the marital corporation is:

    a) Legitimacy and status to compensate for lower status of homosexuals in society.

    b) The ability to form a marital corporation for the pooling of assets.

    c) The ability to use the pooling of assets to place a greater burden on the dissolution of the relationship, and a greater reward for retaining it.

    d) The ability to obtain an open power of attorney on behalf of one another that comes with the marital corporation.

    That we express the EMOTIONAL RESULTS of doing these things says nothing about what it is that we do and why.

    The reason we rejected Homosexuality in the past is that it is innately distasteful – although the disgust reaction is higher in conservatives than progressives – much higher. The other is that we had wrongly assumed that it was a voluntary choice, and therefore homosexuals were hedonistically corrupting youth. Now that we understand that homosexuality is a combination of genetic and in-utero conditions that largely runs in families, and is essentially a ‘natural birth defect’ that causes no genetic harm to the body politic, then there remains no reason to eschew homosexuals other than some people’s innate distaste for visible displays of homosexual affection. And that is no reason to deny people property rights – access to the marital corporation.

    Given that the reason for marriage is the prevention of violence, the economic efficiency of marriage, the economic necessity of marriage for child rearing without borderline poverty, the status symbols associated with marriage, the career benefits that come from marriage, the value of having a partner with power of attorney to protect your interests, and the state’s use of marriage as a vehicle for redistribution, it is somewhat illogical to force people into economically disadvantageous circumstances by denying them access to legal corporations for the pooling of interest and assets.

    Now as a bit of humor, I suspect that when homosexuals decide to divorce in large numbers, there will no doubt come a day when they ask for special dispensation in the distribution of assets because of their homosexuality. But that will be a natural consequence of self interest. 🙂

    I am fairly sure the reason that the movement succeeded was the active suppression of the rather excessive public behavior of some members of the community. As such both sides have achieved their objectives.

    As far as I know, (and this is what I do) there is no better argument than this one -albeit for this blog I have used more brevity than is desirable.

    Affections.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute, Kiev.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-02 11:29:00 UTC

  • POSNER ON US POLICY @Posner This breach of peace is because that lesson has atro

    http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/09/when-should-we-interfere-in-another-countrys-internal-affairs-posner.htmlCONTRA POSNER ON US POLICY

    @Posner

    This breach of peace is because that lesson has atrophied into a moral conviction expressed as policy.

    a) People have the right to self determination.

    b) Self determination is limited to good citizenship in the pattern of production and trade.

    c) That destabilization of the pattern of production and trade that influences commodities that could encourage warfare is equal to the waging of war against a neighbor.

    d) That if a people choose a government that abridges a, b or c, then we, the USA, will punish that government and the citizenry for their poor choices.

    We are not a peer nation. We are an empire. We act like an empire. We act like an empire in no small part because we must out of economic self interest, and in no small part, because our main trading, political, and cultural partners, actually WANT us to, so that they can participate in the reconstruction of Europe, after the first world war that destroyed human civilization as we know it, and from which we only begin to emerge in the present decade – albeit over a century behind what might have been.

    So, in closing, I’m a little uncomfortable with harkening back to historical reference of equal states, when our empire is run pragmatically for pragmatic purposes, and our policy has been reduced to ideology

    Curt Doolittle

    THe Propertarian Institute

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 14:41:00 UTC

  • A Critique Of The Anarchic Program Compared To The Intuitive and Conservative Programs

    Dear libertarian(s) Some of your statements trouble me, because we need passionate and articulate advocacy of libertarianism. And you’re clearly a passionate and articulate advocate. But it’s better if all of us are the best quality advocates possible, so that we reduce internal friction as wasted effort, and direct it elsewhere where it can be more benefit to liberty. As Caplan has recently argued, Libertarians tend to behave as moral specialists. The cause of this behavior is the libertarian sentiment – the bias against coercion, and the forced sacrifice of opportunity that causes no loss either directly or by externality. But the problem with sentimental and moral arguments is that they since they ARE intuitive, and intuition is limited to whatever it is that we have mastered by experience. In order to agree with Bastiat and Hayek (which, like you I do) we must also intuit that they are morally correct. But that we intuit that they are correct is not sufficient to argue apodeictically (rationally) or scientifically (empirically) that they are correct independent of that intuition. To understand the contributions of the Anarcho-Capistalist movement, of Rothbard and Hoppe to the advance of liberty, libertarian ethics, and libertarian institutions, we need only appreciate that prior to Hoppe and Rothbard, the classical liberal (libertarian) program had failed to produce a non-intuitive, rational, analytical argument for liberty that was anywhere near the argumentative depth and veracity of marxism. Had it not been for Rothbard and Hoppe in ethics and Friedman in Economics, and Hayek in politics the world might be a very different place. It is arguable that the conservative intellectual program has been a failure even if the political program has been a strategic success. And conversely, our intellectual program has been a success, but by empirical standards, a political failure. The reason we have failed is Rothbard’s ‘ghetto’ ethics are not only intuitively insufficient, to the majority who possess classical liberal ethics. The are intuitively reprehensible to them. And for an intuitive system of ethics to evoke intuitively negative emotions is politically problematic. It’s a non-starter. And for us it has been. If we again look at what the conservatives have accomplished by focusing entirely on the moral sentiments, and not the ratio-scientific argument, it’s instructive. What is it that conservatives cannot rationally articulate or empirically demonstrate, but ‘sells’, and what what is it about our ethics we can rationally articulate but cannot sell? I think I know that answer: and it is what is missing from Rothbardian and Anarcho capitalist ethics. Rothbard gave us the ethics of the ghetto – an ethic of rebellion. He did not give us the ethics of the high trust society – the aristocratic egalitarian, Christian, Protestant ethic of the high trust society, in which symmetry of knowledge is mandated by warranty, and externality is prohibited by morality and law. While the Anarcho Capitalist program is certainly incomplete (I would like to complete it), it is the only advance in political theory that is substantive in the latter half of the twentieth century. Rothbard reduced all rights to property rights. And he restated history to demonstrate that assertion. It was a fundamental insight, and provided us with an analytical language for responding to marxists. But his analysis of the scope of those rights is artificially narrow, and he provided us with no institutional means of obtaining or holding those rights – possibly because he could not solve the problem of institutions. I am extremely critical of Rothbard for these reasons, because he gave us both an insufficient definition of what is moral, and what is essentially a toothless voluntary religion to hold it with. Hoppe has explained to us the incentives of why democracy fails, and why monarchy succeeded. He has tried to give us institutions that will provide services without monopoly bureaucracy, or even legislative law. Hoppe solved the problem of institutions – at least in a homogenous polity – and he did it in rigorous language. He did not solve the problem of heterogeneous polities. (I think I may have, but I am not sure yet.) Neither of these insights were minimal in impact. Rothbard effectively made ethics non-arbitrary, and Hoppe provided a means of ethical governance. Both of them did this by eliminating the monopoly power of government. Hoppe’s weaknesses are a) c) he relies argumentatively on rational rather than ratio-scientific arguments, which while I might argue are functionally correct, are causally weak, and we now have the ratio-scientific evidence to prove them without relying on complex (and nearly indefensible) rational arguments alone. b) That he is excessively fawning of Rothbard, for personally legitimate reasons – but that Rothbard is sufficiently tainted by the failure of his moral arguments to hinder Hoppe’s legacy, and his arguments. c) Style issues are those of politically active moralism against Marxists. His native german prose only lends itself to anglo articulation after he has reduced it through repetition. He uncomfortably peppers it with unnecessary ridicule as did Rothbard – which I have been consistently critical of, and which he has slowly laundered from his formal works, but not his speech – because it is in fact highly entertaining to audiences. These are problems of argumentative method alone, not of intellectual contribution. Hoppe has given us solutions to serious political problems that are two and a half millennia old. That he did so in the language of his time is something to be acknowledged, but the results simply appreciated for the visionary insights that they are. We cannot say that one is rationally or scientifically arguing for something without a rational or scientific argument. The fact that we are moral specialists, and rely upon moral arguments, and moral arguments that are intuitive to us, may in fact, suggest that our intuitions are correct, if and only if we can ALSO support those intuitions with rational, scientific and institutional solutions. Otherwise, the fact that we intuit liberty to be something moral, is merely an accident of evolutionary biology and nothing meaningful can be said about it. So I would caution you, and most libertarians, who are, in fact, sentimental, rather than rational, ratio-scientific, and institutionally empirical, advocates, that just because we agree with something, and we intuit it, is meaningless, since that is exactly what the people on the other pole of the moral spectrum inuit. Intuitions must be defensible. So while I assume you agree with Bob Murphy (who is our best economist) and Bastiat (who is the father of our institutional rhetoric), I would argue that you correctly intuit classical liberal ethics of the high trust society. In this sense you are superior in intuition to Rothbardian intuitionists. However, we must also acknowledge that the classical liberal political system failed upon the introduction of women and non-property owners into enfranchisement. This is because those without property hold very different ethics – if ethics can be used to describe it, And the female reproductive strategy is to bear children and place the burden of their upkeep on the tribe (society). Private property was an innovation, that allowed males to once again take control of reproductive strategy, and the marriage that resulted from that innovation was a truce between the male and female strategies. A truce that feminists and socialists, and communists, and those that lack property, all seek to break. Private Property and the nuclear family, and the high trust ethic are both politically indivisible. And the classical liberal program cannot survive in their absence. And no one else has provided us with a solution to this problem other than the feminists and socialists – who which to destroy private property, and the anarcho capitalists, who wish to preserve our freedom, and property. And as far as I know, I am the only libertarian who is trying to solve the problem of freedom in the absence of the nuclear family as a uniform reproductive order in the order of production we call the industrial and technical age. So these are not questions of sentimental intuition, or belief, or morality. They are questions of institutional, philosophical, and argumentative solutions to the problem of cooperation when the agrarian order of the nuclear and extended family has been replaced by the individualistic and familially diverse. Political theory is not a trivial pursuit. Cheers Curt Doolittle Kiev.

  • A Critique Of The Anarchic Program Compared To The Intuitive and Conservative Programs

    Dear libertarian(s) Some of your statements trouble me, because we need passionate and articulate advocacy of libertarianism. And you’re clearly a passionate and articulate advocate. But it’s better if all of us are the best quality advocates possible, so that we reduce internal friction as wasted effort, and direct it elsewhere where it can be more benefit to liberty. As Caplan has recently argued, Libertarians tend to behave as moral specialists. The cause of this behavior is the libertarian sentiment – the bias against coercion, and the forced sacrifice of opportunity that causes no loss either directly or by externality. But the problem with sentimental and moral arguments is that they since they ARE intuitive, and intuition is limited to whatever it is that we have mastered by experience. In order to agree with Bastiat and Hayek (which, like you I do) we must also intuit that they are morally correct. But that we intuit that they are correct is not sufficient to argue apodeictically (rationally) or scientifically (empirically) that they are correct independent of that intuition. To understand the contributions of the Anarcho-Capistalist movement, of Rothbard and Hoppe to the advance of liberty, libertarian ethics, and libertarian institutions, we need only appreciate that prior to Hoppe and Rothbard, the classical liberal (libertarian) program had failed to produce a non-intuitive, rational, analytical argument for liberty that was anywhere near the argumentative depth and veracity of marxism. Had it not been for Rothbard and Hoppe in ethics and Friedman in Economics, and Hayek in politics the world might be a very different place. It is arguable that the conservative intellectual program has been a failure even if the political program has been a strategic success. And conversely, our intellectual program has been a success, but by empirical standards, a political failure. The reason we have failed is Rothbard’s ‘ghetto’ ethics are not only intuitively insufficient, to the majority who possess classical liberal ethics. The are intuitively reprehensible to them. And for an intuitive system of ethics to evoke intuitively negative emotions is politically problematic. It’s a non-starter. And for us it has been. If we again look at what the conservatives have accomplished by focusing entirely on the moral sentiments, and not the ratio-scientific argument, it’s instructive. What is it that conservatives cannot rationally articulate or empirically demonstrate, but ‘sells’, and what what is it about our ethics we can rationally articulate but cannot sell? I think I know that answer: and it is what is missing from Rothbardian and Anarcho capitalist ethics. Rothbard gave us the ethics of the ghetto – an ethic of rebellion. He did not give us the ethics of the high trust society – the aristocratic egalitarian, Christian, Protestant ethic of the high trust society, in which symmetry of knowledge is mandated by warranty, and externality is prohibited by morality and law. While the Anarcho Capitalist program is certainly incomplete (I would like to complete it), it is the only advance in political theory that is substantive in the latter half of the twentieth century. Rothbard reduced all rights to property rights. And he restated history to demonstrate that assertion. It was a fundamental insight, and provided us with an analytical language for responding to marxists. But his analysis of the scope of those rights is artificially narrow, and he provided us with no institutional means of obtaining or holding those rights – possibly because he could not solve the problem of institutions. I am extremely critical of Rothbard for these reasons, because he gave us both an insufficient definition of what is moral, and what is essentially a toothless voluntary religion to hold it with. Hoppe has explained to us the incentives of why democracy fails, and why monarchy succeeded. He has tried to give us institutions that will provide services without monopoly bureaucracy, or even legislative law. Hoppe solved the problem of institutions – at least in a homogenous polity – and he did it in rigorous language. He did not solve the problem of heterogeneous polities. (I think I may have, but I am not sure yet.) Neither of these insights were minimal in impact. Rothbard effectively made ethics non-arbitrary, and Hoppe provided a means of ethical governance. Both of them did this by eliminating the monopoly power of government. Hoppe’s weaknesses are a) c) he relies argumentatively on rational rather than ratio-scientific arguments, which while I might argue are functionally correct, are causally weak, and we now have the ratio-scientific evidence to prove them without relying on complex (and nearly indefensible) rational arguments alone. b) That he is excessively fawning of Rothbard, for personally legitimate reasons – but that Rothbard is sufficiently tainted by the failure of his moral arguments to hinder Hoppe’s legacy, and his arguments. c) Style issues are those of politically active moralism against Marxists. His native german prose only lends itself to anglo articulation after he has reduced it through repetition. He uncomfortably peppers it with unnecessary ridicule as did Rothbard – which I have been consistently critical of, and which he has slowly laundered from his formal works, but not his speech – because it is in fact highly entertaining to audiences. These are problems of argumentative method alone, not of intellectual contribution. Hoppe has given us solutions to serious political problems that are two and a half millennia old. That he did so in the language of his time is something to be acknowledged, but the results simply appreciated for the visionary insights that they are. We cannot say that one is rationally or scientifically arguing for something without a rational or scientific argument. The fact that we are moral specialists, and rely upon moral arguments, and moral arguments that are intuitive to us, may in fact, suggest that our intuitions are correct, if and only if we can ALSO support those intuitions with rational, scientific and institutional solutions. Otherwise, the fact that we intuit liberty to be something moral, is merely an accident of evolutionary biology and nothing meaningful can be said about it. So I would caution you, and most libertarians, who are, in fact, sentimental, rather than rational, ratio-scientific, and institutionally empirical, advocates, that just because we agree with something, and we intuit it, is meaningless, since that is exactly what the people on the other pole of the moral spectrum inuit. Intuitions must be defensible. So while I assume you agree with Bob Murphy (who is our best economist) and Bastiat (who is the father of our institutional rhetoric), I would argue that you correctly intuit classical liberal ethics of the high trust society. In this sense you are superior in intuition to Rothbardian intuitionists. However, we must also acknowledge that the classical liberal political system failed upon the introduction of women and non-property owners into enfranchisement. This is because those without property hold very different ethics – if ethics can be used to describe it, And the female reproductive strategy is to bear children and place the burden of their upkeep on the tribe (society). Private property was an innovation, that allowed males to once again take control of reproductive strategy, and the marriage that resulted from that innovation was a truce between the male and female strategies. A truce that feminists and socialists, and communists, and those that lack property, all seek to break. Private Property and the nuclear family, and the high trust ethic are both politically indivisible. And the classical liberal program cannot survive in their absence. And no one else has provided us with a solution to this problem other than the feminists and socialists – who which to destroy private property, and the anarcho capitalists, who wish to preserve our freedom, and property. And as far as I know, I am the only libertarian who is trying to solve the problem of freedom in the absence of the nuclear family as a uniform reproductive order in the order of production we call the industrial and technical age. So these are not questions of sentimental intuition, or belief, or morality. They are questions of institutional, philosophical, and argumentative solutions to the problem of cooperation when the agrarian order of the nuclear and extended family has been replaced by the individualistic and familially diverse. Political theory is not a trivial pursuit. Cheers Curt Doolittle Kiev.

  • THERE IS NO ANTI WAR LEFT Yet another in the long list self congratulatory nonse

    THERE IS NO ANTI WAR LEFT

    Yet another in the long list self congratulatory nonsense.

    The left is a kleptocracy. Organized theft.

    It has no principles except theft.

    Wherever and whenever possible.

    At least this amateur has advisors that have explained what will happen to americans if Iran succeeds in establishing itself as the core state of islam.

    So now the simpleton who like all left ideologues, is forced to confront the reality that conservatives are just boring pragmatists.

    By becoming a pragmatist himself.

    I hate this drivel.

    Let iran rise and america decline. If youre stupid enough to follow the left then you deserve to descend. Ti have our middle class evaporate, then our upper class follow.

    The only equality is poverty.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-08 12:06:00 UTC

  • FIRST PROGRESSIVE WHITE FLAG We conservatives and libertarians spent 30 years tr

    http://theumlaut.com/2013/07/09/age-of-negation/THE FIRST PROGRESSIVE WHITE FLAG

    We conservatives and libertarians spent 30 years trying to destroy the progressive fantasy, first economically, second intellectually, third morally, and finally with media. We were slow. But we were willing to lose everything to stop communism, socialism and its successor ideological postmodernism.

    Morality is a mirror of family structure. And family structure a mirror of production structure. Without a common family structure, we have no common morality. Without a common morality we cannot democratically select priorities, and instead are stuck in perpetual conflict.

    The northern universalist fantasy was developed in ignorance of our own homogeneity as an outbred extended family. The rest of the world finds this anti-kinship ethic horrifying and immoral. Neither they nor we understood that our la k of corruption was a byproduct of our small states and extended tribalism. As such its impossible elsewhere – where trust is impossible at our level.

    The historical fact that the proletariat never leads anything, and cannot, was not enough. The falsehoods of the labor theory of value, the necessity of prices and incentives, the fact that capitalism produces mass consumer goods cheaply was not enough. The failures of socialism and communism were not enough. The success of converting communist countries to consumer capitalism wasn’t enough. The economic crisis wasn’t enough. But the result of diversity combined with the degeneration of the family, and the loss of our privileged status of the only technologically advanced society was enough.

    But we cannot undo the damage from destroying the nuclear family, intergenerational saving and lending, and the rule of common law, the constitution, or the homogeneously moral society.

    Pending a dramatic reversal driven by economic necessity the progressive movement will succeed as did the french revolution, the Bolshevik And Maoist revolutions, albeit more slowly: the reduction of the competitive norms of the people and setting them back for centuries.

    The left didnt kill capitalism. Just our civilizations prosperity. And maybe our status as a people forever.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-18 08:01:00 UTC

  • “DOCUMENTARY = PROPAGANDA” PROBLEM I was crushingly depressed when I learned tha

    http://www.cracked.com/article_20585_6-famous-documentaries-that-were-shockingly-full-crap_p2.htmlTHE “DOCUMENTARY = PROPAGANDA” PROBLEM

    I was crushingly depressed when I learned that “Nanook of the North” was utter nonsense. I felt lied to. (I had been lied to.) The noble savage myth is a myth. Living primitive life is hard. And when indigenous people discover their own poverty, large numbers of them commit suicide many others seek any exit possible.

    McDonalds is possibly one of the best food products ever produced. (Corn syrup probably one of the worst.) When I was 16, before work, would eat two big mac’s and a large order of fries, and I had a washboard stomach. We ought to treat McDonalds as one of the worlds best charity organizations for the poor. Because that’s how much they’ve done to feed the poor. (Compared to the nonsense the government does.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-13 01:38:00 UTC

  • ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill

    ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT

    On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill Vallicella argues that Philosophical problems are deep by listing the common philosophical questions: “What is (the nature of) X? What is knowledge? What is consciousness? What is the self? What is free will? What is causation? What are properties? What is motion? Time? Existence?” And then he goes on to describe how these questions are ‘deep’ and complex.

    However, notice that the are all stated as ‘is’ questions: metaphysical questions made nonsensical by the magical word ‘is’. Yet, if these questions were asked in operational, scientific, language, they would be stated as “when we use the term knowledge, what examples do we refer to, and what do they have in common?” Or “When we use the term ‘time’, what experience do we refer to?” Or “given that we experience something we call the passage of time, what causes us to possess this experience.”

    Nothing ‘is’. We experience things that we manufacture independent of the physical world. We experience things directly. We experience things through the narrative of others – in many forms. We experience things through instrumentation and measurement. Experiences are changes in state of physical sensations, and of the physical sensation of changes in memory.

    Properties are patterns that increase or decrease inclusion in a concept. A concept is a set of related patterns. EAch of which is a set of related patterns – all of which is represented by sets of physical neural relations. And all of which are created through one of the experiences above. And as such our concepts are limited to those things which we can reduce to some complex set of experiences.

    All of the phenomenon Vallicella lists are trivial concepts before science and impossible concepts before philosophy, because the instrumentation available to the physical sciences is greater than our ability to perceive our inner workings without science.

    The interesting question of consciousness, (Having had many episodes of losing consciousness and regaining it myself) is that it slowly emerges from complex layers of stimuli. But what is obvious to the person experiencing it, is that the part we call ‘me’ seems to coalesce, but once it does, and we are ‘aware’ of the passage of internal time, it ‘feels’ consistent with ‘the experience of being me’ prior to the availability of either external sensations, or memories. The ‘me’ personality feels emotionally consistent regardless of state. (At least in me it does. And that ‘me’ sense has been the same since childhood.) Then as memory starts to come back, we become the complex creatures that we are, because of our memories. Until we are able to process information around us in physical reality.

    This tells us most of what is useful. (And it probably explains why psychedelic drugs appear to help people with psychological disorders obtained from behavior (experiences), but not disorders obtained from physical defects (say, schizophrenia). That’s because the ‘i’ can be separated from the experience of a traumatic memory, long enough to objectively correct the emotional relationships caused by the memory (or memories).

    That diversion aside, the problem plaguing philosophy is the same one that has plagued it since Kant: the desire to find something mystical there, that does not exist, most of the time, by the artful use of language to construct paradoxical puzzles that are computationally difficult for humans to solve because they are framed as problems with a solution, but in fact are nothing more than arbitrary artifacts of imprecise language that remains from our mystical past – largely religious dialog.

    The cure for most philosophical puzzles is the use of operational language.

    Like most puzzles, philosophy’s metaphysical questions consist largely of parlor games created by very bright people who may or may not have been aware of what it was that they were doing. Infinite sets, and all that derives from them included.

    Philosophy is, at least today, useful in understanding the evolution of human thought – primarily so that we do not repeat past errors – and for assisting us in interpreting the findings of the physical and economic sciences.

    That’s it. Science and Economics Won.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-03 17:07:00 UTC