Curt Doolittle

Form: Critique

  • Contradicting Bruce Bartlett’s Fantasy Of American Exceptionalism And Good Government

    Bruce Bartlett, who is a well known conservative, tried to pitch tolerance to conservatives, and in doing so proved he fails to understand conservatism. I left this comment on his web site:

    Bruce, I want to let it pass, but I simply have to contradict this column of yours, even if I agree with it’s sentiments. You (and Boaz) are confusing language with content. (This is the same mistake religious fundamentalists and their critics make. It’s an endemic human error.) Slavery was not the reason for the civil war, the fact that the south paid for the government and could block the north’s initiatives was the reason. Lincoln only changed to ‘slavery’ to get popular support. Slavery is a bad economic model and was in decline, and would continue to decline. Every economist in the world knows this. It’s not about airbrushing slavery. It’s about social status, political power, costs, and ‘the long run’. Denmark is a small homogenous society that has imported a labor class and has yet to experience the degree of friction that empires face when they merge cultures. Denmark literally pays a third of the poulation to stay home so that they wont disrupt the real people, and so that you can talk to an educated person in train station. They pay their poor and ignorant to go away. Homogenous societies are more generous and egalitarian. They can afford to be because political power is something that they have a grip over. The same is true for small societies. Comparing small communities of protestant nordics to the vast body of the world populace is either disengenuous or simply stupidity. The italians in the south are a corrupt and lazy people. THe north know this. They hate supporting them. The north chinese rule the prosperous Southern Chinese. The south hates this. American conservatives don’t like it for the same reason. And, we aren’t nordics. We’re romans. Freedom expands elsewhere? You mean capitalism spreads because it is a superior social technology. However, the vast body of the world is in the process both as an intellectual movement, an as a material political force, to totalitarian capitalism. We may live in the illusion that democracy is meaningful, but it’s actually property rights and fiat money that make a nation. Our ability to expand has been under the force of arms. Not under our graces. Democracy if it persists another century, will be an oddity of northern european civilization. And there is no record in history of democracy enduring, and there is no rational reason that it should. It’s a bad system of government for anything other than a city state. Freedom is maintained by a freedom seeking minority of the population that is willing to use violence to perpetuate those freedoms. That is the source of freedom. It has been the source. It always will be the source. Most people want the fruits of freedom. But freedom has always been and always will be a desire of the creative minority. You are confusing FREDOM FROM nature, and FREEDOM TO act. I’ve written a longer posting to you about this, because it warrants it. But freedom is a specific term that has to do with human political organization and the use of property (life and property). The other ‘freedoms’ allude to are ***ANALOGIES*** to freedom. They are forms of security, safety, and reinsurance. They are not freedom. They are the RESULT OF THE PROSPERITY GENERATED BY FREEDOM. In this comment, and in my posting, I have tried to correct each of your points as erroneous attributions of causality, in an attempt to provide a better understanding of conservative sentiments, and to express those sentiments as a rational economic philosophy. “Conservatism is an economic strategy for group persistence on a longer time frame by a military class using sentiments that represent material economic costs.” This is a long article, but it is a topic that requires explaining a number of issues that are poorly understood for historical reasons. Conservatives need a language to express their complexity. That language is in economics and sociology. The problem for any intellectual is to create a system of thought that can be expressed by people who can only understand those sentiments, people who are more critical of them, and those that an completely articulate them. Conservatives need to understand themselves in something other than metaphorical language in order to compete with short term thinking secular humanists. And even with well meaning but erroneous conservatives who only serve to make the problem worse with their acquiescense and justification. Four thousand words is the best I could do. http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2010/04/contradicting-bruce-bartletts-fantasy-of-american-exceptionalism-and-good-government/

    Bruce, I want to let it pass, but I simply have to contradict this column of yours. This is a long article, but it is a topic that requires explaining a number of issues that are poorly understood for historical reasons. While you might attempt to say ‘government has more goods than bads, Conservatives have material objections that, in the end, they feel will result in the elimination of the ability for government to deliver ‘goods’. 1) The accumulation of political power by the state in opposition to the civic republican tradition of denying the state power. 2) Using immigration to disempower the ‘group’ as they perceive it out of political power 3) Giving others extraordinary rights at our expense in violation of the civic republican tradition’s mandate for equality. 4) education biases against us, in violation of the civic republican tradition of meritocratic outcomes. (“Why can jews take over harvard but we have to be restricted by quotas”, for example.) 5) job biases against us 6) abuse and derision by public intellectuals – who have disempowered the churches in favor of the religion of democratic secular humanism and are now mandating their religion as the new social order. 7) redistributing our wealth, in particular, favoring immigration over retirement schemes. The state undermined another pillar of civilization: the mandate to save rather than consume. By liquidity and taxation we are permanently impoverished in old age. Income taxes should be instead be based upon balance sheet wealth so that men can be independent in retirement. 8 ) asking us to sacrifice our productivity to pay for what we don’t believe in. This is the definition of oppression. Democracy is not a vehicle for justifying oppression. It’s a means of peaceful transfer of power, and a means by which peers can choose among opportunities for mutual benefit. When it becomes a means of oppressing one group for the benefit of another, and in doing so empowering government, then it’s simply oppression and no amount of ‘common good’ changes that oppression. 9) undermining the family structure which is the basis for our entire society. Giving people property rights and access to capital is one thing. But undermining the family, and effectively, enslaving men through divorce and child care law is not equality. It’s oppression, and it has made it too easy to enter a marriage, and too costly to exit it. (and yes I can debate the statistics on this with the best of them.) We reward malcontents at the expense of people who have discipline. THis is offensive to conservatives who only want a level playing field. 10) building a victim society instead of a meritocratic society which is against the principles of the Civic Republican Tradition under which it is assumed that we give authority to the state in exchange for not TAKING that authority ourselves. And that is what conservatives DO. They give their authority to the state. (Authority is a proxy word for VIOLENCE.) Why? Because conservatives are Pareto’s ‘Residues’ of the military social class – the last remnants of nobility at the top, and of the soldiery and craftsman class at the bottom. THey operate by the concepts of duty, which they see as indirect payment for the social order. They are the remnants of the Civic Republican Tradition. The one cultural advantage of the west is it’s prohibition on corruption, and this class is the originator of that tradition. If all nations are organized by corruption, then the most wealthy are those with the least of it. The military class is what obtains and maintains trade routes, and what obtains and maintains land, and therefore what obtains and maintains resources . Trade routes and land are the source of prosperity. Not everyone can be switzerland so to speak, and switzerland and singapore are outliers. Essentially conservatives object to profiteering by government at our expense while demonizing our objection to their abuses. Government is the equivalent of a priestly class that lives under the protection of conservatives and by their effort and labors while deriding them and encouraging the beggars to steal from them. I can enumerate these causes of government abuse ad-infinitum. Even if most conservatives cannot articulate their positions in the temporal language of secular humanism, I can. Conservatives have not had enough time or worked in sufficient numbers to develop a competing political language to that of the religion of secular humanism. In fact, to some degree, doing so is antithetical to their dictum of “actions not words, since words are deception”. As such they are trapped in historical metaphor at the top, and religious metaphor at the bottom. These metaphors can be restated rationally, even if most conservatives lack the ability to do so. That doesn’t mean that such a language cannot be developed, despite Mises, Hayek, Popper, Parsons and many others having failed. It just means that as a group that seeks “group-persistence-over-time”, the language that they must employ is necessarily historical and strategic rather than temporal and tactical. Simply because our academic understanding of politics and economics is lagging so far behind our scientific language, and our history, literature, religion and myths are all an impediment to correcting that deficiency. Our wealth, and the ‘goodness’ of government that you casually attribute to the state, is not from the state, but from the freedoms FROM the state. In contrast to your correlations, I’ll enumerate the causations: The real sources of American Prosperity? 1) English Common Law, which facilitates individual property rights, which facilitates human calculation of opportunities. Wide spread use of accounting technology that facilitates calculation of opportunities and costs. Wide spread contract dispute resolution. This law was not made. It evolved. The king could not write laws as we mean them, until recently. He had to rely upon common law. 2) The civic republican tradition awakened in germany as a reaction to the search for freedom from the dominance of Mediterranean civilization, it’s culture of corruption, and it’s trade routes. That german awakening was then distributed by way of english naval dominance. 3) The movement of trade to the atlantic so that we could exploit the newly discovered continent, and the increase in wealth given to the northern european naval nations over the more sedentary competing civilizations of the east. And in particular, the militarization of the entire english nation into what we call Merchantilism, or the corporate state. Ths allowed officers to move into business and expand business under state sponshorship. This mobilizes the vast amount of ‘individual computing power’ when combined with sound money and granular property rights. 4) Plentiful money so that we are not constrained by the availability of money. Contrary to most libertarians who want to expropriate money into the capitalist class, the military is what makes trade possible, and money is borrowed from the citizenry – else we have what libertarians desire, privatized wins and socialized losses – expressly against the civic republican tradition, as well as that of all other civilizations. (this is what we have been doing by the way – privatizing wins and socializing losses. Instead, we should bypass the capitalist class the way the swiss have but that’s another topic althogether.) 5) the importation of vast numbers of people as we sold off this newly discovered continent while giving them political power before they were self sufficient. This is the real reason why the property qualification was valuable. It prevented the importation of people who could empower the political class and allow it to extort money from producers. 6) the concentration of capital made possible by selling off the continent. This has been the greatest land grab in history. 7) the funding of a military bought cheaply and at a discount after the world wars, by the profits earned by selling off a continent. 8) the use of that military network to take over and expand trade routes, banking and the ‘international financial system’ that made american ‘currency’ a necessary commodity for world trade. 9) This export of ‘money’ has been our fee for creating and exploiting that world trade system. it is the source of all our wealth since the great depression. THe imbalance of power has led to an imbalance of wealth that has been in our favor. THAT IS THE SOURCE OF OUR GOOD LIFE. PERIOD. The ENTIRE world knows this. They understand the myth of american exceptionalism even if we don’t. “The west dominates the world because it westerners are simply better at war, not because they are more virtuous.” You can find this statement or an equivalent in the literature of every civilization. In particular, in the literature, worldwide, for the past decade, has been coalescing an argument against western democracy as something peculiarly western. They do not take it to the full conclusion. THat we have a democracy because we are wealthy enough to have one, but that is a temporary phenomenon. We americans are wealthy because in the act of discovering a continent the wealth generated and the freedom of individuals to act, outpaced the ability for the european governments to appropriate that wealth. This led to local concentration of wealth in the hands of local ‘business people’ who then took political power and profited from westward expansion. THe increase in productivity by the late 1800’s along with the after effects of napoleon’s chaos collapsed the european economy in the first great depression and led to the franco-prussian problem, and eventually to the first world war. The further concentration of capital allowed the US to capture english trade routes and military bases and buy that empire’s trade routes at a discount. England has been a client state ever since. And the dollar the world currency instead of the pound. We are in our position of wealth not out of national character, or our system of government, or any myth of american exceptionalism, but out of english heritage and the act of selling off a continent. Conservatives, who are historical and traditional by nature, and whom have a long view of time, will take pride in any civilization wherein their status as the progenitors, and maintainers of that society are acknowledged. Conservatives seek to maintain group persistence by maintaining group advantage. This is a masculine strategy as old as mankind. LIberals seek to distribute resources for current good, rather than capitalize resources for future stress. This is a feminine strategy as old as mankind. Together they generally balance one another whether in tribal cave, clannish village, or chieftain state. The problem becomes epistemological when we get to empires. We have trouble ‘knowing’ if we’re storing or distributing enough. WE haven’t had the political technology to solve that problem yet. The first time mankind had this problem we developed writing, numbers and counting systems. The second time we developed Accounting, contracts, interest and banking. Now we need to understand that our political system has to catch up with technology. We have an antiquated political system in this country for the size of empire that we have and it is this antiquity, this antiquarianism, this reliance upon metaphysical biases and residues that is preventing us from solving the problem of reinventing government. Socialism is not reinvention, it’s re-establishment of tribalism. Democracy is not advancement, it’s a temporary tool for increasing the scope of participants in problems solving. We are beyond the ability for politicians to comprehend our problems and provide solutions. Conservatives know this. They just don’t know how to change it. (I do.) But if history is true to form, the invested interests in government, and the money in the political chain, (just as conservatives warn) is such that these innovations will take a century to implement if even possible, unless there is a catastrophic failure of our ability to maintain trade routes and the global monetary system. Government broke the boundary of moral hazard when it created fixed benefit programs and sought full employment rather than variable benefit programs and productivity increases, and in doing so converted the society from saving so that the old could profit from lending to the young to the young supporting the old, when it had taken thousands of years of human history to adopt the established technology of saving and interest. This is was social hubris on a massive scale. Furthermore the government simply SPENT all that accumulated wealth in savings, as redistribution and social and infrastructure programs over a period of eighty years. The conservatives tried to counter it but could not, and now demographically have lost the opportunity. They have been out immigrated and out bred. Americans need to stop congratulating themselves on their perceived wisdom and the virtue of their religion of democratic secular humanism. That’s all nonsense. We are prosperous because we control resources, and levy a worldwide tax for our policing of the international system. While at the same time we undermine that system’s ability to function by undermining the political power of the people who made that system possible: the military class. Americans need to have an honest conversation about the source of their prosperity so that they can have an honest political debate. without that debate we cannot have a democracy or a republic because all else is superstition, religion, absurd metaphysics and outright fraud supported by outright violence. And that’s the danger. At some point, that military class and it’s newest iteration as the small business owner, has been so willfully undermined by the priestly class’s new iteration of public intellectuals and the new religion of secular humanism, will choose to return to it’s basic principles as a military class. Conservatives may be conservative but they are only non-violent by restraint, not by choice. (Aside from the jewish contingent in the libertarian movement that failed to learn the one lesson of the hebrew bible, and it’s story of the rise and fall of Israel – that jewish doctrine is not sufficiently self sacrificing to hold land, and therefore hold a state.) The conservative dislike of Clinton was almost entirely because of his failure to understand the importance of the military culture to conservatives. When he undermined that culture, he effectively stole the inheritance of the conservatives. That we only had a few incidents of domestic violence was surprising. If he had not done that one thing, he could have emerged as a great president. The trick in this country is to be both militaristic and socially tolerant, and fiscally responsible. But our leaders lie about the source of american prosperity. It is this primary lie that causes american political friction. The West’s success versus all other civilizations, despite it’s marginalism and distance from the beginnings of the centers of civilization, has been that the military class adopted individual tactics in battle. THis led to enfranchisement. Enfranchisement led to debate. DEbate led to reason and logic. Logic to science and technology. Science and technology to And our civilization’s locus changes, from athens, to rome, to florence and Venice, to Paris, to Holland to london to new york to washington, and now to the different cities that are capitals of ‘nine nations of north america’ that make up the Washington Empire. People do not possess the necessary information to make rational decisions about political and social ends. They rely on myths. (THe alternative would be to say “I simply don’t know” which is a sin in the religion of secular humanism. There are a few people who are aging now who are wise enough to say that but the religion is so pervasive that it’s become rare to hear someone say “I don’t knw enough about such things.”) People instead rely on metaphysical presumptions and biases instead of rational information. Because of the complexity in predicting the future during periods of dynamic change (as another generation of our economists are discovering yet again), makes prediction nearly impossible due to such extraordinary complexity, people in all social classes rely on their biases and assumptions. As such, metaphysical biases and therefore, all human decision making, are made according to class judgements – ‘residues and derivations’. And for complex reasons due to pedagogical content in our families, child rearing, language, and literature, THIS CANNOT CHANGE. Class memes are relatively permanent. Most voting patterns are not due to political changes in opinion but to redistricting and immigration and breeding rates. Even for neutral policies that do not affect them, people do not change their long term biases except to generally become more conservative as they age. This is why conservatives are annoyed. THey see their sacrifices in the name of group persistence used by the government to immigrate and empower the state, and they feel angry at the theft of their sacrifices. As such, conservatives and liberals simply hold class residues that together form a division of labor, with short term altruistic goods on the left, and long term group persistence on the right. The question is not whether one or the other is right, but whether each group’s preferences are fulfilled well enough and with sufficient compromise, that neither revolts. (even if revolting is ‘leaving the economy’) The problem in the USA is that the south has recovered from it’s slumber, and the rust belt and west coasts have immigrated vast populations. Second, that the industrial heartland is NOT on a coast, and faces the same problem as does germany – it must produce exceptional products in order to create an export economy that compensates for it’s geographic disadvantage, yet the ‘residues’ in that part of teh country do not promote german or japanese quality, because the rust belt/great lakes culture was developed for westward expansion and developed a culture of cheap simple goods, not for an export economy. This can only be fixed over a generation of policy, and a political ability to articulate that policy. Democracy is notoriously bad at accomplishing these kinds of change. And socialist totalitarianism is the opposite direction. it seeks to distribute normative gains not to increase production. Macchiavelli, Weber, Pareto, Michels, Hayek, Mises and Popper all understood these things to some degree. (I think rothbard distracted the libertarian movement despite his many insights he prescribed anarchism as a means of controlling the state, rather than developing tools by which we could maintain the system of social insurance created by fiat money and the state-bank, making the government insurer or last resort.) Yet these men were unable to develop a prescription for government that solved the problem faster than the state could appropriate power under the myths of socialism and secular humanism. That is because the problem of distributed government in the civic republican tradition is much more complicated than under the simplistic tribal metaphor of centralized states. Socialism succeeds because of SENTIMENTS not because of reason. Government empowerment succeeds because of incrementalism, and a failure of conservatives to articulate a sufficiently explanatory alternative. From my position, in hindsight, it turns out that some people in the thirties, during our second great depression stumbled across it. But that in that period of duress, the state sought the short term goal of FULL EMPLOYMENT instead of the long term goal of PRODUCTIVITY, and thus Keynesianism supported socialism, and we developed the welfare state, just as did the egyptians, Romans, the Mayans and just about everyone else who ever had to run an empire. We can have our cake and eat it too. We can do it without using politics as a tool of calculation. That’s what we do now. We calculate the future of our society using democracy’s political ‘wins and losses’. By trial and error. But we don’t have to race to the bottom like all other democracies in history. We can have our cake and eat it too. We just have to understand that our system of government is from an era of shipping and trading agrarian goods, and that laws are a remnant of slave society, and that the use of politics and government is of necessity an imprecise, and fraud-producing enterprise. As has been said, “We have simply swapped a culture of violence for a culture of fraud.” Conservatives by their nature, understand this. THey see government as fraud. And for reasons that are explained in the myth of the rational voter, it is only by fraud and later justification of failure, that politicians are empowered, and only those that seek power, who seek political office. When the entire western tribal tradition has been to ensure that no man obtains sufficient power to dominate others. Now, the underlying and unstated problem here is that conservatives, as the remnants of the military class are by definition, militant. They are not a rabble. They do not like rabblery. And they will shortly, if they have not already, choose to CEASE refraining from their use of VIOLENCE. I have stated this repeatedly : “men are not equally endowed with either violence or courage. Some are capable of interpersonal violence, some of rabblery and protest, adn some of revolution and civil war.” If I forgo my opportunity for violence, I pay a cost in doing so. If I forgo by opportunity for fraud, i pay a cost in doing so. If I work hard then I pay a cost for doing so. If I am self supporting then I pay a cost for doing so. This is how our civilization is paid for – not by money, but by forgone opportunity. This is the currency of human action that pays for a non-corrupt society, and for the institution of property. That’s how property is PAID for. Not by government, but by many, many millions of forgone opportunities every day. It is THIS that funds the development of the STATE, not the state that creates property. “We have laws because we have property, we do not have property because we have laws”. THe differences in cultural definitions of property have to do entirely with the degree of familial independence needed to keep a farm or craft a good. It is not that one civilization is more charitable than another. It’s that more advanced civilizations are more productive and as such require greater divisions of labor, and as such more granular definitions of property. You didn’t think property rights were FREE did you? Or granted by the government did you? Governments simply publicize property rights – when they interfere with them they disrupt the society. Property is a very complicated technology that must evolve along with the division of labor. It is very little different from the technology of numbers or language and is just as important as science. And it is paid for by forgone opportunity. So conservatives feel that sacrifice by sacrifice they pay into the ‘virtual wishing well’ that creates society. They do this, each of them, with a thousand micro-payments a day. Then, along comes the state and wants them to pay the RESULTS of those sacrifices to the state for reasons of mutual investment. Then the state shows up and wants them to pay the results of those sacrifices for charity. Then the state shows up and wants them to pay the results of those sacrifices to empower the government, and the government says it’s not a donation, but a duty, and then the conservative looks up and says, “hmmm….. I do all these things, and make these sacrifices so that others may jeer at me and ridicule me. ” Soldiers are the source of every civilization because they are the source of it’s ethic, it’s resources and it’s trade routes. Different civilizations’ social systems are largely a reflection of their ancient battle tactics. The west is unique because it adopted the wheel, horse, bronze and coordinated tactics, which required individual initiative, and that the warrior supplied his own instruments of war. That is the difference between western, byzantine, middle-eastern, and asian cultures. It is how you use them as a civilization that affects all other classes that come after it. Furthermore any civilization that loses it’s soldier class, and in particular their motivation to act as soldiers despite the sacrifice of doing so, rapidly becomes the victim of someone else’s soldiers. Conservatives are your soldiers. They carry the meme of heroic sacrifice. The question is, how do you want to use your soldiers? This is the core of conservatism. “Group Persistence and heroic sacrifice to maintain that persistence, and the individualism needed to maintain that ethic.” And as such it is not a silly believe or an absurd metaphysics or a religion. It is a strategy for maintaining land and trade routes. And as such, is the source of not only western but american prosperity. And none other. Everyone else is just along for the ride and complaining about the scenery.

  • Bruce Bartlett’s Optimism

    Bartlett annoys me. I’m not sure why he annoys me so much. Perhaps it’s the political hack in him that I find offensive. Perhaps the pomposity? Perhaps the fact that he insults the suffering of the common man? Perhaps both. In this posting he states:

    I’m rather astounded at all the ill-informed commentary I have read today in normally responsible places such as the Financial Times to the effect that the National Bureau of Economic Research is not sure that the recession is over. That is not at all the case. I am 100% certain that every member of the Business Cycle Dating Committee knows perfectly well that the recession ended some time ago. What the committee is unsure about is precisely when the recession ended.

    Of course, according to the definition, it simply means that we are no longer falling. However, imbalances remain, and on a global scale. And unemployment will persist for a long time. In general, the period of contraction only constitutes one third to one quarter of the time span needed for recovery of employment. Unemployment will persist for four or more years. And global contractions are still possible in for multiple reasons in multiple areas. So early claims of recovery are cheerful only for speculative investors and political hacks. The common people have no reason to celebrate.

  • Laments For Attention On Environmental Economics

    On Environmental Economics, the authors take note that Krugman appears to be reading their blog. They then state that the market will fail to protect the environment. Not that the government literally, by reserving powers to itself, FORCES the failure to protect the environment. As soon as something that is useful becomes a scarcity, it needs market PROTECTION. Not market consumption, but market PROTECTION. What does that mean? Lets start with their erroneous complaint:

    But what if a deal between consenting adults imposes costs on people who are not part of the exchange? What if you manufacture a widget and I buy it, to our mutual benefit, but the process of producing that widget involves dumping toxic sludge into other people’s drinking water? When there are “negative externalities” — costs that economic actors impose on others without paying a price for their actions — any presumption that the market economy, left to its own devices, will do the right thing goes out the window.

    This is only because we allow the violation of property rights. If rivers, oceans and air were ‘owned’ then we could . Ownership need not include infinite rights to use. We do not have infinite rights to use flammable things, nor even infinite rights to play music or engage in speech. So it is possible to regulate the use of rivers, oceans, forests and air, as well as endangered species, so that people have the incentive for responsible protection of resources. It is the enforced-ignorance that the state places upon men by denying them the ownership of resources and with it the construct and protections of property. Ownership is a necessary part of the division of knowledge and labor. The state mandates knowledge-incompetence by reserving to itself administration of the ‘property’ we call commons, instead of defining the limits on the use of that property and putting it in private hands, so that individuals have the knowledge and incentive to protect it. Privatize stewardship of air, water, nature. The market will correctly distribute costs of doing so. And the owners of these resources will vehemently protect their ‘interests’ while protecting ours. Otherwise, there will continue to be the ongoing illusion that political forces who compete for government attention are the same as commercial forces who seek to avoid it, and our bureaucracy will continue to be a self-aggrandizing waste of the efforts of the citizens, while our resources continue to be ruined. While the market has weaknesses: in particular, it cannot CREATE property without state intervention (as in determining the rules by which property is used), and it cannot PRESERVE objects without state intervention (as in determining the conditions by which the property is transferred, or the limits on it’s use), the market is far superior at protecting those interests and making use of scarce monetary resources to do so without the waste of government. Since government employees can have special consideration because they are outside the market, they gain special rights that the market would not endow them with. In particular, protection against risks that we call unemployment (the drop in demand for our skills and labor). As such, this is the driving factor behind all political organizations. Whereas, the market would protect the long term resource over the short term desires of government employees. In other words, failing to make ‘public goods’ or ‘commons’ into ‘property’ is simply the willful and mandated theft and redistribution of those goods and the redistribution of those goods to government employees. The commons is the theft of resources by the state so that individuals may profit by the use of ‘commons’ to fund their political advocates. The tragedy of the commons is that ownership leads to over-consumption. But there is another tragedy of the commons, and that is the state-ownership tragedy of the commons, wherein the state uses it’s assets to reward or create advocates. Instead we should avoid the over-consumption tragedy of the commons as well as the bureaucratic tragedy of the commons, and eliminate the commons as a form of property and stewardship, and instead, make it a market matter of the regulated use of and transfer of property, thus enabling individuals and organizations to protect and use it without the participation of the state except as an enforcer. Sell off the air, seas, rivers, lakes, forests, preserves. Directly redistribute money to these ‘owners’ in order to subsidize any ‘common use’. But leave protection of the resource to the owners, who will, universally, do better than the state at doing so. Regulate the use of those ‘goods’. The division of labor, knowledge and incentive is humanity’s greatest accomplishment, because it is the method and means by which we break the universe up into knowable entities. The market is the means by which we allocate the use of those resources. And the state is the organization that creates the ENVIRONMENT that is the market, as well as the means of resolution of differences in property. The state is CREATING THE WRONG ENVIRONMENT when it manages something, rather than when it defines the rules for something, and leaves it to the market to actually do the labor. And thinking otherwise, is to attribute to human beings, knowledge and incentive that they cannot have in a division of knowledge and labor of any degree of complexity. And therefore a fools errand.

  • Time For Violence: Judicial Activism And The New Supreme Court Nominee

    The difference between conservatives and socialists, is that conservatives believe that the government was constructed so that the legislature makes laws, and the court overturns those that are unconstitutional. That is the purpose of the court: to guarantee that the laws that are made adhere to the constitution, and to guarantee that the adjudication of conflict is according both to the laws and to the constitution. But the constitution can be changed. There are methods of change in our constitution. These methods are the right to call a constitutional convention, which requires a majority, and legislation, which requires a majority. There are no methods of change that require a minority. That is not democracy. That is the abuse of our system, circumvention of the constitution. There are no methods of change that do not require legislative change. And legislative change must be obtained by the consent of the majority. Judicial activism on the other hand, is circumvention of our democracy. And judicial activism has been the means by which most of our constitution has been abridged. The general approach has been to tolerate judicial activism because a constitutional convention would expose the nation to too much risk. However, it does not state that judicial activism poses the nation to the risk of civil war, rather than constitutional convention. A constitutional convention would, almost certainly, return rights to the states and to individuals. The constitution is the set of rules that limits what a government can do. They are not the rules by which liberals agree to play. The county is, and always has been, center-right. The left does not want this constitution to prevail. It wants no limits on government. It wants to have an upheaval, a constitutional convention held by fiat – against the very document that gives them political power: the constitution. It wants to change the public hearts and minds to favor ‘compassion’ and democracy over the rules by which the nation was established. The constitution is the rules by which conservatives agree to play. By allowing the left to change the dialog to one of injustice rather than rules, we do not force them to use the rules by which our democracy operates. if however, the rules of the interchange are ‘whatever we can get away with’, or the rules are whetever rules one side chooses to adhere to, then we are not playing by the rules. if we don’t play by the rules then there are no rules, there is no constitution, and there is no need to refrain from violence, because the very premise of our non-violence is the principle of peaceful competition according to those rules. Since the constitution is being circumvented by the left, and by conspiring with an activist judiciary that acknowledges that the constitution is now unworthy of respect,and must be circumvented, then we cannot hope to call a constitutional convention. Since the left ignores the constitution, and the right respects it, we are no longer agreeing to play by the rules that we agreed to. We are simply fools clinging to a fantasy while our opposition abuses the document and processes by which we constrain ourselves to peaceful democratic politics.. We cannot restore our civilization. We can enumerate the changes we wish to make to our country, or we can break it into pieces. Given the size of our country, and the vast different cultures that inhabit the new england, the south, Texarcana, the great lakes, the River and Plains, the pacific northwest the mexican southwest, it may be best to come up with a new federal government in each of those different cultures, and substantially weaken the federal government so that it cannot oppress us. It may instead be better to simply update the constitution with greater protections. It may be better to simply return all power to the states. But this trend toward totalitarianism cannot continue. Freedom is the restraint of individual violence in return for property rights. There is no other form of democracy that is not Bonepartism. (Bonepartism means that the masses elect a totalitarian and are volunatarily made unfree.) I am advocating violence. I am going to continue to advocate violence. At first it must be civil disobedience. But it must grow to upheaval. Because if we do not play by the rules, then I no longer need to restrain my violence. Conservatives no longer need to constrain their violence. It is time for violence. Some men are capable of petty interpersonal physical violence. Some are capable of rabblery and protest. Some of us are capable of revolution and civil war. We are threatened by the myth of the general strike. We are threatened by the idea of revolution by the left, we are threatened with personal violence in order to institute change, by the left. We believe that these malcontents will simply learn. They will conform. That we are safe in our patience. We tolerate this abuse because we are confident in our system. But that system has failed. We must understand that we cannot hold onto pacifism and restraint. And that if we do we are not acting on conviction but convenience. We don’t need half the population to create change. We don’t need a quarter of it. We don’t need a tenth of it. We need one man in one thousand to be willing to take action in an organized manner, and we can restore our freedom. Under the rules of the civic republican tradition, a tradition you may not even be able to articulate, or even understand, except as habits and emotions, you agreed to restrain your violence as men, for the common good, in an effort to create a meritocratic society, as long as the rules were adhered to by everyone. Instead you find that you are sacrificing, that you may have to live in poverty in old age, that your civilization will become another Bonapartist state, so that the left can immigrate us out of power under the rubric of compassion and democracy. So stop confusing your complacency with conviction. You pay for government by forgoing opportunity to use your violence. YOu could, if you wanted, use that violence, use fraud, use deception, break the rules, for your own benefit. Each time you dont you pay the cost of building a society. You pay for whatever society you get. So you are paying for this one. EAch deposit you make pays for this society. Each time you forgo and opportunity. Each tax you pay. Each abuse of your freedoms you tolerate, pays for this society. Prepare to withdraw your deposit. You have been saving violence into a bank for most of your life. It’s time to withdraw it. To spend it. It’s a hefty sum. And with that violence you can buy your civilization back.

  • Citi’s Prince Doesn’t Place Enough Blame On The Government

    From Reuters, regarding today’s CITI testimony before congress:

    Prince’s infamous comment that his bank was “still dancing” even as the subprime crisis worsened came back to haunt him at the commission hearing where he was asked about it. His explanation seemed to boil down to this: it was a race to keep up with competitors who kept loosening lending standards and Citi couldn’t afford to drop out.

    Prince is too defensive. The correct response was that the government was madly printing money in an attempt to recover from the tech bubble’s crash. In this environment of cheap cash, Bankers must lend or be forced out of business by the actions of the government. The risk was compounded by the governments failure to regulate new financial instruments. And the government failed to regulate them because academic economists has proposed models and equations that promised risk, and many financial luminaries, of which Greenspan was a member, believed that these instruments had indeed reduced risk. THe problem is this: by printing money the government created a moral hazard, and the government is responsible for the outcome. A banker, with understanding or not, should not be forced into being uncompetitive or into insolvency because the state dumps the commodity we call money on the market. Bankers just protected their organizations from the government’s interference in business. Sure they profited from it. Because the only other choice was to go out of business. If capitalism fails, it fails because of government interference. Markets cannot solve all problems, in particular, they cannot concentrate a large volume of capital on long term projects such as infrastructure. But failures of capitalism are almost universally failures of government to refrain from those acts which cause long term harm for short term good. We are two years into this crisis and still the blame is on the wrong parties. Bankers are normal people, and few of them have all but the vaguest understanding of the economy. They are largely clerical workers and accountants who move the commodity money around our civilization. For all there terminology, graphs and formulae, for all their statistics and reports, the vast majority have little understanding of the impact of their decisions, the outcomes of their actions, or the limits of our conceptual technology in forecasting such things as risk. If the greatest minds in history have had trouble with such consensus, then why should we think bankers should? Furthermore, why do we think government is capable of doing any better than bankers? It’s hubris on the part of government. Practicality on the part of bankers. And foolishness all around. But the people who CAUSED this problem, are the people who have, at least since FDR, but likely since the start of the federal reserve, conspired to destroy our money, and with our money, our cautious behaviors, and with our behaviors our nation.

  • Hayek’s Renunciation Of Conservatism – A Failure Of His Own

    Hayek is somewhat famous for his essay “Why I am not a conservative.” In that essay, he states that conservatism has no solution to offer us. But Hayek, along with Popper, Mises, Parsons, and the more sociological Pareto, Burkheim and Weber, all failed to provide us with that solution. They all tried and failed. Pehaps Hayek and Popper made the most theoretically valuable attempts. Perhaps, Pareto, Burkheim and Weber made the most valuable observations. But the movement failed. It failed to provide a scientific solution, or even a rational one. It failed because it could not produce a set of actions by which people, particularly the political elites. could adapt to new economic and technological circumstances, which was the rising influence of the prior peasantry due to economic participation, and education. THey had no counter to the Marxian Luddite world view. Unfortuately, although Hayek and Popper both emphasized the knoweldge problem, they still operated in ineffective terms – ineffective causality. Hayek, who got very close to the solution, relied on his work, the sensory order, and thereby made the same mistakes as did Hume, Kant and Mill – failing to sufficiently understand the nature of the human mind in terms of what is NOT possible for it to understand, as well as how it understood. At least Keynes came up with an abstract mathematical principle that would allow politicians to work with tools at their disposal. Mises came closest, by picking up after Weber’s statement that most social advancement was to do with rules and tools for humans to make decisions, with the economic calculation argument. And while it’s insufficient on it’s own as they expressed it, the calculation argument, was closer to than answer than the various historical or psychological and the Misesian Logical, or the Hayekian sensory models. Conservatism is a Pareto-residue. A military class’ value system. It is a prescription against hubris. It acknowledges that we are most easily misled by our vanities and perceptions, and that political hubris is most often a political downfall, rather than an heroic political achievement. It says if we do not understand it we should tread lightly, becaus the costs of failure are dear. As such, it is a prescription of what NOT to do, in a world where we are increasingly empowered to take personal and political actions, yet because of prosperity, we are isolated in time from the outcome of those decisions, and as such, commit the act of hubris, beccause we confuse our abilty to sense an outcome with the fact that that outcome is simply slower to be detectable by our perceptoins. However, we must act. We must create political actions. Even if those actions are simply to prevent the hubris of others in our politiy from harming us by the results of their folly. And to act we must understand what is possible and impossible for people within a polity, or at least, beneficial and harmful to us and our fellows. And conservatism as it is constructed, uses a language of history and largely expresses a condemnation of the Greek concept of hubris. These prohibitions are not quite a religion, and not quite a science. They are a set of observations and limitations. They tell us what not to do, while we do what we know how to do. They warn us about using our pretense of knowledge. They are not a form of skepticism, but a warning against egoism. But, as a set of principles for an activist, participatory government, they are not sufficient to define what actions we may take as a polity. As limitations for Kings and Oligarchs, they are tribal wisdom. But as wisdom for activist democrats, they are both impossible and uninformative. In a democratic polity, and perhaps, even a republican polity, Conservatism must become a science in order to combat what are the normal human political preferences that are the outcome of each generation’s politicians, serving each generation’s young, by trying to apply the principles of the family, tribe and clan to the extended order of human cooperation that we call the market, but which is effectively a highly complex information system between people of varied ability, knowledge and desires. And the market is a tool that exists precisely because we cannot know as a group, what many individuals know as individuals. It is a tool mandated by our political ignorance. It is only science, or the force of scientific argument, that allows us to make decisive political movement in the face of the ignorance and error in the polity due to necessary human ignorance. All the great minds have failed to create a science of politics. Hayek failed. He called himself a liberal. Popper did as well. Most of these great thinkers were classical liberals or libertarians – which means a cautious, market oriented conservative. They attempted to discover a science by which to convince members of the polity, or at least their elites, what NOT to do. They were scientists searching for truth to employ in political coercion. They were members of a class that would not be disenfranchised, or diminished, or see their people harmed by the fashionability of democracy, and it’s simplistic view that prosperity could be generated by government, rather than encouraged and protected by government. In time, Mandelbrot came closer. The behavioral economists closer still. We have seen the recent demonstrated failure of mathematical idealism in economics, and therefore politics – economics being the argumentative scripture of modern politics. But even the behavioral economists are postiviists. THey measure without knowing what they measure, and all of their measurement simply confirms what is common sense, and disproves the ideal type that economists seek to express with their formulae. The science that the great thinkers of the last century attempted to discover is not a form of sentiment, or emotion, or cognitive bias, but calculation. Calculation in the broadest sense. Calculation in the sense of the tools human memory must make use of in order to compare possible outcomes. And that process, when understood is quantifiable. It is measurable. It can be tested. It can be proven by testing. It is enormously complicated. But we should not confuse the difficulty of obtaining the data with the value of possessing it. We codified laws. We wrote constitutions. We contrived philosophies. We conducted wars, and we built nations and complex governments. Surely we can solve the greatest problem of human conceptual history, politics, even to the extent of including Hume’s problem of induction. The properties of individual human memory are the fractal patterns of Mandelbrot’s observations. Society prospers or dies because it’s tools of calculation keep pace with it’s birth rate. A government’s purpose, if it has one, is to spread calculability. What it does instead is spread taxes, which distort calculability. We do not live in the law-and-tax world any longer. We live in the credit and calculability world. While there will always be laws, laws are only important for those who abandon market participation – what we define as criminals. Our problem is to insert as much calculative ability into society and therefore into politics. So that rational arguments can be made. So that irrational arguments can be exposed. So that instead of class warfare there is class migration and class cooperation. So that we can cease being a society of laws – prohibitions and punishments, and instead become a society of actions – ambitions and compensations. Conservatism currently simply assumes those ambitions and compensations without being able to articulate them, or understand their causes.. But it does not comprehend that there are ambitions and compensations that the market CANNOT create. And we cannot make political judgments among the myriad of possibilities, nor stay within the Pareto-Optimum of helping without hurting, without the tools by which to cooperate politically in large numbers while avoiding the problem of creating a self-interested corrupting bureaucracy which simply exploits producers for it’s own benefit, while arguing that exploitation is for the common good. We need to get government off the drug of secular humanism, the food of taxes, and the fantasy of laws. We need to build the calculative society. We need to get away from the religion of secular humanism, and the mystic luddite fantasy of socialism. WE can have our cake and eat it too , if we can measure the ingredients. We can have low taxes and redistribution. We can have small government and large public expenditure. We can cooperate between classes instead of foment class hatred. We can have it all, if we reward our risk takers and producers and redistribute to our laborers and consumers. We can avoid hubris. Hubris is simply the warning that we cannot perceive what we cannot measure, so do not interfere in that which cannot be measured. It is still hubris if you can’t sense or percieve it. It is still hubris if you cannot measure it. And in politics hubris is simply violence and theft. But it is not hubris if you can measure it, and calculate it. The great thinkers failed to give us the the calculative society. The philosophers failed. The economists failed. They had the answer in their grasp. We can have the calculative society. And that calculative society is a science of Conservatism.

  • Two Misleading Infographics – One Religion of Secular Humanism

    Timeplots posted an infographic on women’s participation in congress, which, all things being equal, has essentially remained flat. However, I take issue with the assumption that participation alone is a measure of somehting valuable, other than than as a vidication of the spread of the religion of secular humanism. Also: The Guardian posted an infographic on military spending, which implies that spending is some sort of jingoistic preference, rather than necessity. Together, these graphics illustrate something other than stated. THey represent a measure of the non-rational ambitions of secular humanism rather than the material expression of economic risk and necessity. The first is a misleading graphic, because it assumes that women would achieve some unstated GOOD by greater participation in political participation, rather than are a reflection of political sentiment. For example, another Infographic that’s misleading is the comparison of the US military’s expenditures, which is far larger than any other nation’s. But this ignores the underlying reason for having a military: protecting trade routes. After first, property rights, and second, corruption the third factor most important in prosperity is trade routes. And the civilization that polices trade routes is, in human history, the prosperous one. Another problem is that Chinese military’s size is overstated versus the US. The US uses vast numbers of contractors, as many or more of them than military personnel. The Chinese do not, but instead they perform these tasks within the military ranks. Another problem is that our military is one of technology not numbers, so cost per soldier is more important. Lastly, a very large portion of the military budget is for benefits and in particular, military benefits. The meaningful, and therefore accurate measure of comparison of military cost is the total dollars minus benefits, adjusted by national purchasing power, expressed as a percentage of GDP spent on the military, divided by the number of miles of air, water, rail and road transit that the nation operates. This would show that the USA is very close to dead last in military expenditure. Or rather, that the cost to its citizens is infinitesimal compared to that of other nations. The same analysis would be informative for viewing other nations. Russia for example has a horrific country to transport goods upon and police. It is vast, much of it is harsh to human life, it has a terrorist threat on it’s border, China at it’s south and east, very little in the way of connected waterways and little access to worthwhile seas. All miltary costs for russia will be higher. It must be a threat in order not to become a victim. (See Stratfor’s articles on Rivers and seas as well as on China’s security needs) The US is, fortunately, or unfortunately, the policeman of the seas, and took on that duty after the fall of the british empire. Our wealth is largely dependent, not upon democracy and all the other self-congratulating features we attribute to ourselves, but almost entirely to our control of the seas, because water transport is so much less expensive than any other. This military dominance makes our political values (secular humanism) and our currency, and our laws, the dominant structure on the planet, and is the reason why americans are prosperous. Early US growth was simply the result of applying european technology for the purposes of selling off and occupying a continent. The assumption made by advocates of decreased military expenditure is that there would be little material impact, or that we would not be impacted. Or that this impact would lead to greater equality at home. But that would nto be true. It would lead to vastly higher costs and a permanent upper class, and a vast reduction of the middle class to lower standards of living. Any argument to the contrary must rely upon an example of decreasing control over shipping that led to something other than widespread decline across a nation. In other words, advocacy of pacifism is an appeal to Ludditeism. The problem with women in politics in the US is related to the underlying political necessity of trade route protection. Since many people in the USA, rightly understand these necessary militaristic sentiments (Pareto would call them residues and derivations, and others would call them metaphysical preferences, others would call them biases, or jingoism) they are accurate representation of the problem at hand. Since our political structure is largely organized to maintain that policing and that trade, the population is more interested in maintaining a similar political sentiment. This tendency is generational, class based, and culturally influenced, and is becoming the minority sentiment (which is how civilizations age). But it is still the dominant sentiment among males. Even hispanic males. The reason other nations have higher percentages of women en-toto, is that trade route protection is not the problem faced by, or sentiment held by, people in weaker states. Redistribution is. The correct analysis of women in politicswould be visible if countries were ordered by their ability to expand trade routes. As such, you would see weak countries dominated by women, correctly expressing the social sentiment, and strong countries dominated by men. This is, another example, of the philosophy of Power and Weakness stated by Kagan. People develop philosophies that they CAN. Women have a preference for maternal redistributive duties, and men have a preference for conflict resolution and status enhancement. These charts, by contrast, are an example of a metaphysical bias toward the religious doctrine of secular humanism. (Which is the evolutionary result of christianity.) A pacifist doctrine that is only possible to maintain in the midst of prosperity – a prosperity generated by trade routes, and maintained by militaristic, expansionist, sentiments in a population. Both sentiments are necessary. But dominance of one sentiment is a function of the nation’s needs. So, in other words, if we look at the miles of transport that we police, we have a very, very cheap military. And women serve according to their preference, and societies preference for their sentiments. Women CAN serve in politics. Ability is not a question. Sentiment is a question. Because, in the presence of inadequate information to allow us to predict the future, we make decisions according to our sentiments. And politicians are of necessity both inadequately informed, and not in their positions because they are informed, but because they appeal to voter sentiments. So these charts do not illustrate what the authors mean them to: an illustration of the progress yet to be made in advancing the religion of secular humanism. They illustrate something else entirely: the resistance by the objective and material world of raeality to the religion of secular humanism, and the rationality of those existing judgements in the face of the irrationality of the ambitions of secular humanism. Men and women have different sentiments, and it is almost entirely biological in nature. And there is no evidence to the contrary. Yet our political discourse must, for secular humanist reasons of faith, deny that fact. Arguably from a man’s perspective, especially a divorced man, we have rendered unto women extraordinary privileges never available to men in human history. To the detriment of men’s quality of life, men’s occupational distribution (men take the high risk jobs and largely bear the brunt of unemployment), and medically, more money is diverted to research for women’s health than for mens. Certanly benefit systems are set up to give women an advantage. Especially when we consider that the world’s primary issue is overpopulation, not pollution, or health care. Overpopulation. We have implemented this shift from male dominated benefit, to women dominated benefit, by women’s participation in the voting structure, not by women’s participation in politics – a participation level which appears to have leveled out. The same is true for women’s participation in the work force. It has leveled out. The same appears to be occurring in the past two generations. Women under 30 are not as activist as they were in the post-war generations. The post war generations were largely an effort to demilitarize society that has been militarized in order to fight the world wars, and recently, because of labor saving devices (invented by men) that no longer made it necessary for women to spend the day in home labor. In other words, we attribute to our politics those causes which were actually effects. This overemphasis of politics is another example of the religion of secular humanism, which attributes to collective judgment that which is an artifact of economic conditions. And economic conditions which are an artifact of military sentiments. In the 19th and early 20th century, our trade routes were largely internal, as the Great Lakes region industrialized so that the west could be populated. In the 1980’s our trade routes moved from the atlantic to the pacific, along with the technology leadership, and increasingly are doing so. The same is true for financing. San Francisco is the primary source of investment capital for experimental ideas. At some future point, our trade routes will change again. When that happens, we will change our political participation to be more masculine, or more feminine, depending upon our nation’s position of power and weakness. Just as every other nation will.

  • Hallman Criticizes Hoppe

    I’ve not run across Andy Hallman before. But he posted a blog entry today that is critical of Hoppe entitled A Libertarian Against Free Immigration. Andy States

    Neither in this section nor anywhere in the book does Hoppe ever stop to consider that the “millions of third-world immigrants” would be much better off under free immigration. Granted, we should consider the effect of potentially large mass migrations on all the people affected by them, such as the people paying for the welfare state. But to totally ignore the fact that millions of people would almost certainly be better off from the policy is hard to understand, to put it mildly.

    When the retort to this, is that they would be better off at other peoples expense – people who did not make the decision voluntarily to aborb that expense. If the wealthy world gave all it’s riches to the poor world, then the poor world would be better off, but there would rapidly cease to be a wealthy world. The correct answer is to export the technology of our institutions for a PROFIT, which would create long term prosperity for the third world, AND the first world. Because it is institutions that create prosperity, in particular, institutions of truth telling. Too few people remember that the Russians, recognizing their inability to govern themselves, asked the Danes to come govern them. One of the better decisions in political history. I responded too broadly for the simplicity of the article. Andy makes a number of errors, the fist is the christian error of giving away what is not his to give, because he did not earn it, the second is more complex, which is not understanding the short and long term costs, and the third is a misunderstanding of the problem of political economy that Hoppe is answering:

    Hi, I think you’re confusing multiple concepts. The Hoppe/Rothbard system is just that, a system of interdependencies. It’s an attempt at an explanatory theory based upon an analysis of an ethics of property. (Which Rothbard attributed to natural law and Hoppe to a variant of natural law using a different method of proof (argumentation). Hoppe is answering the problem of maintaining a CIVILIZATION, and the retention of freedom within a civilization, and the quality of life that comes from freedom. (Freedom to DO something, not freedom FROM something – other than violence and coercion.) In your analysis above, you are saying that SOME benefits come from taxing immigrants in the short term. But you have not answered the cost of those immigrants, both in the short and long term. And failing to do so is why you are making such a hasty conclusion. Hoppe, and Weber and others (myself included) would argue that time preference (shorter and higher, versus longer and lower) is part of the division of labor in society, as well as an indicator of class. Time preference may not be a preference but a bias, as it’s a very likely a statement of at necessity. Since humans have different abilities to forgo gratification, since it requires more knowledge and greater intelligence to make longer forecasts, since we learn at vastly different rates, since goals are transmitted intergenerationally, and most importantly since habits and production processes with different periodicity appear to be cognitively incommensurable, it is NECESSARY that we form a division of knowledge and labor in society because it’s all we CAN do, as people with unequal ability. Even if we can educated some people to have increasingly lower and longer time preferences, we cannot teach everyone to have the longest time preference, because they are not able to achieve it, and the division of labor and knowledge appears to require different time preferences. Since the nobility as a class profits from ‘owning society’ it has the longest and lowest time preference. Hoppe himself has that time preference – because like everyone back to the Greeks, we are trying to solve the problem of politics – cooperation rather than conflict. THe assumption here, which appears to be justified, is that a society with longer time preference accumulates all forms of capital for longer term use and creates a more prosperous society that is DURABLE. THis also brings into question whether property rights perpetuate across generations, which would be necessary if a society is to accumulate social order as one of the forms of capital. It’s not uncommon to make a mistake on the value of immigration, because the debate is still open on immigrants. If you immigrate talent (like we did from europe after the fall) then you benefit because you did not pay to create it, and did not take the common with the elite. But if you immigrate talent, even for jobs that your people do not want to do, and especially if they have values that conflict with the values that made your civilization possible, it’s not clear at all that immigrants are a value. In fact, it appears that they’re no different from printing MONEY and inserting it into your economy. No small number of great thinkers have worked on this problem and there is no consensus. However, Hoppe might answer, (and I would) that you cannot have facts without a theory. And unless you can explain the theory which your facts supposedly support, then there is no way of knowing that you’re talking about the same problem, you’re just using CORRELATION, not CAUSATION. (This is the premise of the Mises->Rothbard->Hoppe argument.) Hoppe is giving us a theory of human cooperation and social order. In my own work I agree with Hoppe. I have altered his argument slightly to additionally rely upon calculation and incentive, and added group behavior to it, to better support less individualistic assumptions about human nature which works against the market as much as it works in favor of property. But this is an improvement upon Hoppe’s work, not in any way a refutation of it. The point is, that you don’t refute a Hoppian argument (which is a christian noble’s argument about civilization as much as it is a rothbardian middle class argument about individual rights) with a short term utilitarian expression of tax revenues, because either you are unknowingly supporting his argument, or you haven’t espoused a theory sufficient to compete with the broader theory, and instead are arguing irrelevant and perhaps unrelated facts, that can only be made relevant by the elucidation of a replacement theory. At the very least, you may be describing NOISE not SIGNAL (see Mandelbrot and Taleb) without such a broader theory. (Which is what you’re doing, really, but that’s part of your intellectual development just like it was for the rest of us.) And your theory would have to say that you agree with the USE of GOVERNMENT VIOLENCE to steal property, potential, and freedom from the current citizens of your country to give to immigrants for the sole purpose of empowering government such that it can profit from violating those rights, whether it be out of ignorance, or (as Rothbard and others have stated) because of a misguided application of Christian egalitarian principles, or because of a human foible that makes us feel good about being charitable with public property because we get a social and emotional benefit,a s well as temporary status increase, from giving away what is not ours to give. I’ve tried to lay out a line of reasoning for you in short form, but may not have succeeded. If not, I’ll try to answer what I can for you. Having spent most of my life trying to find an answer to the problem of society, I think hoppe has taken it the farthest. If you assume that we should and can burn accumulated social capital in an effort to make current life better for the global underclass, then you are operating by different PREFERENCES, not by different TRUTHS. And truths are what make argumentative persuasion possible, But you MUST be taking from your citizens, and from their ancestors, to redistribute to your immigrants. THe arguments about productivity increases of immigrants are NOISE if they impose longer term costs on the social order. They are not SIGNAL. They are temporary fluctuations gained by arbitrage, and the theft of property from citizens, not trends to be extrapolated, and upon which we can make value judgements about a theory of political and social economy that is yet to be stated except as a set of “Derivations” (Pareto), or more abstract metaphysical assumptions about the nature of man, or cognitive biases due to incomplete knowledge of human social processes (Popper). For example, what is the cost of making it affordable for your children not to have jobs in their teens, and thereby learning work habits prior to entering the adult work force (the cost of prolonging childhood)? What is the cost of a 20% minority that does not integrate? Or one that proposes a different system of laws? Or one that does not value freedom? All costs are just the choice between one set of costs and another. But those costs have long term consequences. And the measurement of alternate timelines is extremely complex. Cheers. PS: I have a google alert for all articles referencing Hoppe, so that I can educate people about his work, and that’s how I found your posting.

    Moreover, neither Hoppe, nor rothbard (nor mises, popper, hayek or Parsons) have answered the problem of the costs of creating property in the first place, and the opportunity and time economies. Rothbard’s analysis is specious because the island does not exist, and violence over property is rife and most often between groups, not individuals in the same tribe or family. The question is, “why don’t I kill you if you if you take my stuff”, or “why don’t I kill you if you take my opportunities away”.

  • Response To Economists View: One Way To Look At The Bush Years

    RE: “One way to look at the Bush years is that job growth was lousy so the Fed (and the government policies) subsidized construction jobs by creating a housing bubble. That jobs program abruptly ended. It is now time for a new jobs program. For the longer run, it is time for a different labor policy that will create many more jobs.”

    It’s not just a way to look at it, it’s what happened. They wanted to create this ownership society as a means of countering the growth of urbanized socialism, and the diminishment of freedom, and competitive prosperity. This is the most important dimension of the multi-dimensional philosophy that they have been following. (We tend to classify them as having a simplistic philosophy but it is not so. It is not useful to underestimate the thought of your competitors.) The rest of it is essentially a universalist christian concept for the material benefit of mankind, (going back to Alexander) that promotes democracy as a means of exporting control over world resources in order to keep prices low, and maintain military and political power. The problem is for their philosophy, that in the end, society has become urbanized, and large and dense. And the epistemology of urbanites is very different from the epistemology of farmers. There is more similarity between the evolutionary tendencies of urbanites and slavery economies, than the evolutionary tendencies of farmers, for precisely these epistemological reasons. THis difference has been understood for a long time, and written about extensively. However, our current status of behavioral economics has not reached a sufficient state of maturity to connect this set of tendencies, with density of population, and availability of opportunity cost at the expense of perceptibility of causality. Furthermore, our calculative institutions (accounting and taxation) as they are currently practiced, effectively launder causality from our information systems, and require us to rely on the farmer vs urbanite dichotomy as a religious or political difference, or ‘taste’, or even as a strategy of class warfare,versus relying upon factual information that allows us to analyze our behavior and make judgments about it. Fortunately we know how to fix these issues, so that the epistemological clarity of farming (visibly of cause and effect) is available to the urbanite. Unfortunately, we have a form of government that distracts us from solving this problem by individual profiteering on the resolution of conflicts between groups and classes. Our biological sensitivity to fairness, which compels us to work hard, and endure costs, in order to punish those who steal from us, or treat us unfairly, seeks to commit violence, control, or punishment between groups in order to feel fairness has been satisfied. However, this masks the underlying problem as one of solving the underlying problem as one of extending human senses, perception, and comparitive and calculative ability such that we can make decisions for collective benefit. There is an argument that such accountability, which would come from epistemological clarity, would still be avoided by the peasantry, because of necessity we much manage consumption through the pricing system. However, redistribution can mollify discontent as it has in much of europe, assuming that there is anything to redistribute, because the population provides competitive value in contrast to other competing groups. I have a more benign view, which is that if a sufficient number of people can understand that this is a problem of providing information, on the scale that was provided by double entry accounting, and the inventory process facilitating taxation, and the standardization of currency, a small number of simple policies can be enacted that will provide us with the information we need, and therefore will allow us to cooperate, profit, and redistribute without the necessity of relying upon democratic negotiation for the purposes of resolving disputes between classes. Capitalism is with us forever as a set of institutions, precisely because humans cannot, in real time, process complexity of information without those institutions. Redistribution is likewise with us forever, since there is a difference between the necessity of incentive and the necessity of calculative power, and the preference for fairness. Likewise, social and economic classes are with us forever, because people requires status differences in order to pursue the mating ritual, and will create them faster than such differences will be redistributed, just as they will create black markets to circumvent anti-capitalist activity. But capitalism and socialism as biases, are only necessary as biases, because we cannot calculate, measure, and compare, the complexity of society in which we live. It may seem simplistic that society can be better managed by implementing changes in accounting, taxes, banking, credit, and the scope of lawmaking, but our society is changing BECAUSE of changes in these things. Instead, these institutions are what made our complex society possible, and our social systems, because they require decision and legislation rather than simply relying on evolution of business practices, simply evolves much more slowly. If we simply correct this problem, we can get away from class warfare, and into cooperating between classes for mutual gain. In other words, we are trying to build a science of economics on testing assumptions because we lack data needed to actually understand causality. We will have a much easier time if we have the data, and we have the technology, in both accounting and record keeping, to maintain causality in our data. Truth=Causality

  • A Response To Krugman’s Petty Poke At Prestidigitators

    Paul Krugman wrote today, poking fun at prestidigitators in the financial sector. As the most public advocate of forcible redistribution, I thought it was appropriate to poke back.

    The understanding that we obtain from reading the predictions of the financial sector, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it. The understanding that we obtain from reading the predictions of public intellectuals, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it. The understanding that we obtain from listening to business leaders who risk their capital, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it. The understanding that we obtain from listening to the predictions of common people, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it. The understanding we obtain from the opinions of all of these groups of people,is the understanding of how these same people react to what they hear, and what actions that they will pursue accordingly. There is no future determined in advance, only the future that people make because of the information at their disposal, that they can employ to project that future, and the resulting actions that they take in daily life in comparing their needs, obligations, resources, prices, and their anticipation of coordinating the optimum among them. But when we distort the financial system through credit money, or distort entrepreneurial activity through taxation, or distort public opinion through consensus building in order to gain political control over the levers of power, we distort the evidence that these people use to cooperate in their daily lives, and to build a stable, prosperous economy, especially when a prosperous economy is entirely driven by the willingness of it’s members to take risks in anticipation of reward for doing so. While it seems that our transition from the theocratic and religious public debate about the will of god to that of the Civic Republican moral debate about the pragmatism of laws and human character, to that of the economic debate about the material benefit of citizens, has been toward practical rationality, and material reward, it also appears, that under all three public debates, only the preservation and development of our institutions of truth, contract, property rights, accounting and division of labor, has had any material impact on our quality of life – and that the ongoing pubic debate, the use of taxation, and the use of monetary policy has done more to distort the information systems people use to build these institutions, and habits, and trade, and division of labor, than has the debate and political policy over these previous religious and moral traditions — because we are not debating the subject at hand, but debating who should obtain power to manipulate the levers of tax, law, and money. We are, in this public forum, debating power over spoils, not the productivity and prosperity that results from cooperation and trade under our institutions. Most of our technologies evolve by accident of compounding fractal patterns that increase our ability to cooperate in larger numbers: 1) Restraining the use of violence creates the institution of property. 2) The institution of objective truth and fidelity of contract creates complex trade. 3) The institution of money creates the technology of human calculability and cross-categorical comparison. 4) The volume of trade creates the establishment of prices subject to sufficient stickiness that they become forecastable. 5) Sticky Prices create the ability to lay expectations, and forecast complex uses of property. 6) Credit creates intergenerational cooperation, and the pairing of older wisdom with younger effort. 7) Fiat Money and Credit Money create insurance allowing more risk mitigation at the cost of socializing losses and privatizing wins. Conversely: 1) General liquidity distorts the pricing system. And people are informed by those prices to pursue unproductive, but price-ballooning ends. 2) Taxes distort entrepreneurial activity, and in particular, distort the accounting process, and distort banking, credit, investment, and employment, to the detriment of each, while entrepreneurial skill, the most valuable asset of any economy, is directed to tax reduction, rather than productivity gains. Since calculability is the means by which we cooperate: The state should collect and redistribute interest, not issue taxes. A state based upon interest collected is the only method of political and social calculability currently available to man. The state’s job is as a lender, who redistributes profits to citizens. Taxes should be accelerating and flat, on those people who collect and coordinate interest, when their balance sheets make them financially independent, and therefore living upon credit and interest, not upon entrepreneurs who take personal risk, and who are penalized by taxation for having done so. The citizenry should not be enslaved for decades by the use of intergenerational theft and enslavement by involuntary debt. Class warfare should not be fomented, between classes but cooperation and respect encouraged by a process that rewards politicians not to gain from spoils, but to gain from borrowing from the average person, and returning to him his investments. Under this method a politician can be held accountable but material and calculable methods of measurement. The state should not be able to enslave it’s citizens through taxation and justify it by moral argument, any more than it should justify it by the will of god, or justify it by ti’s capacity for violence. These are all forms of slavery. Taxation is a product of slave society. If we are indeed rational beings capable of democracy, or capable of independent commercial action, then we have exited slave society. Ownership by an individual or ownership by the state are insignificant differences. The polibical debate should not be over who controls the levers, but that the only lever should it should use is lending, and the only purpose of the state is to borrow risk from the population and use it to increase production, and thereby distribute teh spoils justly earned by all parties. In this manner we change the public debate from that of class warfare and the power to conduct class warfare, and distributing the spoils, to the civic republican tradition of generating prosperity. Law and taxes are products of slave societies. “Credit and Interest are the ties that binds us. Law and taxes are the thefts that divide us.” Change the public debate. We have been debating the wrong problem for a century. We should be debating how to make a society free from theft and coercion between classes, and to one of cooperation between them through mutual self interest. This is “Capitalism v3.” But it remains to be seen how long before it takes hold – or fails to.