Curt Doolittle

Form: Definition

  • Fascism: What Are The Indicators Of A Fascist State?

    Your question is worded oddly. One could define a Fascist state. We can enumerate the properties of fascist states.  By use of the term ‘indicators’ you imply that either this convention isn’t something you’re familiar with, or that you are trying to establish the properties of a state that describe a trend.  If the former, then that’s possible. If the latter, it is very difficult to argue that any given policy is fascist versus a simple example of retaliatory trade policy.

    Fascism is the pursuit of Autarky (economic and resource indepenence) under a corporation called the state, which represents an extended tribe of people (nation) by direct intervention with industry and trade to give preference to autarkic exchanges despite pricing signals that would normally instruct members of any given industry to operate efficiently by buying by price alone.

    Fascism is merger of the state and industry such that industry adopts autarkic pricing, buying within the country, rather than market pricing.  This is what it means. That this political agenda has been accomplished by all manner of propaganda is not material, since all political efforts are accomplished by propaganda and some appeal to nationalism. People attach a great deal of emotional load to the term that is not relevant.  So it is easy to fail to understand this strategy.

    https://www.quora.com/Fascism-What-are-the-indicators-of-a-fascist-state

  • STIGLITZ SYNDROME ; UNACCOUNTABLE INTELLECTUALS “Stiglitz Syndrome” after Nobel

    STIGLITZ SYNDROME ; UNACCOUNTABLE INTELLECTUALS

    “Stiglitz Syndrome” after Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, referring to the phenomenon of public intellectuals being held utterly unaccountable for their bad predictions.

    From Taleb

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-24 11:03:00 UTC

  • PROPERTARIANISM: WHAT IS “DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY”? In economics we have the conce

    PROPERTARIANISM: WHAT IS “DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY”?

    In economics we have the concept of ‘demonstrated preference’. This means that people tend to say a lot of things, but they they demonstrate by how they act, what their true preferences are, and those things are often very different from what they say.

    We also have the concept of property. And, we tend to think of property as a legal concept, or a utilitarian concept. But the more interesting question is “What do people consider to be property as is demonstrate by their actions?”

    That’s the interesting question. And, Propertarianism is based upon what people DEMONSTRATE by their actions that they consider their property?

    It turns out, that they consider quite a few things to be property. And, with that observation, it turns out that we can explain all human action and emotion in terms of what people consider to be property.

    So, with private property, we can, indeed, reduce all human rights to private property. But further, with DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY, we can reduce all human action, and perhaps, all human cognition and emotion, to statements of property.

    And with that knowledge we can render different systems of economic preference into statements of a competition for the definition of property rights.

    For example, using Praxeology, we can determine whether any proposed incentive is logical to the individual. With demonstrated property we can further explain why Praxeology was insufficient – because (besides the failure of ordinality) it failed to incorporate the full breadth of what humans considered to be property. And as such, could not explain their behavior.

    Propertarianism, which relies upon Demonstrated definitions of property, is able, along with understanding of our cognitive biases, to complete Praxeology.

    Cheers

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-24 10:32:00 UTC

  • PROPERTARIANISM (FOR WIKI) Propertarianism is an ethical discipline within liber

    PROPERTARIANISM (FOR WIKI)

    Propertarianism is an ethical discipline within libertarian philosophy that is used to advocate and justify anarchic, private, and contractual models of government as replacements for monopolistic bureaucracies organized as states.

    It is used more loosely to categorize all libertarian philosophy that gives ethical precedence to the voluntary transfer of property. The term propertarian refers both to practitioners of these ethical systems, and their arguments. Those opposed to private property may be referred to as non-propertarian or anti-propertarian.

    The term “propertarian” was used originally by critics, to refer to the nearly exclusive reliance upon property rights and private property demonstrated by anarcho-capitalist libertarians in their ethical and political arguments, in order to distinguish them from the classical liberal disposition toward liberty in the American constitutional tradition.

    In recent years the term has been used within the libertarian movement as a self-identifying label by those libertarians who rely on propertarian ethical arguments, but try to define practical political institutions in order to separate themselves from sentimental libertarians who rely on classical liberalism’s moral, allegorical, and historical arguments, as well as from members of the ideological anarcho-capitalist movement.

    The propertarian ideologies can vary from those based upon the Propertarian canon consisting of Misesian Praxeology, Rothbardian Ethics, and Hoppian Private Government, to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, to a variety of minor thinkers.

    Libertarian philosophy, like Marxist philosophy that it was created to compete with, is a complex dogma dependent upon economic and philosophically analytical arguments that assert that voluntary transfer of private property is the only means of testing ethical arguments.

    When libertarians apply this ethical technique to political philosophy, they express it as the principle that all human rights can be reduced to property rights. And further, that the only rights it is logically possible to possess are property rights. This principle rests in turn on the proposition that respecting property is the only right that people can equally grant to one another, since property rights only require that people refrain from doing something. And while people cannot all contribute actions equally because of their differences, they all can all refrain from acting regardless of their differences.

    This line of argument is often difficult to master, and so many of the people with libertarian bias, simply resort to treating private property as sanctified, which allows them to rely upon more intuitive, emotionally loaded, and less complex moral arguments. The rise of “internet libertarianism” may reflect this simplification.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-21 16:46:00 UTC

  • THE ONLY TEST OF ETHICAL STATEMENTS The only test of any ethical statement is wh

    THE ONLY TEST OF ETHICAL STATEMENTS

    The only test of any ethical statement is whether all transfers caused by any act, are voluntary transfers – including involuntary transfers of goods, actions and opportunity, and including both direct involuntary transfers by externality, asymmetry of knowledge, fraud, theft or violence (in that order), and including reverse involuntary transfers caused by impediment, free-riding, rent seeking, or privatization (in that order). There is no other test of any ethical statement. There isn’t. Period.

    – Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-20 06:44:00 UTC

  • YOU WANT A LIBERTARIAN GEM FOR TODAY? The ethics of competition. From another pi

    YOU WANT A LIBERTARIAN GEM FOR TODAY?

    The ethics of competition. From another piece I’ve been writing.

    “Competition” itself, as we use the term, is the normative sanction of external involuntary transfer by an artificial, counter-intuitive, set of rules we call the market, consisting of voluntary transfer of goods and services, by fully informed consensual exchange, and insured as fully informed and consensual by warranty, at the cost of opportunity and investment to other producers of similar goods, in an effort to coerce producers to innovate in their use of resources, to produce goods for all at lower price, or higher quality, in an effort to produce goods and services at the lowest cost and highest quality for all consumers participating in that set of normative rules that comprise that market, and which we in turn call ‘a society’.

    -Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-20 06:35:00 UTC

  • Propertarian Definition: REVOLUTION

    1) SOCIETY: A society is an organization. It is an organization of people by norms, using exclusion from, and inclusion in, opportunities to gain adherence to norms. 2) GOVERNMENT: A government is an organization. it is an organization of people who make decisions over the use of property using a bureaucracy that operates by rules, and violence to ensure those inside and outside the bureaucracy obey the decisions and rules. 3) MARKET: A market is an organization. It is an organization of people by the use and allocation of resources using the incentives produced by prices, and the promise of deprivation or benefit by adhering to the incentives produced by prices. 4) CORRUPTION: In any bureaucratic organization, some individuals have greater access to rent-seeking (corruption) than other individuals. 5) PARTIAL MONOPOLY RENTS: In any market organization, some individuals have greater access to the bureaucracy and can therefore obtain licenses for rents (partial monopolies). 6) REVOLUTION: A revolution is a replacement of individuals in a GOVERNMENT by a different set of individuals, who allocate property differently to different people, using the same or a different bureaucracy according to the same or different rules. (Revolutions are very expensive and societies rarely recover from them without the passage of generations.) Revolutions occur when one group of individuals outside the government has greater economic power than the individuals inside the government, and seek control over the government to perpetuate and improve their organizations. a) a market is a continuous reordering of society – revolutions are called ‘corrections’. b) a society is a continuous revolution – revolutions are called ‘reformations’. c) Government’s are a process of calcification because of: i) bureaucracies that stagnate rather than contracted private services that adapt, ii) laws that do not expire when irrelevant, rather than contracts that do when fulfilled. iii) Taxes regardless of the effect of the government, rather than commissions because of the productivity of the government. 7) IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY: All groups need decision makers. Decision makers must consolidate power across a network of alliances in order to make decisions. A bureaucracy is necessary to support conformity to the organization. Once the organization is stable, all individuals inside it seek rents, and the organization exists for the purpose of self perpetuation rather than the fulfillment of its charter. NOTE: OH. And remember: all emotions are responses to changes in allocation of property. ***The mind is a property engine.*** Purportedly Moral language is just a way of trying to steal from one another and get away with it. :)”

  • A Propertarian Definition of Ruthless

    “ruth·less /ˈro͞oTHləs/ Adjective Having or showing no pity or compassion for others. feeling or showing no mercy; Synonyms merciless – pitiless – unmerciful – remorseless Propertarian translation: disregard for externalities. Different from ‘cruel’ which is to intentionally cause externalities.”

  • On Rent Seeking

    RENT SEEKING In public choice theory as well as in economics, rent-seeking means seeking to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Simple Version: “Corruption from outside the government inside of inside the government.”

    NOUN 1. the fact or practice of manipulating public policy or economic conditions as a strategy for increasing profits. “cronyism and rent-seeking have become an integral part of the way our biggest companies do business”

    ADJECTIVE 1. engaging in or involving the manipulation of public policy or economic conditions as a strategy for increasing profits. “rent-seeking lobbyists” Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth-creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline. [I]n its original sense, rent seeking is the act of gaining partial ownership of land in order to gain control of a part of its production. In government it is the act of gaining privileges, redistribution or partial monopolies. In its broadest sense it is the act of obtaining some sort if claim on the productivity of others rather than producing something ones self, or through voluntary exchange. We all seek rents. We all seek opportunity for benefitting from either the actions of our organizations, the actions of others, or the grant of state state monopolies. Women seek mates as monetary rents and men to ease the burden of childrearing. We all seek rents. We could argue that rent seeking is the primary incentive for cooperation. Because so few of us are productive enough through direct exchange of our efforts. The only rent thats totally moral is interest. Interest is free of involuntary transfer. Interest, in the sense that we rent money to others, contrary to our superstitions, is moral. Now, It is possible to seek rents via interest. Either through usury or through leveraging the state’s fiat money. One can collect interest on production. On can collect interest on consumption. Neither of these things is necessary. Both are voluntary. Neither produce negative externalities. They create whole sequences of positive externalities. But collecting interest on externalities is immoral if it creates externalities that produce involuntary transfers. Rothbards ghetto ethics actually encourage involuntary transfers. Under the false presumption that the market will solve the problem through competition. But Since all things being equal, profit from externalities is greater than the same loan without externalities, just the opposite is true. The market will encourage externalities. Also, ghetto ethics assume that judges will not hold people accountable for those externalities and require restitution of them. But they have and will. Because it is consistent with the ethics of property to do so.

  • On The Word “Articulate”

    One is articulate if one speaks articulately. Most definitions say ‘speaks clearly’. However, the term “clearly” itself is subjectively inarticulate. To speak articulately is to express concepts as a unified set of causal relations. The problem with any unified set of causal relations is that the set of causal relations a) must be expressed as a series of actions (to avoid the platonic or subjective errors), b) must bridge the gap between different audiences with greater and lesser knowledge. c) and the steps in those causal relations must be short enough that the audience can follow them. Net is to articulate something well requiers we understand it well. and understand others well enough to calculate how we can bridge the gap between those states of understanding.