Curt Doolittle

Form: Definition

  • What Is Post-austrian Economics?

    1. I think these people are describing a sentiment that they sense in the libertarian movement, not an explicit set of works. (I consider myself one of the people working on post-austrian solutions.)  There are a number of factors that are driving that sentiment.
    2. We are no longer battling socialism but redistributive democracy.  The Austrian canon is not as suited to the current battle as it was to the previous battle.
    3. “Austrian” has been appropriated by the anarchists, as a means of claiming legitimacy, and this has been advocated by the Mises Institute in particular. And there is an attempt by the intellectual community to abandon the term ‘Austrian’ in order to distance itself from Rothbardian anarchism. I suspect that this is the reason you’re seeing the term float around.

    That’s my suspicion. If you pointed me to a few examples I’m pretty sure I could directly address it. It’s not like there are all that many influential people in the  movement.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-post-Austrian-economics

  • Why Is Socialism Such A Bogeyman?

    You would need to understand the term “Socialism”
    1) Original meaning: central control of the means of production.
    2) Current meaning: redistributive democracy -central ownership of the profits from individual actions.

    The first It has a bad name because:
    In the name of socialism nearly a hundred million people died (disruption of incentives). Because it’s economically impossible (economic calculation debate).  And because it held people in poverty.

    The second is just a slow means of achieving the first.

    Small homogenous Germanic countries who’s strategic needs are subsidized by the united states or whose economies are subsidized by natural resources appear to be egalitarian. (It’s called ‘getting to denmark’ in political economy.) This is because they have a rigid normative structure and the different groups are not large enough to create a bloc.  The usa is a large heterogeneous economy with many factions in direct opposition, and unenforced norms, racial and cultural conflicts, facing both internal and external strategic threats that subsidizes much of the world, and where access to government allows access to power over other groups. The USA also has dramatic redistribution through inefficient benefit programs rather than directly via money.   People are not charitable to others who they feel they are in competition with.

    (And before you get too impressed with those countries go live there for a year. It is extremely expensive and you will be able to consume only a fraction of  what you do in the states.)

    It is entirely possible to have a great deal of redistribution if norms are consistent and there is no access to poliitcal power.  But that means ‘small is good’.  And ‘small is good’ is what you should learn from the nordic countries.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-socialism-such-a-bogeyman

  • What Are The Differences Between The Political Parties In The Usa?

    They represent different sets of alliances.  Mostly those that want to expand the state and those who want to contract it.

    https://www.quora.com/unanswered/What-are-the-differences-between-the-political-parties-in-the-USA

  • The Meaning of “Utility” In The Context Of Philosophical Inquiry

    I keep running into questions over the meaning of ‘utility’. It means only that all actions are in the pursuit of ends. The end might be just the emotional reward that comes from an experience like learning, or a flavor, or the elegance of a composition, or the pleasure of interacting with others. This approach, the analysis of actions and ends, avoids any number of errors in casual philosophizing. Not the least of which is confusing reactions to arbitrary norms with objective truths. Philosophy is a process. It can be constructed an aesthetic religion as if our tastes are a truth rather than a learned response. It can, and usually is, used to construct a religion of norms: a means of coercing others to adopt the same values under the presumption of equality of abilities and desires. It can be used as a means of constructing institutions and processes so that people can cooperate despite having different abilities, desires, and norms. (I’m avoiding the term knowledge and use the term norms, since I break knowledge into aesthetic/experiential, prescriptive/how and propositional/what categories, and it’s communicability into tacit, explicit and normative — which is why our arguments get lost: assuming it’s just one state rathe than a spectrum. Likewise, philosophy can be used to describe the spectrum of ethics from the aesthetic to the personal to the political. But spectra emerge only in the context of action. I am never sure whether the desire to define a philosophical concept as a state rather than a spectrum is a means of coercion — of either the self or others — or as a means for AVOIDING UNDERSTANDING AND AVOIDING ACTION. Which is, for example the purpose of most religions. Hinduism, buddhism and Islam have all succeeded in calcifying because of this error. So I am not relying on ‘utilitarianism’ as an aesethetic philosophy, which Is what I think a few people hear. I’m relying upon action as a means of avoiding errors in reasoning that come from the desire to create states rather than spectra. Where states are largely the regurgitation of static norms, and spectra allow us access to the aesthetic, normative and political. And where my interest is the political, because I do not believe it is possible to create a universal set of norms. Not that anyone cares. But that’s why use or utility is important: as the object of action, where action is a test of our philosophical reasoning, as something other than the coercion of the self or others in order to avoid the problem of gaining knowledge by which to improve our actions, which in turn improve our experiences. Arguably this is a matter of time preference but that’s another topic altogether. – Thanks

  • LIBERTARIAN, LIBERTARIANISM, BLEEDING HEART LIBERTARIANISM, CONSERVATISM, AND PR

    LIBERTARIAN, LIBERTARIANISM, BLEEDING HEART LIBERTARIANISM, CONSERVATISM, AND PROPERTARIANISM DEFINED

    “Libertarian” refers to sentiment that is expressed as a value judgement which in any political question favors individual liberty, but where the sentiment cannot be articulated in analytical terms, and only articulated as metaphor or analogy.

    “Libertarianism” is a philosophical framework which at the minimum, reduces all political questions to those of property rights and voluntary transfer, but which different factions also include the scope of property definitions, the limits of those rights, the cause of those rights, the justification of those rights as moral or utilitarian, the inclusion of warrantee, the necessity of symmetric ethics, the use of normative or procedural institutions.

    “libertarian’ (small-l- libertarian) is the self-identifying label for the faction of Libertarianism that restricts all questions of politics to a the narrower criteria of several-property and voluntary exchange. (This term has become synonymous with anarchism.)

    “Classical Liberalism” is advocacy for a certain set of procedural institutions that assist in libertarian value judgements: participatory republicanism, a division of powers, a hard constitution, and the rule of law, and restriction on the concentration of power.

    “Bleeding Heart Libertarianism” is an *as yet unarticulated* sentiment that some sort of egalitarian allocation of resources is necessary, utilitarian, or desirable.

    “Conservative” refers to a value judgement which favors organic meritocratic change rather than intentional and planned legislative change, as a defense against the dangers of hubris and corruption.

    “Conservatism” refers to an historic philosophy which favors the priority of procedural institutions over normative institutions.

    “Social Conservative” refers to a bias that favors the priority of normative institutions over procedural institutions.

    “Democratic Socialist” refers to the collective ownership of all resources, and hte lending of those resources to individuals for the purpose of producing collective ends, and income as the reward for service, and the amount of the award to be determined by representatives of the collective. (Democratic Socialist Secular Humanism.)

    “Socialist” refers to the collective ownership of all resources and all means of production, and all human beings, and the organization of production, and allocation of rewards by representatives of the collective.

    PROPERTARIANISM is an articulated set of arguments using an expanded concept of property, and which recommend different sets of procedural institutions that both allow us to explain and compare different political preferences as descriptions of property and transfers. It makes political strategies possible to articulate. In so it justifies bleeding heart libertarianism, and allow conservatives to articulate their political sentiments, which are expressions of the non-procedural normative economy, in rational propertarian terms. This ability to articulate ideas can improve general political discourse by making conservatism, which includes libertarianism, at least int he west, finally arguable in rational terms.

    A PROPERTARIAN is unconcerned with the preference for any institutional combination, only which combination of institutions are possible and which outcomes they can and cannot produce.

    (NOTE: The term “Libertarian” evolved out of Classical Liberalism when the term “Liberal” was successfully appropriated by the socialists, and Classical Liberals sought a new self identifying term that was less victim to appropriation. This term was then appropriated by the anarchist movement despite their narrowing of the scope of the properties of classical liberalism.)

    Source date (UTC): 2012-04-05 13:52:00 UTC

  • is the study of norms: existing norms, suggested norms, and the tools by which w

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/2012/03/10/nyt-followup-philosophy-needs-more-than-rebranding-it-needs-a-reformation/Philosophy is the study of norms: existing norms, suggested norms, and the tools by which we construct and deconstruct norms. And the discipline’s avoidance of the material value of norms was an abandonment of its purpose. And it’s why the discipline has lost respect of the public, and lost its relevance to contemporary society. The strange fear of empirical data is its most conspicuous failing.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-03-10 13:15:00 UTC

  • A Propertarian Definition of Tolerance

    Every society contains a population which together, as shareholders, possess a portfolio of norms, a portfolio of opportunities, and a portfolio of capital. When we tolerate something, it means that we are willing to bear the knowing theft, involuntary transfer, or privatization of some small part of those portfolios that we would expect other members of the society to avoid. We can bear these costs for both positive and negative reasons: Positive: as an investment in the future, in the hope that these people will learn the norms, increase the portfolio of opportunities, or increase the portfolio of assets. Negative: as a matter of convenience, resulting in our privatization of public assets ourselves, we can refrain from paying the cost of policing the portfolios by forgoing opportunities with the individual, or bearing the costs of protecting those assets from involuntary transfer. The only way to know the difference between the positive and negative use of Tolerance, is to know whether the actions of the individual or group in question will result in the accumulation of assets or not. But it should be clear that it is impossible to perform neutral tolerance. All tolerance is either good or bad. Claiming ignorance is just convenience: privatization. Theft of public assets for one’s personal consumption. The complexity arises when multiple portfolios are involve and outcomes are speculative. Unless ‘Tolerance’ is an economic strategy whose impact is fully understood by the population, it is not investment but convenience. The example in the western countries is that they pay for their social programs by a) letting the USA pay for their international trade and defense costs, and b) using immigrants to create consumption not possible for the people to create by productivity. In canada, we add c) which is that we export resources. So the cost to canada is one of a pair of risk propositions: that immigrants can be assimilated sufficiently that a ‘canada’ and its portfolio can be maintained, OR that the future is irrelevant, and there is no responsibility we hold toward the future. In the States, one population holds to its heritage – attempting to retain its portfolio in the belief that it is something unique in human history. Another seeks to consume that portfolio in an attempt to build a more utopian society. And that is the source of conflict.

  • A Propertarian Definition of Tolerance

    Every society contains a population which together, as shareholders, possess a portfolio of norms, a portfolio of opportunities, and a portfolio of capital. When we tolerate something, it means that we are willing to bear the knowing theft, involuntary transfer, or privatization of some small part of those portfolios that we would expect other members of the society to avoid. We can bear these costs for both positive and negative reasons: Positive: as an investment in the future, in the hope that these people will learn the norms, increase the portfolio of opportunities, or increase the portfolio of assets. Negative: as a matter of convenience, resulting in our privatization of public assets ourselves, we can refrain from paying the cost of policing the portfolios by forgoing opportunities with the individual, or bearing the costs of protecting those assets from involuntary transfer. The only way to know the difference between the positive and negative use of Tolerance, is to know whether the actions of the individual or group in question will result in the accumulation of assets or not. But it should be clear that it is impossible to perform neutral tolerance. All tolerance is either good or bad. Claiming ignorance is just convenience: privatization. Theft of public assets for one’s personal consumption. The complexity arises when multiple portfolios are involve and outcomes are speculative. Unless ‘Tolerance’ is an economic strategy whose impact is fully understood by the population, it is not investment but convenience. The example in the western countries is that they pay for their social programs by a) letting the USA pay for their international trade and defense costs, and b) using immigrants to create consumption not possible for the people to create by productivity. In canada, we add c) which is that we export resources. So the cost to canada is one of a pair of risk propositions: that immigrants can be assimilated sufficiently that a ‘canada’ and its portfolio can be maintained, OR that the future is irrelevant, and there is no responsibility we hold toward the future. In the States, one population holds to its heritage – attempting to retain its portfolio in the belief that it is something unique in human history. Another seeks to consume that portfolio in an attempt to build a more utopian society. And that is the source of conflict.

  • Brick At A Time: A Propertarian Definition Of Tolerance

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/2012/03/06/a-propertarian-definition-of-tolerance/One Brick At A Time: A Propertarian Definition Of Tolerance

    Source date (UTC): 2012-03-06 11:17:00 UTC

  • A Propertarian Description Of Causality

    Causality, like all human concepts, is a product of the necessity of humans to act, in order to alter the course of events, so that they can consume the difference. Causal understanding is then bounded by human perceptive ability, processing power, in real time. And from this perspective, whether something is causally replicable on one end, or correlatively positive but causally uncertain at the other end, is only as relevant as the cost and risk of the actions necessary to achieve the outcome. We often confuse truth in the abstract, with truth-for-action. Truth in the abstract is a metaphysical tautology. Truth-for-action is simply scientifically pragmatic. Evolution works by trial and error, and so do we.