Curt Doolittle

Form: Full Essay

  • CONFLATION AND DECONFLATION IN ARGUMENT (important concept in demarcation betwee

    CONFLATION AND DECONFLATION IN ARGUMENT

    (important concept in demarcation between science and non-science)

    I want to try to put my objection – if we can call it an objection – into a more articulate form, and see if I can convince you, or at least see if I am capable of communicating this idea with any degree of clarity.

    1 – CONFLATION TO COMMUNICATE VS DECONFLATION TO INNOVATE

    I”m not necessarily objecting to the conflation of experience, action, observation, and existence, because otherwise we could not produce literature and art, the purpose of which is loading and framing in order to attribute value through shared experience, to ideas. But I want to point out the consequences of conflationary( monopoly ) and deconflationary (competing) models by which civilizations produce and use knowledge.

    2 – DECONFLATION AND COMPETITION VS CONFLATION AND AUTHORITARIANISM

    In the western tradition, we maintained separate disciplines for Law, Religion, and ….welll… “Theory”, or what we call ‘science”. Or Religion: what we should do, Theory, how we do it, and Law, what we must not do. In the west , our civic disciplines are divided into the common law; contractual politics that are limited by that common law;

    Our celebrations and festivals and art function as our ‘church’ experience (bonding), and our mythology as our literature (aspirations).

    Our science and technology and commerce function as their own discipline inspired by religion and limited by law.

    Our succes at discovering truth proper (scientific truth) is due to our evolution of empirical contractual law, independent of the state, independent of religion,

    We divided the related properties of existence, and thereby deconflated them just as all human thought consists of a process of deconflation (increasing information), free association (pattern recognition), and hypothesis (ideation).

    3 – COMPARISONS

    Other civilizations that did NOT start with sovereign contractualism did not do this, and they retained conflation, in order to retain authoritarianism. (fertile crescent, east Asia). Monotheism, uniting law, religion, and even a pretense of existence into a literature, created the most conflationary totalitarianism yet developed. Law, politics, religion, and science deconflated those same concepts and left them not only open to further investigation and evolution, but prevented the deception that arose from the conflation of manipulation of the physical world(cafts and science), dispute resolution(law), cooperative action(trade), common aspiration(religion), and education.

    The result in every civilization and in every era is that conflation led to stagnation. and deconflation led to innovation. (We can go through every civilization. Fukuyama does it for us actually.)

    4 – WE ALL SEEK TO ESCAPE THE COST OF DUE DILIGENCE

    All of us seek opportunities and aspirational information provides us with opportunities. We all want something for nothing, and we feel intellectual opportunities are the most valuable ‘freebie’ we can obtain. Moreover, we can read books and decide ourselves, rather than enter into production of goods and services, production of commons, production of arts, or production of offspring – all of which require cooperation with those who differ in knowledge, opinion and desire from us. Which is why many of us seek to use philosophy, like religion, like science, as an authoritarian method of decidability rather than a voluntary exchange of promises, contracts, goods, services, commons, and liabilities.

    All of us seek to avoid limits upon us, and so we seek to separate the limits of cost, and the limits of morality,the limits of cooperation, and the limits of law, and by doing so the limits of reality. Philosophy notoriously throughout history differs from Law and science, by ignoring costs (effort, resources, time, and money), which is why it’s failed to retain independence from religion in the modern academy.

    5 – THE ENLIGHTENMENTS AND THEIR OPPOSITIONS

    The anglo enlightenment, beginning with Bacon’s creation of empiricism by applying the methods of the common law, to the methods of scientific investigation, was terribly disruptive to the non-contractual peoples, even though it was natural to the anglo-saxons (north sea peoples) who had been operating a contractual government since at least the 700’s if not earlier. The English revolution was painful but was eventually settled by contract – as is traditional in anglo saxon civilization, and remains today in the USA.

    The french enlightenment was written as a literature of moral persuasion, in order to protect itself from empiricism and contractualism. And its revolution destroyed french civilization, created state currency financed total war, and force the uniting of german princedoms in response. That this effort was merely an attack on the land holders in both private (noble) and church hands is obvious to us. That this ended french contribution to western civilization is less so. That it has been the sponsor for marxism and Islamism are less obvious. France fell from the stage and without interference from other nations would be german colony today.

    The german enlightenment used not empiricism, and not moral literature, but rationalist literature (kant) in order to protect its social order from empiricism and contractualism that threatened the hierarchy that constitutes german ‘duty’. Kant replaced germanic Christianity not with science but with rationalist literature. He spawned the continental philosophical movement retaining conflation which has tried every bit of verbal trickery to retain conflation while proposing alternate methods of INTERPRETING and VALUING what we experience, but not better methods of ACTING upon the universe we exist within. in other words, the germans remain desperate to restore religion. Unfortunately, the germans were cut short in their maturity by the entrapment between the bolshevik/soviets who wanted to obtain eastern Europe, and conquer Europe, to defeat deconflationary empirical contractualism – and the anglos who wanted to maintain the balance of power. And the germans who had spread what remains of Hanseatic civilization across central and eastern Europe with members of her own nation, and wished to defend them.

    The Jewish enlightenment expanded on the french and german by creating the great authoritarian pseudosciences: boazian anthropology (ant-Darwinian), fruedian psychology (anti-Nietzche restorationism), and Marxist socialist (anti contractualism), and even Cantorian mathematical platonism (anti-materialism), frankfurt-school criticism (anti aristocratic ethics), and combined it not just with press, but with new mass media, and new consumers with disposable income from the consumer capitalist industrial revolution. Out of the Jewish enlightenment, we get the horrors of the Bolsheviks, the soviets, the maoists, and world communism. 100M dead. And at present, we are about to lose Europe for the second time in two thousand years to another wave of ignorance.

    Without bolshevism and communism we would very likely never had the world wars, and would still retain the best system of government ever evolved by man: Juridical monarchy, a market for commons by houses representing classes, a market for goods and services, and a market for reproduction, all under the rule of law.

    6 – THE COST OF CONFLATION AND DECEPTION

    What has been the cost of each of these failed enlightenments? What has been the cost of the Jewish alone? What of napoleon? The British was a trivial tribal dispute between the (failed) corporate-republicans and the (successful) national-monarchists.

    What if the British enlightenment hadn’t been cut short by the conflicts (counter enlightenments) of the French, German, Jewish and Russians? What if the greeks had finished their invention of the industrial revolution? What if Justinian hadn’t closed the stoic and greek schools, and forcibly indoctrinated Europeans into mysticism instead of literacy and reason? What if the RESTORATION OF DECONFLATION imposed on the west by the first great deception of authoritarian monotheism had not been necessary?

    Most of the great lies in history are created by conflation, and all our great achievements in dragging mankind out of ignorance and poverty have been achieved through information provided by deconfliction and competition.

    SO while as a human I can empathize with the desire to assist in COMMUNICATION through conflation – thereby allowing us to impose values upon ideas, during education, and allowing us to experience life through the words of other minds. That is very different from the act of conflation in philosophy which appears in large part, whether literary philosophy, moral philosophy, or religious philosophy, to be nothing more than the use of subterfuge (the use of suggestion under the influence of suspension of disbelief), to cause either submission or agitation by artful deceit.

    So just as we must have communication and education (conflation) we must have analysis and prosecution(deconflation). Without both tools, (literature for education, law for deconflation) we cannot protect ourselves from the greatest crimes in history.

    Because outside of the great plagues, philosophers and prophets are responsible for more death and destruction, ignorance and poverty, susceptibility to starvation and disease than any general ever dreamed of being.

    So contrary to giving philosophers a license to special pleading, my position is that the evidence is in, and that unless words are backed by warranty that they do no harm, the are no different from any other product of man. And that while no producer of goods, services, and ideas, wishes to be accountable and to warranty his materials, actions, and words, that we must constrain those people such that no intellectual products, like no services, and like no material goods can enter the market for knowledge any more so than goods and services can enter the market for consumption.

    My assessment of history is that the jurists and scientist do all the work, and the prophets and the philosophers take all the credit, and us it like today’s marketers and advertisers for personal gain despite the drastic consequences of their deceptions.

    So I tend to damn philosophy or literature that is objectively criminal, regardless of the intentions of the producers and distributors of it.

    7 – WHY CANNOT WE WARRANTY OUR SPEECH

    I have no idea why, in an era of mass manufacture and distribution of information that we do not require the same increase in due diligence against harm, that we have incrementally added to the production of goods and services.

    If we can police polite speech (political correctness) against shame by the true, then why can we not police philosophical speech against damage by the false and immoral?

    We cannot ever know what is good or true until we test them. We can, however, know that is bad and false.

    If it is bad and false we can either regulate(prior constraint) in the continental model, or enforce involuntary warranty(post facto restitution) in the American model. My opinion is that regulation creates corruption and restitution creates quality.

    So as to your preference for conflationary philosophy, I would say that as long as you would warranty that your conflation does not harm, then it seem you have nothing to worry about. But if your use of conflation does harm, then you do.

    And if we had the same defense against deception that we have gainst every other kind of fraud, that there would be very few philosophers – and the few we had, would be of much higher calibre rather than simply those who write the rationalist equivalent of science fiction and fantasy, under the pretense of possibility, thus inspiring people to the social equivalent of yelling fire in the theatre.

    8 – CLOSING

    There is only one moral law of nature: do no harm. Everything that does not harm, is by definition good. One thing may be better good than another. But that is a matter of preference and taste, not of truth,

    No free rides. No special pleading. Ideas produce more harm than material goods by orders of magnitudes.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2016-08-28 08:50:00 UTC

  • WHY IS PHILOSOPHY RESPONSIBLE FOR SO MUCH DEATH? —“If I don’t load and frame w

    WHY IS PHILOSOPHY RESPONSIBLE FOR SO MUCH DEATH?

    —“If I don’t load and frame with subjective experience I cannot convey reality”—-

    (I think this is a deception, and here is why)

    So, given that you’re clearly knowledgeable I want to try to put my objection – if we can call it an objection – into a more articulate form, and see if I can convince you, or at least see if I am capable of communicating this idea with any degree of clarity. If not I’ll understand.

    1 – CONFLATION TO COMMUNICATE VS DECONFLATION TO INNOVATE

    I”m not necessarily objecting to the conflation of experience, action, observation, and existence, because otherwise we could not produce literature and art, the purpose of which is loading and framing in order to attribute value through shared experience, to ideas. But I want to point out the consequences of conflationary( monopoly ) and deconflationary (competing) models by which civilizations produce and use knowledge.

    2 – DECONFLATION AND COMPETITION VS CONFLATION AND AUTHORITARIANISM

    In the western tradition, we maintained separate disciplines for Law, Religion, and ….welll… “Theory”, or what we call ‘science”. Or Religion: what we should do, Theory, how we do it, and Law, what we must not do. In the west , our civic disciplines are divided into the common law; contractual politics that are limited by that common law;

    Our celebrations and festivals and art function as our ‘church’ experience (bonding), and our mythology as our literature (aspirations).

    Our science and technology and commerce function as their own discipline inspired by religion and limited by law.

    Our succes at discovering truth proper (scientific truth) is due to our evolution of empirical contractual law, independent of the state, independent of religion,

    We divided the related properties of existence, and thereby deconflated them just as all human thought consists of a process of deconflation (increasing information), free association (pattern recognition), and hypothesis (ideation).

    3 – COMPARISONS

    Other civilizations that did NOT start with sovereign contractualism did not do this, and they retained conflation, in order to retain authoritarianism. (fertile crescent, east Asia). Monotheism, uniting law, religion, and even a pretense of existence into a literature, created the most conflationary totalitarianism yet developed. Law, politics, religion, and science deconflated those same concepts and left them not only open to further investigation and evolution, but prevented the deception that arose from the conflation of manipulation of the physical world(cafts and science), dispute resolution(law), cooperative action(trade), common aspiration(religion), and education.

    The result in every civilization and in every era is that conflation led to stagnation. and deconflation led to innovation. (We can go through every civilization. Fukuyama does it for us actually.)

    4 – WE ALL SEEK TO ESCAPE THE COST OF DUE DILIGENCE

    All of us seek opportunities and aspirational information provides us with opportunities. We all want something for nothing, and we feel intellectual opportunities are the most valuable ‘freebie’ we can obtain. Moreover, we can read books and decide ourselves, rather than enter into production of goods and services, production of commons, production of arts, or production of offspring – all of which require cooperation with those who differ in knowledge, opinion and desire from us. Which is why many of us seek to use philosophy, like religion, like science, as an authoritarian method of decidability rather than a voluntary exchange of promises, contracts, goods, services, commons, and liabilities.

    All of us seek to avoid limits upon us, and so we seek to separate the limits of cost, and the limits of morality,the limits of cooperation, and the limits of law, and by doing so the limits of reality. Philosophy notoriously throughout history differs from Law and science, by ignoring costs (effort, resources, time, and money), which is why it’s failed to retain independence from religion in the modern academy.

    5 – THE ENLIGHTENMENTS AND THEIR OPPOSITIONS

    The anglo enlightenment, beginning with Bacon’s creation of empiricism by applying the methods of the common law, to the methods of scientific investigation, was terribly disruptive to the non-contractual peoples, even though it was natural to the anglo-saxons (north sea peoples) who had been operating a contractual government since at least the 700’s if not earlier. The English revolution was painful but was eventually settled by contract – as is traditional in anglo saxon civilization, and remains today in the USA.

    The french enlightenment was written as a literature of moral persuasion, in order to protect itself from empiricism and contractualism. And its revolution destroyed french civilization, created state currency financed total war, and force the uniting of german princedoms in response. That this effort was merely an attack on the land holders in both private (noble) and church hands is obvious to us. That this ended french contribution to western civilization is less so. That it has been the sponsor for marxism and Islamism are less obvious. France fell from the stage and without interference from other nations would be german colony today.

    The german enlightenment used not empiricism, and not moral literature, but rationalist literature (kant) in order to protect its social order from empiricism and contractualism that threatened the hierarchy that constitutes german ‘duty’. Kant replaced germanic Christianity not with science but with rationalist literature. He spawned the continental philosophical movement retaining conflation which has tried every bit of verbal trickery to retain conflation while proposing alternate methods of INTERPRETING and VALUING what we experience, but not better methods of ACTING upon the universe we exist within. in other words, the germans remain desperate to restore religion. Unfortunately, the germans were cut short in their maturity by the entrapment between the bolshevik/soviets who wanted to obtain eastern Europe, and conquer Europe, to defeat deconflationary empirical contractualism – and the anglos who wanted to maintain the balance of power. And the germans who had spread what remains of Hanseatic civilization across central and eastern Europe with members of her own nation, and wished to defend them.

    The Jewish enlightenment expanded on the french and german by creating the great authoritarian pseudosciences: boazian anthropology (ant-Darwinian), fruedian psychology (anti-Nietzche restorationism), and Marxist socialist (anti contractualism), and even Cantorian mathematical platonism (anti-materialism), frankfurt-school criticism (anti aristocratic ethics), and combined it not just with press, but with new mass media, and new consumers with disposable income from the consumer capitalist industrial revolution. Out of the Jewish enlightenment, we get the horrors of the Bolsheviks, the soviets, the maoists, and world communism. 100M dead. And at present, we are about to lose Europe for the second time in two thousand years to another wave of ignorance.

    Without bolshevism and communism we would very likely never had the world wars, and would still retain the best system of government ever evolved by man: Juridical monarchy, a market for commons by houses representing classes, a market for goods and services, and a market for reproduction, all under the rule of law.

    7 – THE COST OF CONFLATION AND DECEPTION

    What has been the cost of each of these failed enlightenments? What has been the cost of the Jewish alone? What of napoleon? The British was a trivial tribal dispute between the (failed) corporate-republicans and the (successful) national-monarchists.

    What if the British enlightenment hadn’t been cut short by the conflicts (counter enlightenments) of the French, German, Jewish and Russians? What if the greeks had finished their invention of the industrial revolution? What if Justinian hadn’t closed the stoic and greek schools, and forcibly indoctrinated Europeans into mysticism instead of literacy and reason? What if the RESTORATION OF DECONFLATION imposed on the west by the first great deception of authoritarian monotheism had not been necessary?

    Most of the great lies in history are created by conflation, and all our great achievements in dragging mankind out of ignorance and poverty have been achieved through information provided by deconfliction and competition.

    SO while as a human I can empathize with the desire to assist in COMMUNICATION through conflation – thereby allowing us to impose values upon ideas, during education, and allowing us to experience life through the words of other minds. That is very different from the act of conflation in philosophy which appears in large part, whether literary philosophy, moral philosophy, or religious philosophy, to be nothing more than the use of subterfuge (the use of suggestion under the influence of suspension of disbelief), to cause either submission or agitation by artful deceit.

    So just as we must have communication and education (conflation) we must have analysis and prosecution(deconflation). Without both tools, (literature for education, law for deconflation) we cannot protect ourselves from the greatest crimes in history.

    Because outside of the great plagues, philosophers and prophets are responsible for more death and destruction, ignorance and poverty, susceptibility to starvation and disease than any general ever dreamed of being.

    So contrary to giving philosophers a license to special pleading, my position is that the evidence is in, and that unless words are backed by warranty that they do no harm, the are no different from any other product of man. And that while no producer of goods, services, and ideas, wishes to be accountable and to warranty his materials, actions, and words, that we must constrain those people such that no intellectual products, like no services, and like no material goods can enter the market for knowledge any more so than goods and services can enter the market for consumption.

    My assessment of history is that the jurists and scientist do all the work, and the prophets and the philosophers take all the credit, and us it like today’s marketers and advertisers for personal gain despite the drastic consequences of their deceptions.

    So I tend to damn philosophy or literature that is objectively criminal, regardless of the intentions of the producers and distributors of it.

    8 – WHY CANNOT WE WARRANTY OUR SPEECH

    I have no idea why, in an era of mass manufacture and distribution of information that we do not require the same increase in due diligence against harm, that we have incrementally added to the production of goods and services.

    If we can police polite speech (political correctness) against shame by the true, then why can we not police philosophical speech against damage by the false and immoral?

    We cannot ever know what is good or true until we test them. We can, however, know that is bad and false.

    If it is bad and false we can either regulate(prior constraint) in the continental model, or enforce involuntary warranty(post facto restitution) in the American model. My opinion is that regulation creates corruption and restitution creates quality.

    So as to your preference for conflationary philosophy, I would say that as long as you would warranty that your conflation does not harm, then it seem you have nothing to worry about. But if your use of conflation does harm, then you do.

    And if we had the same defense against deception that we have gainst every other kind of fraud, that there would be very few philosophers – and the few we had, would be of much higher calibre rather than simply those who write the rationalist equivalent of science fiction and fantasy, under the pretense of possibility, thus inspiring people to the social equivalent of yelling fire in the theatre.

    CLOSING

    There is only one moral law of nature: do no harm. Everything that does not harm, is by definition good. One thing may be better good than another. But that is a matter of preference and taste, not of truth,

    No free rides. No special pleading. Ideas produce more harm than material goods by orders of magnitudes.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2016-08-28 08:01:00 UTC

  • THE FRAUD OF TOLERANCE —Should we be tolerant? Should we tolerate intolerance?

    THE FRAUD OF TOLERANCE

    —Should we be tolerant? Should we tolerate intolerance? If we don’t, does that make us intolerant?—

    We can always justify truthful speech. Why and how can we justify tolerance of anything other than truthful speech? Why should we justify falsehood, libel, slander, and risk (yelling fire in a theater for example).

    So, why did the founders of the constitution, attempting to transform anglo empirical law into a formal logic of social science, state that freedom of speech was permissible instead of that freedom of truthful speech was permissible, and that punishment for use of false speech was permissible? (Jefferson’s ambition was brilliant but incomplete.)

    The problem we have faced through history, is that because our justificationary language was based upon the false application of internal axiomatic moral language, we confused moral and legal justification with theoretic and survivable truth. And only with contemporary science did we discover that we cannot justify theoretic argument no matter what we do – we can only perform due thorough due diligence against falsehood in theoretic systems, including all of ethics, economics, and politics.

    We have just endured a century of pseudoscience, propaganda, and deceit, on a scale not seen since the use of writing and roads to spread the conflation of law and religion we call monotheism.

    And it has cost us as much damage as that last deceit caused the roman empire, and western civilization, and the dark ages that followed, and all the painful reformations that we have born: anglo, french, german, and Jewish, Russian, Chinese, and now Muslim.

    But why have we been so susceptible to the lies, deceits, pseudosciences, and falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries?

    (media scale vs pulpit and book, and town crier and parchment scale)

    And how can we perform due diligence and warranty against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit?

    WARRANTIES OF DUE DILIGENCE

    Now, we can’t possibly cover this subject in detail as an interjection, but these are the six tests, the first three which are familiar to scientists, and the last possibly so.

    1 – categorical consistency (identity)(non-conflation)

    2 – logical consistency (internal consistency)(non-contradictory)

    3 – empirical consistency (external correspondence)(repeatable)

    4 – operational consistency (existential possibility)(possible)

    5 – moral consistency (reciprocal voluntary transfers)(moral)

    6 – scope consistency (full accounting, limits, and parsimony)

    The first novel test is 4-Operational consistency, meaning that we write in the objective language of action, as do the physical scientists, so that each step we discuss is subjectively testable, and existentially possible, and does not conflate actor intent, observer interpretation, and subjective experience, but simply a record of the actions taken. (This technique can be found by researching e-prime.)

    The second novel test objective morality under which we require that all transfers consist of productive, fully informed, voluntary exchange limited to externalities of the same criteria. This is definition of natural law: the law of non-imposition of costs that would cause resentment or retaliation which would disincentivize the process of cooperation, and limit the disproportionate returns of cooperation.

    So now that we know how to demand the same warranty of truthfulness in speech that we do in advertising, marketing, production, distribution, and trade, why do we not demand implicitly warranty against harm, by the demand for due diligence in the qualification of political speech, just as we over the centuries have incrementally demanded due diligence and warranty of the fitness for service of goods, services, and all other products?

    The only reason to do so is to continue to allow deceit. Or to fail to pay the cost of suppressing falsehood out of convenience.

    Or worse, —“Why is it that people should be lied to and not taught Truth, or spoken to, but not spoken to truthfully, or speak, and not speak truthfully? To engage in human husbandry.”—David Mondrus

    We can all tolerate uncomfortable truths. That the universe doesn’t care about us has been one discomfort after another. But why must we tolerate falsehoods, frauds, and deceits, pseudorationalism (obscurantism), and pseudoscience (deception) when we know how to demand due diligence against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overloading ( including pseudoscience), and deceit?

    Why must we give voice to error bias, wishful thinking suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit? If so, why do products and services require regulation? Do we not live in an information economy now, where it is information that is our primary product and primary good of consumption?

    THE BEAUTY OF IT ALL

    Here is what I am certain of: that the same delta in human achievement that resulted from the greek development of reason, and the suppression of mysticism in the commons; and that same delta in human achievement that resulted from the English invention of empiricism, and the suppression of mysticism and rationalism in the commons, would be brought to mankind by the development of truthfulness as a suppression for error, propaganda, and deception in the commons.

    And likewise I am quite certain that just as the mystics fought reason tooth and nail, and just as the religious and theological fought empiricism tooth and nail, and just as the spiritual fought darwin tooth and nail, and those who practice theology, rationalism, and pseudoscience, and justificationary deception will fight tooth and nail.

    Because, each of these groups profits from their lies.

    The next great leap in human civilization is not technology. it’s morality and law: truth telling. It will be as great a leap as science has been.

    Now, imagine all the books written today, how many are false? Sure, it is true, that we need a different book to discuss the same idea, for every ten points of intelligence, from about 140 on down. But how many fundamental truths are there? (we have estimates in the range of a few hundred to less than two thousand). Why is it that people should be lied to and not taught truth, or spoken to, but not spoken to truthfully, or speak, and not speak truthfully?

    Why do we have any more right to pollute the informational commons than we do the other commons of air, water, and land? Why can we cause informational harm out of ignorance, yet we are prohibited from economic and criminal harm out of ignorance or not?

    What was the cost of literacy? What was the cost of creating rule of law? What was the cost of western high trust?

    We must tolerate the truth, productive competition, the vagaries of the voluntary organization of reproduction we call the family, the vagaries of the voluntary organization of production distribution and trade we call the market economy, and the vagaries of competition for the production of commons that we call government. But there is no reason we must tolerate preventable harm by error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deception, any more than we have tolerated murder, violence, theft, fraud, conspiracy, conquest by conversion, conquest by immigration, and conquest by war.

    So no. Tolerance is an excuse to conflate convenience (cost) with conviction, in exchange for false status signals, fraudulently obtained, by the pretense of charity versus the evasion of the tax necessary for the preservation of a high-trust society and its benefits.

    The tolerant so to speak are just engaged in fraud and nothing more.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of the West: Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2016-08-24 14:27:00 UTC

  • WHO PUT THE WEST IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION? WE KNOW ALREADY. …. WE DID. AT OUR B

    WHO PUT THE WEST IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION? WE KNOW ALREADY. …. WE DID. AT OUR BIRTH.

    (here is the narrative you’re looking for)

    1) The origins of the uniqueness of western civilization are something we have known for nearly a century. On the steppes of Ukraine, (now southern Russia), our ancestors led verbal, contractual, historical, tradition, focused on listening to testimony (story telling), possessing myths, but lacking authoritarian symbolism, idols, or mysticism. They were typical of the indo european people.

    2) With the unification of the horse, wheel, and bronze, these pig, sheep, and goat herders, turned to raiding and dropped the peaceful and cooperative mythology and adopted the aggressive warrior mythology. thus dividing the indo-european peoples. The heroic age was born. The other tribes responded by creating ‘religion’ from mythology as a *resistance movement*. Some groups later used religion as the first legal system, and then later, for greater ‘precision’ in homogenizing punishments and crimes, created more precise ‘law’.

    3) These conquerors spread in all directions, forced by tribal competition to adopt the new technologies just as all other military technologies have since been adopted out of necessity.

    4) Each of the three major branches, northern and western aryans (Europeans), southern aryans (Iranians), and eastern aryans(Indians), (we do not know what happened to those people in the far east yet other than that they appear to be gone), used the new technology to rule their own people, and if possible or necessary to gain good territory, to conquer and rule other peoples, and then extract taxation to pay for the high cost of bronze, horse, and wheel.

    5) This ruling caste succeeded in conquering everything within the european and asian plains from Asia to Spain, and as far south as Egypt.

    6) They used manorialism, and serfdom to cause upward redistribution of reproduction from the underclasses to the middle and upper classes – if we can somehow stretch the meaning of middle class back into those eras. And they used war, winters, taxation, and aggressive punishment to cull troublemakers – even enforcing late marriage. The consequence was a reduction in the ratio of the unproductive underclasses to the productive classes. We call this ‘domestication’ when we refer to plants and animals, but we call it ‘oppression’ when we do it to humans. But these people applied domestication to man with the same passion that they did to their herds.

    6) In those places where they were most successful because of less territorial competition (Europe), they maintained the contractualism between the peerage (aristocracy) and maintained egalitarian meritocracy(those who fight earned rights), and the prohibition on the concentration of power in any of them.

    7) The Greeks, Hittites, Romans, and Celts all practiced this same contractualism, sovereignty, heroic ethic, and aristocratic egalitarianism by merit. Conversely the fertile crescent did not since their chief problem was using propaganda to organize large populations in concert with the flood cycle. And by the time the Axial Age hit China, the aristocracy and peasantry were already formed, and ritual developed as a means of controlling the tendency of the aristocracy to exhaust production for their feasts. So they maintained authority, and the Crescent maintained authority. while the european branch of the aryans maintained contratualism meritoratic egalitarianism, and personal, heroic, sovereignty.

    8) When martial men, members of an initiatic brotherhood of warriors, whether normative, legal, or ritualistic, must negotiate they rely upon martial epistemology (empiricism) and hold to the sacredness of truth (testimony) and contract if for no other reason than in battle one can bear very high costs of error, optimism, betrayal and dishonesty. These men negotiate and argue their positions and the headman (general, chieftain, or king) judges and chooses from the different arguments presented. It is this testimonial, argumentative, debate, from which reason and eventually aristotelian ‘science’ takes it’s origins.

    9) The Romans adopted greek thinking, but not greek rhetoric since they thought it full of what we would consider to day ‘weasel words’ and so they favored ‘plain speech’. So they adopted stoic natural law as their inspiration, not greek politicized speech. Moving man closer to empiricism.

    10) There are only three ways of coercing man, and we evolved all three of them: religious inclusion or exclusion, legal punishment and liberty, credit consumption or deprivation. We can control people through religion, law, and credit. Religion is a loose method of control, law a precise but limited, and credit an individualistic method of control. But each also has different cost structure. Religion is cheap, law requires a tax structure to finance it, and credit requires elaborate institutions and high trust between credit issuers. The same is true for education: literacy is expensive, numbers more so, law more so, and philosophy even more so. So the combination of resisting the germanic migrations, the exhaustion of the slave economy, the Justinian plague, the loss of the north african grains to the muslims, and centuries of raiding against the mediterranean, the Agaean/Mediterranian civilization could not compete any more than the prior dark age could compete against the sea peoples who are most likely a migrating wave of our ancestors. So the church was able to govern, but only by imposing christianity by force, closing the stoic and greek schools, and allowing the empire to devolve into thousands of regional manors each defending what it could, with its own resources. Religion is cheap if imprecise government. The church ruled with literacy, and diplomacy, and superstition, where rome had ruled with religious liberty, law, and credit.

    11) The Europeans try to resurrect Roman law once they rediscovered it. The Templars come along and develop the first system of international credit but the Pope, knowing his brother was deeply in debt to the Templars, framed them in the hope of rescuing his brother from the debt, and possibly claiming the Templar holdings for the church. However, the Pope didn’t understand banking: money is always at work or it is useless and he destroyed the Templars and banking, leaving the Jews – who unlike the Templars – were weak, to fill the void in the market for credit. But as we know now, there was no gold not working in Templar hands.

    12) About the same time two things occur: the British lawyer Bacon, arrived with his invention of empiricism – a novel invention over Aristotelian near-science. And the formation of the Hanseatic civilization we refer to by many names (Germanic, Protestant, Northern European), but was caused by the adoption by the Frisians of bipartite manorialism, which was the most eugenic economic system in the history of man. This spread throughout northern Europe, starting in about 700, and by 1200 had changed the genetics culture, and economy of what we think of as northern Europe. The Hansa bridged the mediterranean trade overland, and by sea, and the north sea then replaced the Aegean/mediterranean economy as the dominant economic force in Europe until the colonies were discovered, and like the alliance between Sparta(Germany), Athens (Britain) and Rome(America) the atlantic became the mediterranean of the ancient world. And the balance of power shifted from the Hansa to the west, while than Hansa continued to spread German genes, culture, and economy to the east. Each carrying with them the ancient aryan tradition of contractualism we think of as the tales of George Washington’s honesty here in America. A character more underrated in history than nearly any man but Bacon.

    13) When Jefferson put pen to paper he did not know that he almost succeeded in developing strictly constructed law from the first principle of the natural law of contractualism. Had he, we would have seen the birth of scientific government: natural, judge discovered, strictly constructed, operationally testable, common law. Had he done so the Enlightenment might have been completed. Not having done so we had to endure the French, Russian, German, and Cosmopolitan enlightenments, and like waves of disasters each caused catastrophic damage to the west. English empiricism was correct, but the theory of man as an oppressed potential aristocracy of everyone was false. French moralism was incorrect and merely an excuse to replace one set of rulers with another, creating the terrors, and ending France’s contribution to western civilization. The German reaction to Napolean destroyed the heart of Europe by unifying princedoms that preserved our martial and oath traditions. The cosmopolitan Enlightenment was terrified by the Darwinian an capitalist revolutions, and created the pseudosciences of Boazian anthropology, marxist economics and sociology, and freudian psychology, and Frankfurtian cultural critique – even Cantorian mathematical platonism. The Russian took the french and the german and the cosmopolitan (Jews) and created the horrors of bolshevism, trotskyism, and the soviets, and ended the Russian Enlightenment which prior, had been literary and orthodox, and made it pseudoscientific. This movement, threatened in europe moved to New York and was funded by Columbia University, resulting the adoption of these pseudosciences by the academy newly willing to sell them to new underclasses finally having access to education. Not knowing they were being taught the same deceitful resistance movement to aristocracy and truth using pseudoscience and pseudorationalism and fabricated history and cultural criticism that their ancestors had been taught as ‘religion’.

    14) At the beginning of the last century a gruop of thinkers understood that the world was being converted to a pseudoscientific religion of rebellion against the truth, to replace the prior era’s conversion to mysticism as a rebellion against the truth. These men unfortunately did not come to any consensus on how to solve the problem of the new mysticism masquerading as pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, and mathematical platonism, Poincare raised the battle flag, then Mises in economics, Hayek in law, Popper in philosophy,

    WHAT MADE US THE WEST, SO DIFFERENT FROM THE REST?

    What made the west the west originated on the steppe, north and east of the black sea, where sometime after the great deluge, a group of people developed a purely empirical mind, absent the dreams and fantasies of the later ages. Throughout our history, a young man took an oath upon his maturity: “I shall not lie, or steal, or strike me dead.” This phrase in a thousand promises, a thousand oaths echoes through our history in every era.

    And this ‘testimony’ this ‘oath’ is the secret of the west: by the combination of oath, sacrifice (battle), truthful (empirical) testimony, jury of peers, an independent judiciary, the sacredness of that oath as the basis for natural, judge-discovered, common law, a people small in number, against much greater numbers, and much greater wealth will innovate, and adapt to change FASTER if not first, than all other civilizations known to man. We are not always first, but where we are not first we are fastest. Because of the oath. This is why we are the origin of more art and science than all civlization in history combined, despite our youth, and small numbers.

    Churches matter in every civilization. In any group of people. Rituals are required. Ceremonies, feasts, and celebrations. We must find some way to recreate the safety of the small tribe. To keep us one somehow. To invoke the pack response we call spiritualism (submission to the pack). To create bonds with those whom outside of church we may even compete with. But it matters little what occurs in those churches other than that we come together to submit to one another, develop and preserve kinship love for one another – despite our lack of kinship.

    Our church did some valuable things: (a) attempted to maintain some semblance of order as the empire collapsed (b) attempted to preserve knowledge as ignorance expanded (c) forbid cousin marriage (in an effort to break up the lands of the great families so that they could be purchased more cheaply by the church), (d) managed what little resistance to the expansion of islam (e), and created an educated and literate cult of administration over the territories despite teaching nonsense to people, failing to educate them, and leaving them in darkness for nearly a thousand years.

    But given that the church mythology was constructed from a combination of those same ancient myths, not the least of which was Mithraism of the soldiery, there is very little within the church’s teachings that did not exist prior to it. And there is much if not more bad done by the the church as good. And the pope’s current campaign in favor of the third world at the expense of the first, is just the most recent example of preserving the institution instead of reforming it.

    We no longer need governance by religion, only ritual, festival, ceremony and perhaps education. We do need governance by law. And the whole world is rebelling despite its incomprehension of cause, against governance by credit which favors a few at the expense of the many, no longer serves the family, tribe, and nation, and is no longer eugenic, but dysgenic on a scale we have never seen before in human history – a price future generations will pay for as much as the dark ages did, because as the marginal differences in knowledge and production are eradicated by global trade and communication, the favelas and slums will be unable to change, because there is no method of using incentives voluntarily organizing production of large numbers of underclasses with the productive capacity of any upper and middle class. The third world will no longer starve, but it will remain poor. There are many kinds of dark ages. And we are just as likely to enter one as exit the current stagnation.

    There is plenty in our history to worship, to celebrate, to feast over, to ritualize, and to ceremonialize. We can Love Jesus truthfully as a philosopher, or untruthfully as a prophet. We can love our western god as a wise father, rather than feign submission to the Jewish imitation of an Egyptian one. We can pray for wisdom to not only our gods and saints, but our scientists, philosophers, artists, craftsmen, warriors, and wise men. We can celebrate life rather than fear death. We can celebrate nature rather than heaven. We can revel in our defeats of the great darknesses of time, ignorance, poverty, disease and suffering. We can learn our great history of truth telling, and honor, the skills of parenting, the skills of life, the skills of civic duty – and our skills of war.

    Because that would be telling the truth to one another.

    And that’s what it means to be ‘western’.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2016-08-22 10:29:00 UTC

  • WHEN WE SAY SCIENTIFIC WHAT OPERATIONS ARE WE REFERRING TO? (important) (scienti

    WHEN WE SAY SCIENTIFIC WHAT OPERATIONS ARE WE REFERRING TO?

    (important) (scientific method) (informational commons)

    It’s not the subject matter, nor the method of inquiry, nor the method of hypothesizing that’s classifiably scientific or that places any limits on what we call scientific investigation.

    ORIGINATION OF HYPOTHESIS: INCREASED INFORMATION AVAILABLE TO PERCEPTION

    We can produce an hypothesis through free association, or random selection. The method of arrival doesn’t tell us anything. In general we must increase the amount of information that we possess either by concentrating time, expanding time, expanding scale, decreasing scale, increasing precision of physical instrumentation, increasing precision of logical instrumentation, increasing precision of institutional instrumentation. Once we have increased information by reducing it to an analogy to experience that we CAN perceive, we can then compare and make judgements and offer hypotheses that transcend the limitations of perception, time, scale, and instrumentation.

    The function of the discipline of science – and that which we call the scientific method – is to test each dimension of a hypothesis to determine whether it survives. And by survival increase the burden that we place on the testing; and by failure discover new potential ideas (avenues) for inquiry (free association).

    Because of this, the discipline of science, with which we practice the scientific method, functions (like its origins in law), as a warranty of due diligence against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion(and substitution), overloading(pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, propaganda), and deceit.

    In the process of due diligence, we search (a process of wayfinding), for possible causal explanations.

    INVESTIGATION: CONSTRUCTION OF INSTRUMENTATION

    The act of scientific *investigation* consists not in the warranties, but in developing categorical, logical, physical, and institutional instrumentation with which to reduce what we cannot directly experience, to that which we can experience, so that we can detect marginal differences, and make decisions, which serve as inputs to our free association (search of memory for patterns).

    So just as we use justification for moral and legal argument, and criticism for truth and scientific argument. Just as we use the golden rule to assert desirable ends, and the silver rule to prevent negative ends, we also construct instrumentation to assert positive tests, and we apply the scientific method, to conduct negative tests.

    Most science requires the invention of tools to extend our perception such that we can reduce the imperceptible to an analogy to experience with which we can make comparisons and render judgments.

    DUE DILIGENCE: WARRANTY OF TRUTHFULNESS

    But why must we perform due diligence?

    True Enough? True Enough For What Purpose

    ———————————————————————

    Comprehension?

    Further Association?

    Planning action?

    Acting?

    Risking?

    – or –

    Communication?

    Negotiation?

    Advice?

    Ethical license?

    Moral license?

    Risk of loss license?

    Risk of harm license?

    Risk of Death License?

    There are greater consequences to our utterances than there are to our thoughts. What happens in your bedroom is beyond the reach of the commons, and so long as it does not enter the commons there is not a moral question. What happens in your living room among guests may enter the commons or not. What actions and words you speak in public are de facto within the commons. If you PUBLISH and especially do so for any form of profit, then you are manufacturing a good (or harm) that is not only entered into the commons but for the duration of its existence. There is no difference between shipping a poisonous medicine, an incorrect recipe or plan, a product that if misused can harm, or a product that can harm without extraordinary due diligence.

    We tolerate emotional outbursts from one another. We tolerate error from one another, we tolerate bias sometimes, we tolerate suggestion infrequently, and we react negatively do deception and harm. Moral intuitions evolved to cause us to retaliate even at very high cost, against those who engage in parasitism by any means, including the imposition of harm directly or indirectly.

    NO MAN WANTS TO PAY THE COST OF REGULATION AGAINST HARM – HE PREFERS TO EXTERNALIZE THE COSTS PARASITICALLY, FOR TESTING HIS UTTERANCES.

    Parasitism in production, consumption, defense, and information are all natural human behaviors: we take discounts where we can get away with them.

    But the history of civilization is the history of incremental suppression of parasitism from murder, to violence, to theft, to fraud, to conspiracy. And the (Popperian) insight that science occurs not only personally, interpersonally, and socially, and that we do harm by pseudoscientific and insufficient diligence, because we have insufficient incentive to warranty our utterances.

    The scientific method, at least for scientists, asks us to use instrumentation and judgement to warranty our utterances against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overlaoding, and decet. It just so happens that in an effort to speak the truth, through these process of warranties, we are more likely to discover that truth.

    THE X/Y AXIS OF DECIDABILITY IN THE SUFFICIENCY OF WARRANTY

    x—> Epistemic process, Y —> Due diligence against harm.

    There is no difference between the production of any good whether physical, normative, institutional, or intellectual. It follows the same process from free association, to individual rational testing, to individual or group hypothesis, to thorough testing, to theory to social application testing, to law, to universal metaphysical assumption about the nature of the universe we live in: physical and totally deterministic, or sentient, and less so.

    What differs only is which output we value that is produced in that process AND the level of ‘truthfulness’ necessary to act upon it without harm to ourselves or others.

    COSTS PROVIDE DECIDABILITY IN CHOICE

    We must always, if we are to avoid error and immorality, remember that the reason that the ancients failed to solve the problem of social science was that they ignored costs. Whether this was a polite mannerism of the wealthy crippling their reason, or the natural consequence of cost exposing our different interests, or fear of overlapping religion and politics, morality and law, and drawing their ire. The separation is either an error, a bias, or a deceit.

    The reasons we did not solve the problem of social science, are the same reasons popper did not correctly identify the scientific equivalent of the mathematical axiom of choice: cost.

    The universe takes the least cost route. Man takes the least cost route. Scientific investigation can and does proceed successfully by taking the least cost route. And it is the least cost route to information expansion that we CAN and do use to provide decidability in matters of inquiry. And that is what we do.

    Man is a very simple creature. We observe changes in state of assets that we value (calorically). These changes in assets produce chemical reactions we call emotions. Our mind evolved to assist us in obtaining those emotions. Our minds use memory to conduct wayfinding. We then criticize our wayfinding. And of the possible found ways, we take that which provides the greatest return in the shortest time, for the least effort, with the greatest degree of certainty, ad the lowest risk.

    Becuase we are merely a part of nature. And memory is very useful for the production of energy, and the conservation of energy, despite its extremely high cost of operation.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Source date (UTC): 2016-08-22 06:09:00 UTC

  • Externalities And Keynesian Economics In Context Of Information And Decidability

     

    [I]n price-theory, an externality is any benefit or loss not included in the price of the exchange.

    But we can debate whether economics is the study of investment, production, distribution, trade, and consumption, or whether economics is the model under which all social science, from metaphysics, to psychology, to epistemology, to ethics, sociology, law, politics, group evolutionary strategy, and conflict – the entire model for the entire philosophical spectrum.

    There remains a conflict between the pseudoscientific(postmodern epistemology, freudian psychology, boazian sociology, marxist political science,) and the scientific social sciences all operating within the single branch of inquiry we call “economics”. (the study of information, incentives, and cooperation).

    Since I do understand that economics as a discipline of social science functions as the scientific competitor to the pseudoscientific social sciences, I work with INFORMATION in total, not with PRICES alone. And I extend economic models to include INFORMATION of all kinds, and the consequences of changes in information.

    I am fairly certain that this is the CORRECT (meaning true) framing for the general rules which we work to discover in that discipline we ‘archaically’ call economics.

    Information is the model in the physical sciences, and information is likewise the model in the social sciences. The fact that Mises, Popper and Hayek did not quite bring this idea to fruition, and why, is one of the great intellectual failings of history – if only because it allowed the competing pseudosciences to gain predominance in our academy and as a consequence, policy.

    IN CONTEXT: EXTERNALITIES
    In the context of my talk, and in the context of my arguments, there is no difference between the increases or decreases in capital, and the voluntary or involuntary transfers of that capital, by INFORMATION rather than that SUBSET of information that we call PRICES.

    In other words, the general rule describing the externalities of prices is but a subset of the general rule describing the externalities of all information.

    And unintended consequences are a question of scope of INTENTION, not a question of the scope of the consequences of INFORMATION.

    (if you understand this I don’t really require an apology because I realize this is non-trivial material. I make very few errors. But I am always constrained by the limits of time and circumstance and I cannot explain every concept that I rely upon in every utterance I make. It’s just not possible. )

    NOW ONTO KEYNESIANISM 
    Just as I rely on information to produce conditions of DECIDABILITY, I also explain the differences between the natural law (mengerian/austrian), rule of law (friedmanite/chicago), and discretionary rule (keynesian/freshwater) branches of economic theory. In each of these theoretical systems the originators relied upon a method of decidability (or what in math is called ‘axiom of choice’) in order to justify the use of their model over the competing models.

    The Natural Law group takes the position of do no harm (do not ‘lie’ using the pricing system).

    The Rule of Law group takes the position of do as little harm as possible, so that we are not lying but ‘correcting’ information problems under rule of law. So that there is a trade between the disinformation we provide and the information system we call prices and incentives. It seeks to restore a condition of natural law.

    The Discretionary Rule group (Keynesians) take the position that any disinformation we produce now, produces such profound gains, that it’s not only immoral to resist using disinformation, but that its unlikely that any negative consequences we produce would be outweighed by intertemporal gains, that we can fix those problems we cause later on with the proceeds.

    Under this model of economics, decidability in economic theory that is not provided by the axiomatic model is provided by an axiom of choice: ie: subjective valuation.

    This issue of decidability is not solved yet although the general austrian prescription that we cannot in fact ‘cheat’, seems to be correct given the increasing duration and severity of depressions. This is why the debate has calmed so significantly since 2008’s crisis. The mainstream relies upon keyensian decidability to justify increased rates of consumption at the expense of genetic, normative, and institutional capital degradation, under the assumption of genetic, normative, and (possible) institutional equality.
    (which if stated this way, is clearly false).

    It has only been since the worldwide abandonment of marxist economics, and the worldwide adoption of consumer capitalism, and fiat credit, that the west’s asymmetrical technological advantage let us assume that the trend of constant growth was available to us without intertemporal consequences.

    KEYNESIAN IN THE CONTEXT OF DECIDABILITY

    So, when I spoke of Keynesianism it is the method of decidability that I was referring to.

    Again, I tend not to make mistakes. I make many mistakes of brevity, and there are many unintended consequences of my brevity. But all common communication requires information loss or the burden would silence us.

    Cheers.

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Philosophy of Aristocracy
    The Propertarian Institute

  • Q&A: –“Curt: What Are Your Thoughts on Taxation?”–

    Author’s note. I like this post because it shows how we can educate people on controversial issues. [G]reat question. I’m going to answer this set of questions in a different order from the one they were asked:

    –“Have you spent much time on taxation and it’s various forms? Perhaps you could do a post on your thoughts about how such a treasury would function and it’s relations to taxation. “–

    Of course. I think it’s a national preoccupation. I’m not alone.

    –“What is your position on taxation?”—

    Well, my position is that under rule of law there exists no discretion in the use funds. That’s the purpose of rule of law: the elimination of discretion. If there is no discretion involved we are not in fact ruled by men, but by law: we govern ourselves by contract. Once we eliminate discretion we eliminate what we call corruption and, assuming we require truthful speech in the commons – not only in advertising and marketing, and warranty, but in ethical, moral, and political speech – we eliminate almost all of what we consider politics. Now another property of rule of law, if we are to prevent discretion, is ‘calculability’ or what we tend to call ‘operationalism’ in science and ‘specific use, or use of funds’ in contract law. Meaning that any fund collected must go to the purpose it was intended, or be refunded. Rule Of Law = Contractualism. Period. Discretion != Rule of Law. However, we must understand, that Rule of Law = Meritocracy, and many people living cannot prosper, compete, or survive on their merits. There are a limited number of strategies for preserving liberty, rule of law, and meritocracy: (i)limit the size of the bottom classes through control of reproduction and culling; (ii) limit their damage by paying them not to reproduce, and (iii) make use of them through involuntary organization of production (maintenance of the commons). This is one of the reasons for taxation: paying for the cost of suppression of reproduction of those who cannot prosper, compete, or survive in meritocracy. Just as the problem external orders (military defense and constructive offense), and internal orders (the judiciary and police). If we negotiate such contracts between groups and classes, and there is no means under natural common judge-discovered law, by which we can object to those contracts, then we have created a market for the construction of commons, in addition to the market for the construction of goods and services. Those are not taxes but installment payments, and enforceable like any other contract. If those taxes are used to make the evolutionarily competitive results of liberty possible, and if it’s not possible otherwise, then taxes for this purpose are simply the market price for the production of a condition of liberty under which we can produce the results of liberty: necessary commons, competitive commons, and desirable private goods and services . The problem then is not taxation per se, but the use of taxes. If we are paying contractually agreed to prices for goods and services obtained through under rule of law, and free of discretion, refunded if paid for, then that is merely contractual payment. Now, there is no reason to argue against either for income or consumption ‘commissions’ (taxes), on the production of goods and services in the voluntary construction of production distribution and trade we call capitalism, since that order is itself a good that is bought and paid for by shareholders, with both personal, normative, and material costs. And furthermore, there is no reason to argue against progressive taxation (commissions) on income or price, either. The question is ownership: In ancient societies order was created by force at substantial risk and expense. And it is probably the most important service we create. In modern societies, almost everyone is enfranchised (a shareholder). And if the shareholders can determine the use of funds by economic voting (proportional voting by contribution), or if they can determine the use of funds by share voting (voting their share of the tax pool), then we preserve operational rule of law and eliminate discretion. The inverse question is whether it is possible to produce a condition of liberty, meritocracy, and prosperity, that has been so rewarding in the ancient and modern worlds. And the answer is that familial, local, social, economic, political, and military orders exist in competition for people(consumers), human capital(skills and knowledge), business and industry, wealth, and leadership (the advocacy for the organization of normative, economic, political, and military capital). So people flee to regions that produce wealth and flee from regions that don’t. Which is a significant problem if they’re imposing a long-term genetic cost on the absorbing market. And this is the problem we face with immigration of underclasses and the rate of underclass reproduction vs middle and upper-class reproduction. The answer to the problem of creating an order in people of diverse abilities is not to choose either a monopoly capitalist market(voluntary organization of labor) or a monopoly socialist market (involuntary organization of labor), but to make use of both markets: one for the production of innovative consumer goods, and one for the production of ‘simple’ common goods: cleanliness, order, construction of bulidings, parks, and monuments, roads, sidewalks, and in general, beauty.

    —“Let’s assume a treasury issues currency and that through the treasury citizens can borrow money interest-free for consumption. Now the treasury needs to be funded through taxation, whether voluntary or otherwise is superfluous for arguments sake.”—

    Well, first, let’s clarify: the treasury can be funded through the sale of assets (minerals, territory, etc), inflation, taxation, fees, profits(returns on investments not possible otherwise – the Panama and Suez canals for example. Some of the great dams. Many projects cannot be ‘insured’ by an insurer of last resort other than the shareholders themselves). And hopefully we would fund the treasury in the opposite order: 1) profit, 2) fees, 3) taxation, 4) inflation, 5) sale of assets. In practice, if it cannot be achieved through profit or fees, it would suggest a political failure. Taxation and inflation are debt instruments. And sale of assets is a form of liquidation. Members of Nations(extended relations) do not squabble about taxes the way oligarchies and empires do.

    —“through the treasury citizens can borrow money interest-free for consumption”—

    I think that this is the great economic question of our time: why should distributors (banks) earn interest on money borrowed from ourselves for the purchase of consumption, when the data says that they perform no function not equally provisible by purely statistical analysis of data produced in extraordinary quality by actuaries. There isn’t any reason. None. There is no reason that we do not borrow to some percentage of the maximum of our statistical repayment ability from the treasury, and then when the economy slows, that money is equally distributed to those same accounts facilitating further consumption. Other than under democracy people would vote to increase such distributions by various schemes untili we were again bankrupt. But the financial sector is disproportionately rewarding given that it’s basically trivial clerical work that privatizes wins and socializes losses. There is no reason we don’t treat lending the public monies just as we do licenses of Lawyer’s, CPA’s and Series 7 holders. These individuals could have public records, and must retain certain scores in order to maintain their licenses. In exchange they can obtain a small percentage of each customer’s accounts that they manage from the treasury. And they would have no protection against suits that is afforded to our bureaucrats. Now aside form the misappropriation of profits by the financial sector, why is it that we charge interest on consumption? That makes no sense at all really. Why do we charge interest on production? Because that’s the only way we can judge whether intertemporal lending as increased productivity by compression of time. So my recommendation is to professionalize lending from the treasury (regional offices of central banks), and interest on consumption entirely (imagine the effect it would have on housing if the maximum period of a home loan using any treasury funds was 15 years, and at zero interest?) And to issue liquidity directly to consumers, on regular (yearly) basis. And to constitutionally eliminate the state manipulation of these funds for any purpose (preserving rule of law by preserving the prohibition on discretion.) From what I can see ih the behavior of most countries, if yo have a small homogenous people they will be highly redistributive voluntarily, and heterogeneity radically decreases willingness to both redistribute or to contribute in any way to the commons. Just to stay on message, and continue to falsify libertinism: What separates libertarianism from libertinism is that libertarians want to do no harm to the commons, and libertines want to do no good to it. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute (I have no idea where I am right now) 🙂

  • Q&A: –“Curt: What Are Your Thoughts on Taxation?”–

    Author’s note. I like this post because it shows how we can educate people on controversial issues. [G]reat question. I’m going to answer this set of questions in a different order from the one they were asked:

    –“Have you spent much time on taxation and it’s various forms? Perhaps you could do a post on your thoughts about how such a treasury would function and it’s relations to taxation. “–

    Of course. I think it’s a national preoccupation. I’m not alone.

    –“What is your position on taxation?”—

    Well, my position is that under rule of law there exists no discretion in the use funds. That’s the purpose of rule of law: the elimination of discretion. If there is no discretion involved we are not in fact ruled by men, but by law: we govern ourselves by contract. Once we eliminate discretion we eliminate what we call corruption and, assuming we require truthful speech in the commons – not only in advertising and marketing, and warranty, but in ethical, moral, and political speech – we eliminate almost all of what we consider politics. Now another property of rule of law, if we are to prevent discretion, is ‘calculability’ or what we tend to call ‘operationalism’ in science and ‘specific use, or use of funds’ in contract law. Meaning that any fund collected must go to the purpose it was intended, or be refunded. Rule Of Law = Contractualism. Period. Discretion != Rule of Law. However, we must understand, that Rule of Law = Meritocracy, and many people living cannot prosper, compete, or survive on their merits. There are a limited number of strategies for preserving liberty, rule of law, and meritocracy: (i)limit the size of the bottom classes through control of reproduction and culling; (ii) limit their damage by paying them not to reproduce, and (iii) make use of them through involuntary organization of production (maintenance of the commons). This is one of the reasons for taxation: paying for the cost of suppression of reproduction of those who cannot prosper, compete, or survive in meritocracy. Just as the problem external orders (military defense and constructive offense), and internal orders (the judiciary and police). If we negotiate such contracts between groups and classes, and there is no means under natural common judge-discovered law, by which we can object to those contracts, then we have created a market for the construction of commons, in addition to the market for the construction of goods and services. Those are not taxes but installment payments, and enforceable like any other contract. If those taxes are used to make the evolutionarily competitive results of liberty possible, and if it’s not possible otherwise, then taxes for this purpose are simply the market price for the production of a condition of liberty under which we can produce the results of liberty: necessary commons, competitive commons, and desirable private goods and services . The problem then is not taxation per se, but the use of taxes. If we are paying contractually agreed to prices for goods and services obtained through under rule of law, and free of discretion, refunded if paid for, then that is merely contractual payment. Now, there is no reason to argue against either for income or consumption ‘commissions’ (taxes), on the production of goods and services in the voluntary construction of production distribution and trade we call capitalism, since that order is itself a good that is bought and paid for by shareholders, with both personal, normative, and material costs. And furthermore, there is no reason to argue against progressive taxation (commissions) on income or price, either. The question is ownership: In ancient societies order was created by force at substantial risk and expense. And it is probably the most important service we create. In modern societies, almost everyone is enfranchised (a shareholder). And if the shareholders can determine the use of funds by economic voting (proportional voting by contribution), or if they can determine the use of funds by share voting (voting their share of the tax pool), then we preserve operational rule of law and eliminate discretion. The inverse question is whether it is possible to produce a condition of liberty, meritocracy, and prosperity, that has been so rewarding in the ancient and modern worlds. And the answer is that familial, local, social, economic, political, and military orders exist in competition for people(consumers), human capital(skills and knowledge), business and industry, wealth, and leadership (the advocacy for the organization of normative, economic, political, and military capital). So people flee to regions that produce wealth and flee from regions that don’t. Which is a significant problem if they’re imposing a long-term genetic cost on the absorbing market. And this is the problem we face with immigration of underclasses and the rate of underclass reproduction vs middle and upper-class reproduction. The answer to the problem of creating an order in people of diverse abilities is not to choose either a monopoly capitalist market(voluntary organization of labor) or a monopoly socialist market (involuntary organization of labor), but to make use of both markets: one for the production of innovative consumer goods, and one for the production of ‘simple’ common goods: cleanliness, order, construction of bulidings, parks, and monuments, roads, sidewalks, and in general, beauty.

    —“Let’s assume a treasury issues currency and that through the treasury citizens can borrow money interest-free for consumption. Now the treasury needs to be funded through taxation, whether voluntary or otherwise is superfluous for arguments sake.”—

    Well, first, let’s clarify: the treasury can be funded through the sale of assets (minerals, territory, etc), inflation, taxation, fees, profits(returns on investments not possible otherwise – the Panama and Suez canals for example. Some of the great dams. Many projects cannot be ‘insured’ by an insurer of last resort other than the shareholders themselves). And hopefully we would fund the treasury in the opposite order: 1) profit, 2) fees, 3) taxation, 4) inflation, 5) sale of assets. In practice, if it cannot be achieved through profit or fees, it would suggest a political failure. Taxation and inflation are debt instruments. And sale of assets is a form of liquidation. Members of Nations(extended relations) do not squabble about taxes the way oligarchies and empires do.

    —“through the treasury citizens can borrow money interest-free for consumption”—

    I think that this is the great economic question of our time: why should distributors (banks) earn interest on money borrowed from ourselves for the purchase of consumption, when the data says that they perform no function not equally provisible by purely statistical analysis of data produced in extraordinary quality by actuaries. There isn’t any reason. None. There is no reason that we do not borrow to some percentage of the maximum of our statistical repayment ability from the treasury, and then when the economy slows, that money is equally distributed to those same accounts facilitating further consumption. Other than under democracy people would vote to increase such distributions by various schemes untili we were again bankrupt. But the financial sector is disproportionately rewarding given that it’s basically trivial clerical work that privatizes wins and socializes losses. There is no reason we don’t treat lending the public monies just as we do licenses of Lawyer’s, CPA’s and Series 7 holders. These individuals could have public records, and must retain certain scores in order to maintain their licenses. In exchange they can obtain a small percentage of each customer’s accounts that they manage from the treasury. And they would have no protection against suits that is afforded to our bureaucrats. Now aside form the misappropriation of profits by the financial sector, why is it that we charge interest on consumption? That makes no sense at all really. Why do we charge interest on production? Because that’s the only way we can judge whether intertemporal lending as increased productivity by compression of time. So my recommendation is to professionalize lending from the treasury (regional offices of central banks), and interest on consumption entirely (imagine the effect it would have on housing if the maximum period of a home loan using any treasury funds was 15 years, and at zero interest?) And to issue liquidity directly to consumers, on regular (yearly) basis. And to constitutionally eliminate the state manipulation of these funds for any purpose (preserving rule of law by preserving the prohibition on discretion.) From what I can see ih the behavior of most countries, if yo have a small homogenous people they will be highly redistributive voluntarily, and heterogeneity radically decreases willingness to both redistribute or to contribute in any way to the commons. Just to stay on message, and continue to falsify libertinism: What separates libertarianism from libertinism is that libertarians want to do no harm to the commons, and libertines want to do no good to it. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute (I have no idea where I am right now) 🙂

  • Q&A: —“Curt: Whats Your Position on Intellectual Property”—

    INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Forms of Intellectual Property:

      [T]rademarks and branding were developed as a weight and measure to both to prevent people from fraudulently representing work, and to provide traceability if the weight and measure was violated by substandard manufacture. There is no more conflict over trademarking than there is over any other standard weight, measure, or title registry. Copyrights might have been issued as a perk to authors from the crown, but they evolved into a standard practice, if for no other reason than humans in protestant societies object to profiting from the work products of others. Creative commons and Open Source licenses evolved out of copyright in order to allow non-commercial use and copying. Which solves the problem of profiting without contributing to the works of others, versus the ability to copy that which is easily copied. Creative commons solves the problem of allowing profiteering on the backs of others. Worse, the reason we have so much (undesirable) that’s published in every medium, is the rewards of selling these artificially licensed products. People who write will do so for very little return. Just as people who produce all arts will do so for very little return. Just as people who engage in research will usually do so for very little return. There is no reason provide support when the net result of that support is the conversion of ART FROM A CIVIC COMMONS TO PRIVATE ENTERPRISE. In fact, under that criteria, it is immoral to issue copyrights. But this is a decision for groups through their political processes. They must just be aware of the consequences that will occur as monumental works decline and experiential works increase. I suggest that we retain a registry (trademarks) and copyrights, so that people may engage in the reproduction of easily reproducible goods for personal, interpersonal, and civic use, while retaining the prohibition on unproductive profiting (reproduction for profit without compensating the copyright holder), and on fraud (profit through plagiarism). Patents have a long history both of existence in one form or another, and of attempts to end them. The problem has been in part that there are good reasons for some, and no point of demarcation (no ‘criteria of decidability’) has been discovered that limits its use. There is one benefit of patents in that it forces continuous creativity in some minor property of a process or admixture, and it is possible that without patents we would not see this creativity. However, it we could easily limit patents (grants of partial monopoly), to those at biological, chemical, or atomic level (basic research), and leave engineering (construction) and design (user interfaces) out of it, and then later extend into atomic, chemical, and biological levels at some point in the future when we have reduced those areas to engineering rather than basic research. Otherwise, if used as an incentive to conduct basic research (like universities and laboratories), or as an incentive to produce goods with unlikely markets (rare medicines and treatments), or in the future, genetic modifications, a patent can serve as a method of funding off-book subsidy of private research for the production of beneficial commons. For this purpose, it would be immoral to prohibit patents. It is difficult to imagine an equivalent of the creative commons or open source movements, for explicitly commercial goods, for personal or civic (non-profit) use. We do not do this today because we already implicitly permit it today. (Given the problem of “I Pencil” it’s almost impossible to create complex goods for personal use, but we encourage it and treat admire it.) So I would argue that we could clarify the right to do so, because this is the area where we get into problems of companies defending uses that they don’t want to because the courts will treat non-defense as license. In other words it is rational to separate market-for-profit-using-the-insights-of-others from ‘use’. Or put another way: you cannot prohibit someone from making something for self, family and society by a license to a MARKET monopoly on the SALE of a good. This is the difference that needs clarifying. You cannot tell someone he may not use information to transform something for use, but you can certainly prevent him from participating in the market because it is a COMMONS, by profiting from the innovations of others. Further Thoughts I suppose I could get into how we create opportunities through population density and the suppression of parasitism using the common law, by requiring PRODUCTIVE, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange between all parties; and then address how the PRODUCT of this collective norm (property) produces opportunities, and that it is these opportunities (a product of the commons) that we compete for, with the best competitor (inventor, investor, producer, distributor) winning the benefits of seizing that opportunity. But I think that the logic and economics of market opportunities is off topic for this discussion. Even though, in order to explain why we require PRODUCTIVE transfers from people rather than parasitic transfers, is the entire purpose of coming together in groups, and incrementally suppressing parasitism through the (negative) prohibition on involuntary unproductive uninformed transfers and negative externalities using rule of law, and the (positive) market reward for productive, informed, voluntary transfers and positive externalities. It’s this process of forcing man (like we have with plants and animals) to engage in productive market participation, in order to benefit from productive market participation of others. This possible a great deal to digest, and yet, I could go into far more detail as I’ve shown in the last paragraph. But this is a categorically consistent, logically consistent, morally consistent, empirically consistent,fully accounted,and fairly parsimonious argument that will be difficult to defeat. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy or Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute

    • Q&A: —“Curt: Whats Your Position on Intellectual Property”—

      INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Forms of Intellectual Property:

        [T]rademarks and branding were developed as a weight and measure to both to prevent people from fraudulently representing work, and to provide traceability if the weight and measure was violated by substandard manufacture. There is no more conflict over trademarking than there is over any other standard weight, measure, or title registry. Copyrights might have been issued as a perk to authors from the crown, but they evolved into a standard practice, if for no other reason than humans in protestant societies object to profiting from the work products of others. Creative commons and Open Source licenses evolved out of copyright in order to allow non-commercial use and copying. Which solves the problem of profiting without contributing to the works of others, versus the ability to copy that which is easily copied. Creative commons solves the problem of allowing profiteering on the backs of others. Worse, the reason we have so much (undesirable) that’s published in every medium, is the rewards of selling these artificially licensed products. People who write will do so for very little return. Just as people who produce all arts will do so for very little return. Just as people who engage in research will usually do so for very little return. There is no reason provide support when the net result of that support is the conversion of ART FROM A CIVIC COMMONS TO PRIVATE ENTERPRISE. In fact, under that criteria, it is immoral to issue copyrights. But this is a decision for groups through their political processes. They must just be aware of the consequences that will occur as monumental works decline and experiential works increase. I suggest that we retain a registry (trademarks) and copyrights, so that people may engage in the reproduction of easily reproducible goods for personal, interpersonal, and civic use, while retaining the prohibition on unproductive profiting (reproduction for profit without compensating the copyright holder), and on fraud (profit through plagiarism). Patents have a long history both of existence in one form or another, and of attempts to end them. The problem has been in part that there are good reasons for some, and no point of demarcation (no ‘criteria of decidability’) has been discovered that limits its use. There is one benefit of patents in that it forces continuous creativity in some minor property of a process or admixture, and it is possible that without patents we would not see this creativity. However, it we could easily limit patents (grants of partial monopoly), to those at biological, chemical, or atomic level (basic research), and leave engineering (construction) and design (user interfaces) out of it, and then later extend into atomic, chemical, and biological levels at some point in the future when we have reduced those areas to engineering rather than basic research. Otherwise, if used as an incentive to conduct basic research (like universities and laboratories), or as an incentive to produce goods with unlikely markets (rare medicines and treatments), or in the future, genetic modifications, a patent can serve as a method of funding off-book subsidy of private research for the production of beneficial commons. For this purpose, it would be immoral to prohibit patents. It is difficult to imagine an equivalent of the creative commons or open source movements, for explicitly commercial goods, for personal or civic (non-profit) use. We do not do this today because we already implicitly permit it today. (Given the problem of “I Pencil” it’s almost impossible to create complex goods for personal use, but we encourage it and treat admire it.) So I would argue that we could clarify the right to do so, because this is the area where we get into problems of companies defending uses that they don’t want to because the courts will treat non-defense as license. In other words it is rational to separate market-for-profit-using-the-insights-of-others from ‘use’. Or put another way: you cannot prohibit someone from making something for self, family and society by a license to a MARKET monopoly on the SALE of a good. This is the difference that needs clarifying. You cannot tell someone he may not use information to transform something for use, but you can certainly prevent him from participating in the market because it is a COMMONS, by profiting from the innovations of others. Further Thoughts I suppose I could get into how we create opportunities through population density and the suppression of parasitism using the common law, by requiring PRODUCTIVE, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange between all parties; and then address how the PRODUCT of this collective norm (property) produces opportunities, and that it is these opportunities (a product of the commons) that we compete for, with the best competitor (inventor, investor, producer, distributor) winning the benefits of seizing that opportunity. But I think that the logic and economics of market opportunities is off topic for this discussion. Even though, in order to explain why we require PRODUCTIVE transfers from people rather than parasitic transfers, is the entire purpose of coming together in groups, and incrementally suppressing parasitism through the (negative) prohibition on involuntary unproductive uninformed transfers and negative externalities using rule of law, and the (positive) market reward for productive, informed, voluntary transfers and positive externalities. It’s this process of forcing man (like we have with plants and animals) to engage in productive market participation, in order to benefit from productive market participation of others. This possible a great deal to digest, and yet, I could go into far more detail as I’ve shown in the last paragraph. But this is a categorically consistent, logically consistent, morally consistent, empirically consistent,fully accounted,and fairly parsimonious argument that will be difficult to defeat. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy or Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute