Form: Full Essay

Morality is a Problem of Cost, Not Scarcity

[S]carcity and Property exist prior to cooperation. However, scarcity is an analytic concept. Humans think in terms of cost, not scarcity. Because scarcity requires knowledge we cannot possess other than through prices/costs. So we cannot know something is scarce any more than we can know something is analytically true. We can only know that it is costly. The very concept of scarcity is modern, even if the precursor existed in the late medieval period (Norman English). Prior to the modern period, everything is ‘scarce'(costly) except an oversupply of labor and an over-demand for consumption. So it is praxeologically irrational to construct operational definitions out of that which is operationally impossible. (the profundity of that statement may not be immediately obvious.)

Cooperation evolves out of the increased productive value of cooperating minus the loss of value in free riding, parasitism and predation. Humans evolved moral intuitions as pre-cognitive assessments of changes in the state of that which they had expended effort upon (paid costs for), so humans ‘feel’ changes in inventory as emotions, and ‘feel’ reactions to violations of parasitism, and react expensively to prevent future such actions – and so, humans act morally on costs, not analytically on scarcity. They must because reason is too expensive and failure prone compared with intuitive responses. We avoid one another because of potential conflict, yes. And, indeed, many of our primate relatives avoid conflict, but do not cooperate. Yet we cooperate with one another out of a desire for returns and discounts. We cooperate because we evolved the ability to empathize with intentions. We cooperate because it is more productive to cooperate than not. We are wealthier, more numerous and more powerful than our primate relatives, because we can not only prevent takings, but because we can cooperate – and they cannot.

But for cooperation to be both rational and evolutionarily survivable, it must be relatively free of parasitism (beneficial for all parties: meaning mutually productive). And that is why humans are so highly agitated that we inflict punishment on all violators of the contract against parasitism: violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by indirection, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of commons, rent seeking, conspiracy, statism, conversion, invasion, and conquest. We call this sequence ‘criminal, ethical, and immoral behavior’. Or we shorten it to ‘morals’.

As such, it is impossible for an economy to form without cooperation – where there are prohibitions only on violence, but an absence of a prohibition on parasitism that make cooperation possible. It is only possible for an economy to form in the presence of morality: suppression of free riding.

The only possible solution for any organism is the sequence:

1) movement/memory/scarcity/defense(property)

2) intention, incentives, cooperation, morality (non parasitism) – cooperation on the production of normative commons.

As such the only CAUSALLY POSSIBLE origin of moral rules is the prohibition on parasitism, not scarcity.

3) Just as we had to suppress ethical and moral parasitism in order to create cooperation, we must expand our suppression to include organized parasitism (state monopolies). But that does not mean that we must abandon prohibitions on parasitism. And it does not mean that it is possible to. Transaction costs alone would force the logical restoration of the state on the one hand, and the organized genocide of low trust peoples (gypsies and jews, and now apparently, muslims) that all host cultures (except the west) always enact. The only possible means of obtaining liberty is to increase the scope of moral prohibitions (prohibitions on parasitism) to reflect innovations in parasitism of the marxist and Keynesian era.

So, for a bit of irony, the scarcity exists prior to cooperation, and therefore it is not praxeologically possible to come into existence post-cooperation.

As such human societies evolve out of an ever-expanding suppression of parasitism, largely by centralizing parasitism to pay for the suppression of local parasitism. Once centralized, the next opportunity for increasing prosperity by suppression, is to eradicate centralized parasitism, by eliminating monopolies that make parasitism possible.
Ergo, the only possible libertarian society is one of high trust, and total suppression of free riding (parasitism).
Ergo the only possible social order using the ghetto ethic is one of those imprisoned either in the ghetto, or on Crusoe’s island.

PRAXEOLOGICAL DEFINITIONS
[O]ne must question the dogmatic advocacy of operational definitions (praxeology) in the construction of any economic statement that we say is ‘true’, while at the same time constructing economic statements that are not operational, but merely rational. This is a contradiction.

Furthermore, operational (praxeological) definitions only prove that something is existentially possible, and if constructed as measures they produce reproducibility. But they do not demonstrate that they are in fact the way something occurred (truth), nor do they demonstrate the exclusive means by which something can be accomplished.
Meaning is useful, but it is rarely true – except by accident. In fact, we may view science as an effort to replace the subjectively meaningful, with the objectively truthful.

Defense of meaning is justification. Man justifies. Justification is just another means of deception of others, and satisfying confirmation bias of the self – which in itself is merely an attempt to obtain a discount. But it is psychologically understandable that one would argue desperately to defend his investments in justification, despite the universal evidence to the contrary of his arguments. It is also logical that it is so easy to use loading, framing, overloading, obscurantism, conflation, and justification, to do so. But justification is merely justification – an error or a deceit.

Hoppe and Rothbard work to justify Ghetto ethics. In large part i have solved the problem that Mises came so close to, failed to, and was ostracized over. I have tried to correct hoppe’s deductive arguments by converting them to scientific arguments, and thereby abandoning the ghetto influence of Rothbard, and preserving Hoppe’s arguments against the incentives of state vs private ownership. And his use of insurance to eliminate monopoly insurer of last resort. And his use of economics to operationally and intuitionistically describe operations and construct theories of all human behavior.

It so happens that the interests between states (out group parties) are not commensurable, and therefore can only be reduced to questions of property and contract. But for in-groups to form, sufficient to hold the territory necessary to implement sufficient suppression of parasitism that it is possible to construct a condition of liberty, requires the suppression of all forms of parasitism regardless of the means by which such costs are imposed.

Man perceives and operates on property he has expended costs, even mere forgone opportunity costs, to obtain. He treats his body, mind, kin, allies, several property, corporate property, common property, normative property, and sovereignty as property that he must defend. He seeks cooperation because it is a non linear multiplier of productivity. But he cooperates *under normative conditions*, meaning that he habituates cooperation, only under conditions of total prohibition on parasitism. Those peoples that learn truth can produce trust, and trust can produce greater velocity and adaptability than lower trust societies, because transaction costs are lower than all other competing groups. To create truth and trust a minority organize and systematically apply violence to those who practice lower levels of truth and trust, to compel them to either abandon their parasitism, or to leave, or to kill them, because their parasitism forces an exported cost upon all other high trust practitioners in the local region.

Hoppeian and Rothbardian mis-application of the ethics of international trade for the purpose of avoiding military conflict, to the local polity where the purpose is reducing transaction costs so that they can cooperate in production of goods, services, commons, institutions and norms, not-withstanding. (They are making a rather stupid error in retrospect. But like all people of those eras fighting socialists, they resorted to the same tactics. Fighting dishonest marxism with dishonest libertarianism is probably a tactical necessity, but now that we are no longer so ignorant of the science we can abandon imitating the marxists and just argue the case for liberty scientifically.)

Curt Doolittle

( it will take me a few more times to get it tight, but it’s pretty close.)

January 18, 2015
MORALITY IS A PROBLEM OF COST NOT SCARCITY I am writing something longer, but fo

MORALITY IS A PROBLEM OF COST NOT SCARCITY

I am writing something longer, but for now:

Scarcity and Property exist prior to cooperation. However, scarcity is an analytic concept. Humans think in terms of cost, not scarcity. Because scarcity requires knowledge we cannot possess other than through prices/costs. So we cannot know something is scarce any more than we can know something is analytically true. We can only know that it is costly. The very concept of scarcity is modern, even if the precursor existed in the late medieval period (Norman English). Prior to the modern period, everything is ‘scarce'(costly) except an oversupply of labor and an over-demand for consumption. So it is praxeologically irrational to construct operational definitions out of that which is operationally impossible. (the profundity of that statement may not be immediately obvious.)

Cooperation evolves out of the increased productive value of cooperating minus the loss of value in free riding, parasitism and predation. Humans evolved moral intuitions as pre-cognitive assessments of changes in the state of that which they had expended effort upon (paid costs for), so humans ‘feel’ changes in inventory as emotions, and ‘feel’ reactions to violations of parasitism, and react expensively to prevent future such actions – and so, humans act morally on costs, not analytically on scarcity. They must because reason is too expensive and failure prone compared with intuitive responses. We avoid one another because of potential conflict, yes. And, indeed, many of our primate relatives avoid conflict, but do not cooperate. Yet we cooperate with one another out of a desire for returns and discounts. We cooperate because we evolved the ability to empathize with intentions. We cooperate because it is more productive to cooperate than not. We are wealthier, more numerous and more powerful than our primate relatives, because we can not only prevent takings, but because we can cooperate – and they cannot.

But for cooperation to be both rational and evolutionarily survivable, it must be relatively free of parasitism (beneficial for all parties: meaning mutually productive). And that is why humans are so highly agitated that we inflict punishment on all violators of the contract against parasitism: violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by indirection, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of commons, rent seeking, conspiracy, statism, conversion, invasion, and conquest. We call this sequence ‘criminal, ethical, and immoral behavior’. Or we shorten it to ‘morals’.

As such, it is impossible for an economy to form without cooperation – where there are prohibitions only on violence, but an absence of a prohibition on parasitism that make cooperation possible. It is only possible for an economy to form in the presence of morality: suppression of free riding.

The only possible solution for any organism is the sequence:

1) movement/memory/scarcity/defense(property)

2) intention, incentives, cooperation, morality (non parasitism) – cooperation on the production of normative commons.

As such the only CAUSALLY POSSIBLE origin of moral rules is the prohibition on parasitism, not scarcity.

3) Just as we had to suppress ethical and moral parasitism in order to create cooperation, we must expand our suppression to include organized parasitism (state monopolies). But that does not mean that we must abandon prohibitions on parasitism. And it does not mean that it is possible to. Transaction costs alone would force the logical restoration of the state on the one hand, and the organized genocide of low trust peoples (gypsies and jews, and now apparently, muslims) that all host cultures (except the west) always enact. The only possible means of obtaining liberty is to increase the scope of moral prohibitions (prohibitions on parasitism) to reflect innovations in parasitism of the marxist and Keynesian era.

So, for a bit of irony, the scarcity exists prior to cooperation, and therefore it is not praxeologically possible to come into existence post-cooperation.

As such human societies evolve out of an ever-expanding suppression of parasitism, largely by centralizing parasitism to pay for the suppression of local parasitism. Once centralized, the next opportunity for increasing prosperity by suppression, is to eradicate centralized parasitism, by eliminating monopolies that make parasitism possible.

Ergo, the only possible libertarian society is one of high trust, and total suppression of free riding (parasitism).

Ergo the only possible social order using the ghetto ethic is one of those imprisoned either in the ghetto, or on Crusoe’s island.

PRAXEOLOGICAL DEFINITIONS

One must question the dogmatic advocacy of operational definitions (praxeology) in the construction of any economic statement that we say is ‘true’, while at the same time constructing economic statements that are not operational, but merely rational. This is a contradiction.

Furthermore, operational (praxeological) definitions only prove that something is existentially possible, and if constructed as measures they produce reproducibility. But they do not demonstrate that they are in fact the way something occurred (truth), nor do they demonstrate the exclusive means by which something can be accomplished.

Meaning is useful, but it is rarely true – except by accident. In fact, we may view science as an effort to replace the subjectively meaningful, with the objectively truthful.

Defense of meaning is justification. Man justifies. Justification is just another means of deception of others, and satisfying confirmation bias of the self – which in itself is merely an attempt to obtain a discount. But it is psychologically understandable that one would argue desperately to defend his investments in justification, despite the universal evidence to the contrary of his arguments. It is also logical that it is so easy to use loading, framing, overloading, obscurantism, conflation, and justification, to do so. But justification is merely justification – an error or a deceit.

Hoppe and Rothbard work to justify Ghetto ethics. In large part i have solved the problem that Mises came so close to, failed to, and was ostracized over. I have tried to correct hoppe’s deductive arguments by converting them to scientific arguments, and thereby abandoning the ghetto influence of Rothbard, and preserving Hoppe’s arguments against the incentives of state vs private ownership. And his use of insurance to eliminate monopoly insurer of last resort. And his use of economics to operationally and intuitionistically describe operations and construct theories of all human behavior.

It so happens that the interests between states (out group parties) are not commensurable, and therefore can only be reduced to questions of property and contract. But for in-groups to form, sufficient to hold the territory necessary to implement sufficient suppression of parasitism that it is possible to construct a condition of liberty, requires the suppression of all forms of parasitism regardless of the means by which such costs are imposed.

Man perceives and operates on property he has expended costs, even mere forgone opportunity costs, to obtain. He treats his body, mind, kin, allies, several property, corporate property, common property, normative property, and sovereignty as property that he must defend. He seeks cooperation because it is a non linear multiplier of productivity. But he cooperates *under normative conditions*, meaning that he habituates cooperation, only under conditions of total prohibition on parasitism. Those peoples that learn truth can produce trust, and trust can produce greater velocity and adaptability than lower trust societies, because transaction costs are lower than all other competing groups. To create truth and trust a minority organize and systematically apply violence to those who practice lower levels of truth and trust, to compel them to either abandon their parasitism, or to leave, or to kill them, because their parasitism forces an exported cost upon all other high trust practitioners in the local region.

Hoppeian and Rothbardian mis-application of the ethics of international trade for the purpose of avoiding military conflict, to the local polity where the purpose is reducing transaction costs so that they can cooperate in production of goods, services, commons, institutions and norms, not-withstanding. (They are making a rather stupid error in retrospect. But like all people of those eras fighting socialists, they resorted to the same tactics. Fighting dishonest marxism with dishonest libertarianism is probably a tactical necessity, but now that we are no longer so ignorant of the science we can abandon imitating the marxists and just argue the case for liberty scientifically.)

Curt

( it will take me a few more times to get it tight, but it’s pretty close.)

Source date (UTC): 2015-01-17 07:46:00 UTC

January 17, 2015
JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN NORMATIVE CONTRACT VS WARRANTY IN EXPLO

JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN NORMATIVE CONTRACT VS WARRANTY IN EXPLORATION INDEPENDENT OF NORMS

First, what do we mean by “knowledge”, and of those things we mean, what is merely allegory, and what is necessity?

Little of the universe is absent regular patterns. However, some are very noisy and difficult to find. Some are very subtle and hard to find. Some are either too large or too small to observe without relying upon instruments, and others must be deduced using logical instruments. We call these regular patterns ‘information’.

Humans can modify the real world in a variety of ways, leaving information behind. We can do this as simply leaving evidence of passage through a forces or field, or in archeological evidence. We can do this intentionally with cave paintings and writing. And we can do it with our architecture, monuments and earth works. We can do this by the memories that we transfer between generations through repetition of experience, advice and story.

A computer must run a program to create the experience we see before us when using it. Information must mix with memories, to create the experience we call ‘knowing’.

Knowledge is reconstructed from information by mixing with existing memories, just as meaning is transferred by the use of analogies to transfer properties. So information exists without a knowing subject. And that information may be very good, or very bad at producing the experience of knowledge in a subject.

But in colloquial language we seem to have an intellectual bias that wants to separate untrue knowledge from true, or at least tested, knowledge thereby conflating QUALITY of knowledge and EXISTENCE of knowledge. We can forgive philosophers this common error, since they are concerned most often with the persuasive quality (truth) of propositions.

And if we look carefully at the discussion of ‘knowledge’ we find philosophers conflating (a)existence/awareness, (b) risk/willingness to act, (c) truth content.

And moreover, truth content consists of two additional properties: (c.i) persuasive power assuming an honest participant, and (c.ii) parsimonious correspondence with reality (what we mean by ‘true’).

The reason that discussion of knowledge is problematic is that this term is a sort of catch-all for these separate properties. And so like many concepts, argument is a problem of conflating properties, each of which exists on a separate spectrum.

“Knowing” could mean ‘awareness gained through experience’, or ‘given what we know from experience, I am willing to act upon it’, or knowing could mean ‘through experience we believe this is true’.

So I think that the only POSSIBLE meaning of the category ‘knowledge’ is ‘awareness of a regular pattern that allows us to predict something, even if it is only to predict in the sense of identifying something as part of a category – the most simple prediction possible.

And then we have the persuasive power of knowledge in convincing the self or others, first to state something is possible, then second to state something is worthy of action (risk).

For example, no one ‘knows’ how to build a computer (or a cheeseburger for that matter) in the sense that they possess knowledge of construction of the constituent parts. So some knowledge can never be centralized except as a hierarchy of abstractions – trust in one another’s claim to actionable knowledge.

For these reasons (the number of causal axis in the category we call knowledge), I think we cannot improve upon casting knowledge as:

(a) awareness (existence) of a regular pattern combining information and memory to create an experience, which we then also remember.

(b) all knowledge is theoretical, and open to revision (no premises are certain)

where theoretical propositions contain both:

(d) truth content(parsimonious correspondence with reality).

(c) persuasive power (sufficiency) in an honest discourse(risk reduction/reward increase),

JUSTIFICATOIN VERSUS CRITICISM = CONTRACT VS TRUTH

So I my problem is that ‘justified true belief’ is not false under the test of risk, but is not meaningful under the test of analytic truth. In this sense, it depends upon which thing we are talking about: willingness to act (justified true belief), willingness of others to insure actions (contractual justified true belief), and analytic truth (parsimonious correspondence with reality).

If a man gives witness in testimony and later on we find a video of the events, and it turns out that he is wrong, but that it is easy to understand how he was mistaken, we do not consider his testimony false. We only warranty what rational man is capable of warranting.

In science we warranty that we have done due diligence: we have criticized our own arguments. We testify that we have done due diligence – we have criticized our own position.

In this sense both justified true belief is necessary for contractual propositions, while critical rationalism (warranty) is the only epistemological possibility we can rely upon.

The fact that argument evolved out of law (debate in the polis) probably explains the origin of conflation of contractual justification according to the norms of the polity, with the pursuit of analytic truth in epistemological exploration.

The fact that most human action is contractual, and very little of our lives epistemic, explains the persistence of both the contractual (justificationary),and epistemic (critical scientific) as method, and the conflation of the term knowledge as a general term covering both contractual and epistemic uses.

Norms guide most human actions. Norms are habituated and therefore reduced to intuitions to function. The norms are contractual (justificationary – so that we avoid blame). Science by contrast, produces not actions but testimony. The problem is inverted. In science all we produce is testimony regardless of normative rules. In normative relations we produce actions that we justify as according to the normative rules of society.

So we testify that we were justified according to norms in contractual relations, and we testify that our statements are free of norms, imaginary, error, bias, habituated deception and outright deception, in science.

This is why science is a luxury good: it’s terribly expensive, and scientific testimony is terribly expensive. Justification allows us to use scientifically tested or evolutionarily tested general rules in real world actions – contractual relations.

And must. We cannot create general rules out of justificationary testimony, only out of critical testimony. For this reason, both justificationary and critical testimony will persist forever. While our warranties must be given by critical means, our testimony is forever justificationary. (I think that is fairly profound).

As far as I know, albeit in brief, this is the most accurate statement of our extant understanding of the question of knowledge, and why it has been so troublesome a concept.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

Source date (UTC): 2015-01-10 16:10:00 UTC

January 10, 2015
Deception: The Test of Aggression Instead of The Test of an Imposition of Costs

—“Depending upon one’s conception of rights and what they logically entail or are incompatible with, it’s not difficult to see, for example, that the corpus of the libertarian program, in logical terms cannot countenance “add-ons” in so far as they are obligations that legitimate the use of force. The shortest, most concise illustration of how this follows from the premise that there is only one negative right, namely to not be aggressors against. Philosophers, such as Roderick Tracy Long argue that this positive thesis of one negative right entails a second negative thesis that logically denies and additional positive rights. If the former is granted, the latter follows, in virtue of the logical character of the obligations it entails.”— Skye Stewart

[O]k, so, the reason it’s a nonsense argument is because the definition is circular. More precisely, “petitio principii”, or less precisely, “begging the question”. Like many cosmopolitan, authoritarian, questions-that-are-not-questions, aggression is a conclusion, not a premise. It is a justification. And like many cosmopolitan arguments it is reinforced by the use of in-group guilt (shaming), despite the fact that it is an out-group argument (attempt to preserve separatism.)

So lets look at it….

The term “Aggress” is like “Good”. It means nothing without context. And that is the first deceptive use of the term aggression. One must aggress against something. So we must know what that something is. Otherwise it is, like all obscurant verbal deceptions in incomplete sentence – left incomplete as a means of deception. Just as use of the verb ‘to-be’ is nearly always a means of obscuring one’s ignorance, or one’s intentional obfuscation of causal relations.

It is impossible to define aggression without defining property. So the principle deception involved when most moral intuitionists state their position is that they rely on the INTUITIVE definition of property of the audience, while assuming a narrower definition of property themselves. In the Rothbard Hoppe case, they refer to physical property – intersubjectively verifiable property. However, this eliminates all possible commons, and licenses all unethical and immoral action.

Then, when questioned, Rothbardians give one of the following excuses:

(a) people can make contracts for that. But if they did, then what would the basis of that law be? and would they not ostracize all non-adherents in order to reduce transaction costs and increase compliance? Isn’t that the rational and demonstrated action – everywhere?

(b) “the market will take care of it through competition.” Except that we can prove empirically that it doesn’t. In fact, we need extraordinary levels of suppression of immoral and unethical behavior for market competition to form.

(c) “It’s meant only to be a guiding principle, not a basis for law.” Well then why not just use the definition of property necessary for a basis of law or morality?

I could also just say that do we not force people to pay restitution in the case of accidents? Are accidents aggression? No.

They are violations of property. Are immoral and unethical actions that cause loss to others mutually productive? (No) So are they rational to tolerate? (no). Do we retaliate against others for immoral and unethical actions? (yes) So aggression is insufficient for describing necessary conditions of human cooperation (Yes). And aren’t all attempts to justify defining these things as aggression — even though they are not — just verbal deceptions? They are ’caused losses’, right? So don’t we retaliate against caused losses, and isn’t retaliation what we seek to eliminate – just as much as seeking to eliminate caused losses?

Well a rothbardian then attempts another deception: “Well that would mean competition is a ‘bad’, since it imposes losses.” But the honest man says, “No, in fact people do treat price competition as immoral (although not quality competition) and we have merely trained one another out of objecting to it by explaining that it is a cost of producing the incentive to innovate.”

[W]hy is it that Rothbard picked aggression, out of all the possible criteria for moral definitions? Why does no other group select this argument?

When, I could just as easily ask,” How can we prevent retaliation for immoral and unethical actions – how can we license parasitism?” And conclude aggression.

Or I could ask “How can we free ride upon another’s expensive-to-produce commons?” And come to aggression.

Or I could ask, “What defines both criminal, ethical, and moral, conduct?” And come to aggression.

Or I could ask, “How can I define ethical, moral and just using the terms of prohibited actions between states (aggression), between internal polities (separatism), and just ignore the fact that internal polities pay the costs of defense?” And I would come to aggression.

Why would anyone in the world pick aggression as a definition, UNLESS the purpose of picking aggression was to justify the conclusions contained in it?

Why, if aggression is not sufficient for law, and not sufficient for ethics and morality, is it meaningful? If you start with the presumption of aggression, WHY start with it?

[I]n propertarianism, I start with the question: “Why should I not kill you and take your women and your stuff? Oh? Cooperation might be more beneficial? Under what conditions would cooperation be more beneficial than killing you and taking your things? I see! As long as it’s mutually beneficial. As long as I get more than I would if I killed you and took your women and your things.” That would be the evolutionary attempt to solve the problem.

I could also start with the question: “What incentives make it possible for the rational formation of a voluntary polity?” In that case, transaction costs prohibit the rational formation of a voluntary polity under aggression; and furthermore, other polities demonstrably exterminate such low trust competitors. That would be the rational solution to the problem.

I could also start with the question “Under what definitions of property has liberty demonstrably evolved?” In which case I would see that only under total prohibition on immoral and unethical as well as criminal actions. That would be the empirical approach to the question.

I could ask the question, “How can morality and law be constructed synonymously?” That would be the institutional approach to the problem.

I could ask a lot of possible questions that are much more obvious, and NOT circular. So why is it that I would make a circular argument?

[T]he only logical reasons to start with aggression are (a) to justify prohibition on retaliation for immoral and unethical actions, (b) to justify non-contribution to the commons (free-riding separatism). Aggression is a means of defining low trust, parasitic, separatist ghetto ethics as ‘good’ despite the fact that all empirical evidence suggests that it makes a people unable to hold land, dependent upon a host population, and open to perpetual attempts at extermination.

So, why would an honest person start with something as arbitrary as the rather elaborate concept of ‘aggression’?

Well the answer is, he wouldn’t. Which is why no honest person ever has.

The libertarian is unaware that any argument sufficiently complex to overwhelm reason must be resolved through intuition – and that libertarian moral intuition is false (incomplete). In other words, libertarians are suckers for certain categories of lies.

Just like all humans are suckers for certain categories of lies – all for the same reason.

(ASIDE: This overloading, suggestion, and appeal to intuition as a means of using internal biases to deceive the audience is the secret to the cosmopolitan and rationalist verbalisms. My goal over the next year or two is to fully undermine the cosmopolitan and german rationalist argument structures and demonstrate them for what they are: lies. The anglo enlightenment argument is wrong: universalism, aristocracy of everyone, the rational actor. But it isn’t a lie. And that’s what science does for us: it unmasks lies.)

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
L’viv (City of The Lions) Ukraine.

January 4, 2015
Deception: The Test of Aggression Instead of The Test of an Imposition of Costs

—“Depending upon one’s conception of rights and what they logically entail or are incompatible with, it’s not difficult to see, for example, that the corpus of the libertarian program, in logical terms cannot countenance “add-ons” in so far as they are obligations that legitimate the use of force. The shortest, most concise illustration of how this follows from the premise that there is only one negative right, namely to not be aggressors against. Philosophers, such as Roderick Tracy Long argue that this positive thesis of one negative right entails a second negative thesis that logically denies and additional positive rights. If the former is granted, the latter follows, in virtue of the logical character of the obligations it entails.”— Skye Stewart

[O]k, so, the reason it’s a nonsense argument is because the definition is circular. More precisely, “petitio principii”, or less precisely, “begging the question”. Like many cosmopolitan, authoritarian, questions-that-are-not-questions, aggression is a conclusion, not a premise. It is a justification. And like many cosmopolitan arguments it is reinforced by the use of in-group guilt (shaming), despite the fact that it is an out-group argument (attempt to preserve separatism.)

So lets look at it….

The term “Aggress” is like “Good”. It means nothing without context. And that is the first deceptive use of the term aggression. One must aggress against something. So we must know what that something is. Otherwise it is, like all obscurant verbal deceptions in incomplete sentence – left incomplete as a means of deception. Just as use of the verb ‘to-be’ is nearly always a means of obscuring one’s ignorance, or one’s intentional obfuscation of causal relations.

It is impossible to define aggression without defining property. So the principle deception involved when most moral intuitionists state their position is that they rely on the INTUITIVE definition of property of the audience, while assuming a narrower definition of property themselves. In the Rothbard Hoppe case, they refer to physical property – intersubjectively verifiable property. However, this eliminates all possible commons, and licenses all unethical and immoral action.

Then, when questioned, Rothbardians give one of the following excuses:

(a) people can make contracts for that. But if they did, then what would the basis of that law be? and would they not ostracize all non-adherents in order to reduce transaction costs and increase compliance? Isn’t that the rational and demonstrated action – everywhere?

(b) “the market will take care of it through competition.” Except that we can prove empirically that it doesn’t. In fact, we need extraordinary levels of suppression of immoral and unethical behavior for market competition to form.

(c) “It’s meant only to be a guiding principle, not a basis for law.” Well then why not just use the definition of property necessary for a basis of law or morality?

I could also just say that do we not force people to pay restitution in the case of accidents? Are accidents aggression? No.

They are violations of property. Are immoral and unethical actions that cause loss to others mutually productive? (No) So are they rational to tolerate? (no). Do we retaliate against others for immoral and unethical actions? (yes) So aggression is insufficient for describing necessary conditions of human cooperation (Yes). And aren’t all attempts to justify defining these things as aggression — even though they are not — just verbal deceptions? They are ’caused losses’, right? So don’t we retaliate against caused losses, and isn’t retaliation what we seek to eliminate – just as much as seeking to eliminate caused losses?

Well a rothbardian then attempts another deception: “Well that would mean competition is a ‘bad’, since it imposes losses.” But the honest man says, “No, in fact people do treat price competition as immoral (although not quality competition) and we have merely trained one another out of objecting to it by explaining that it is a cost of producing the incentive to innovate.”

[W]hy is it that Rothbard picked aggression, out of all the possible criteria for moral definitions? Why does no other group select this argument?

When, I could just as easily ask,” How can we prevent retaliation for immoral and unethical actions – how can we license parasitism?” And conclude aggression.

Or I could ask “How can we free ride upon another’s expensive-to-produce commons?” And come to aggression.

Or I could ask, “What defines both criminal, ethical, and moral, conduct?” And come to aggression.

Or I could ask, “How can I define ethical, moral and just using the terms of prohibited actions between states (aggression), between internal polities (separatism), and just ignore the fact that internal polities pay the costs of defense?” And I would come to aggression.

Why would anyone in the world pick aggression as a definition, UNLESS the purpose of picking aggression was to justify the conclusions contained in it?

Why, if aggression is not sufficient for law, and not sufficient for ethics and morality, is it meaningful? If you start with the presumption of aggression, WHY start with it?

[I]n propertarianism, I start with the question: “Why should I not kill you and take your women and your stuff? Oh? Cooperation might be more beneficial? Under what conditions would cooperation be more beneficial than killing you and taking your things? I see! As long as it’s mutually beneficial. As long as I get more than I would if I killed you and took your women and your things.” That would be the evolutionary attempt to solve the problem.

I could also start with the question: “What incentives make it possible for the rational formation of a voluntary polity?” In that case, transaction costs prohibit the rational formation of a voluntary polity under aggression; and furthermore, other polities demonstrably exterminate such low trust competitors. That would be the rational solution to the problem.

I could also start with the question “Under what definitions of property has liberty demonstrably evolved?” In which case I would see that only under total prohibition on immoral and unethical as well as criminal actions. That would be the empirical approach to the question.

I could ask the question, “How can morality and law be constructed synonymously?” That would be the institutional approach to the problem.

I could ask a lot of possible questions that are much more obvious, and NOT circular. So why is it that I would make a circular argument?

[T]he only logical reasons to start with aggression are (a) to justify prohibition on retaliation for immoral and unethical actions, (b) to justify non-contribution to the commons (free-riding separatism). Aggression is a means of defining low trust, parasitic, separatist ghetto ethics as ‘good’ despite the fact that all empirical evidence suggests that it makes a people unable to hold land, dependent upon a host population, and open to perpetual attempts at extermination.

So, why would an honest person start with something as arbitrary as the rather elaborate concept of ‘aggression’?

Well the answer is, he wouldn’t. Which is why no honest person ever has.

The libertarian is unaware that any argument sufficiently complex to overwhelm reason must be resolved through intuition – and that libertarian moral intuition is false (incomplete). In other words, libertarians are suckers for certain categories of lies.

Just like all humans are suckers for certain categories of lies – all for the same reason.

(ASIDE: This overloading, suggestion, and appeal to intuition as a means of using internal biases to deceive the audience is the secret to the cosmopolitan and rationalist verbalisms. My goal over the next year or two is to fully undermine the cosmopolitan and german rationalist argument structures and demonstrate them for what they are: lies. The anglo enlightenment argument is wrong: universalism, aristocracy of everyone, the rational actor. But it isn’t a lie. And that’s what science does for us: it unmasks lies.)

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
L’viv (City of The Lions) Ukraine.

January 4, 2015
(INTRODUCTORY READING 7) SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEW

(INTRODUCTORY READING 7)

SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IMMORAL INFORMATION DISTORTION EQUAL TO THE INFORMATION DISTORTION OF KEYNSIAN ECONOMICS.

(mind-blowing)(creative)(draft one)

Occam’s razor:

Is it more likely that German rationalism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, both of which were intentionally designed as obscurant anti-scientific deceptions to re-impose their culture’s authoritarianism as a replacement for the faith needed to maintain group competitive evolutionary strategy, are correct in their classification of economics as an axiomatic logic (logically operational system), and that such a discipline is somehow not subject to the same moral and epistemological constraint in demonstrative method, as are all disciplines that claim to construct laws?

Or is it more likely that all disciplines – economics and mathematics included – seek to produce laws from which they can construct models – and that the hypotheses, theories, and laws within those models, require the same moral constraints in demonstrated method regardless of discipline – logical(internally consistent), experimental (externally correspondent), operational(existentially possible), intuitionistic (subjectively testable), and moral (constrained to voluntary transfers) – BUT (and that BUT is important) that each discipline requires only some subset of such properties given the domain of inquiry?

In other words, do not the moral rules developed in science constitute a universal method of moral inquiry into the production of true statements, regardless of discipline? Or are there no universal laws of moral inquiry for the purpose of developing truthful statements?

Is it more likely that more complex systems require greater moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and less complex systems less moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and that whether we require more or less constraint prior to making truth claims, depends upon the properties from which any given system of reasoning is constituted?

COMPARISONS

So lets compare the different approaches on just a few axis:

1) Some economic laws are deducible VS Economic Regularities are explainable by deduction, and thus those hypothesis obtain the status of theory, and when all marginally impactful permutations are identified, these theories can be claimed truthfully as laws.

2) All economic laws are deducible VS Some economic laws are deducible perhaps, but that does not they are not empirically based (obtained through observation). It means only that no instrumentation other than human-sense-perception is needed to make those observations and deductions. While most non-trivial economic phenomenon and the hypotheses theories and laws we use to describe them are ONLY instrumentally and empirically observable. But once observed, with the assistance of further empirical observations, they are also explainable by deduction using sympathetic testing.

3) Economic laws are deterministic VS Economic Laws are imprecise general rules of arbitrary precision, that demonstrate the greatest variation in outcome, of all general rules of arbitrary precision in all systems dependent upon the operational use of regular patterns (other than language), in all the logics (identity, mathematics, physics, economics, and language) with the least (precise) determinacy of the logics; because:

(a) humans act to bend such laws constantly, for personal gain, and;

(b) humans attempt to mitigate determinacy (equilibrium) by constructing various permanent disequilibrium that they can continue to extract benefit from, and;

(c) because causal density (opportunity) is so high, any equilibrating effect can be offset by any other equilibrating effect, and often function in combination, and;

(d) because non-regular events, outside the normal distribution (shocks/black swans) are more influential and less predictable than regular patterns.

4) that economics is unique methodological area of inquiry VS economics benefits merely from the fact that we can subjectively test first principles, whereas in physical science, as yet, we do not know the first principles, while in identity, naming, mathematics, we do. Even if we do not know it *yet* in physics, economics, language, and imagination. If we know the first principles of any system, we can in fact, explain all phenomenon using those first principles. Even if we cannot imagine or deduce or hypothesize all consequentially emergent phenomenon. And since we cannot deduce all economic phenomenon (there are many unsolved problems of economics, as well as mathematics, and certainly of science). It may be possible that in any complex system we will never exhaust all emergent phenomenon (although this certainly seems unlikely if the universe is deterministic).

UNDERSTANDING ARBITRARY PRECISION IN GENERAL RULES

(note: this sequence is a particularly interesting new idea)

The meaning of “arbitrary precision” across disciplines must be understood:

(a) The predictive precision of Identity (laws of categorization) remains tautological no matter what we do.

(b) The predictive precision of naming (laws of numbering) remains operational and tautological no matter what we do.

(c) The predictive precision of Mathematical laws (laws of relations) remains constant independent of physical scale. But since mathematics is an axiomatic system, we cannot take action to alter the consequences of mathematical systems (grok that for a second).

(d) The predictive precision of Physical laws (laws of causality) currently varies dependent upon physical scale because we do not know the first principles of the physical universe – yet. And we can alter the course of physical events and benefit from them – in fact the purpose of human action is to predict and alter the course of physical events in order to benefit from them.

(e) The predictive precision of Economic Laws (laws of human cooperation) varies considerably, and we constantly alter the course of events to benefit from them, by attempting to outwit the altered course of events.

(f) The predictive precision of Linguistic laws (laws of communication/negotiation) are extremely imprecise,demonstrating extraordinary variability, with only a few general, and somewhat deterministic rules such as the evolution toward song, or tonal speech, which requires less effort from the speaker, but the meaning of such speech appears both functional (increasing in information density while gradually losing earlier meaning).

(g) The predictive precision of Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can imagine things) is unknown, but at least if operationally limited, appears to be FUNCTIONALLY unlimited. (A function is the name for collection of mental operations reduced to a general rule that obviates the need for performing more primitive operations – a mental habit that we can trust.)

(h) The predictive precision of Inverse Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can describe categories that we cannot imagine), even if we can ever construct such a set of laws, is nearly useless except as a check on our claims of Laws of Imagination. This is because functions (general rules of arbitrary precision constituting deterministic results of complex operations) even if we cannot conceptualize the content of those functions (cannot operationalize them), appear at present to be infinitely scalable even if decreasingly precise.

This is the problem with economic laws – they are extremely imprecise compared to physical laws, although possibly more precise than linguistic, imaginary and inverse-imaginary laws. Predicting the future location of water and gas molecules in real world phenomenon is almost impossible except at very loose degrees of precision. Predicting the future actions of man in real world scenarios is even less precise. We can explain, historically, what man accomplished, but we cannot predict what any individual will experience.

Because of the time and complexity of human phenomenon, just as in physical phenomenon, we can act to alter the course of events to some degree, within the bounds of those imprecise laws.

Now there may be consequences to these actions: saving and interest have positive cumulative consequences, and expansionary credit has negative cumulative consequences. But that is not to say that we cannot distinguish between those actions that we can take to alter the course of events that produce positive and negative consequences. And that we cannot act to profit from the positive, and avoid actions that are negative. Banking and interest are economic actions. Weights and measures are positive economic actions. Laws that suppress free riding in all forms are positive economic actions. States as Insurer of last resort appear to produce a mix of positive and negative but overwhelmingly positive results. All these institutional actions constitute good policy – the production of beneficial commons that facilitate cooperation and prosperity.

Furthermore, the extension of organized suppression of free-riding into the bureaucracy, and into the system of representation, by eliminating the monopoly bureaucracy, and eliminating political representation, and eliminating legislative law, might be an additional institutional improvement that would facilitate human cooperation and prosperity.

Now we can argue that the Keynesian attempt to distort the monetary information system by involuntarily increasing everyone’s risk through ‘lying’ about demand, and therefore increasing employment and consumption is a terrible means by which to interfere with the economy. It is only slightly better than the destruction of the information system by which we cooperate in the economy by socialist and communist folly. But we may not say that there are other economic institutions that we could experimentally construct that would provide improved means of cooperation, and prosperity that would not constitute lies, any more than credit and interest constitute lies.

For example,

– To create an urban market, members (shareholders) must suppress the profitability of raiding and conquest of their market by those who are not shareholders.

– If tribal raiders and herdsman want to participate in an urban market then they must eschew theft and raiding for entry into the market. That is a voluntary exchange.

– If farmers work the land, and want to participate in the market using their excess production in order to buy goods that they cannot produce themselves, they must obey the rules of buyers and sellers set by the shareholders of the market.

– If people wish to abandon self production, and work entirely within the market they must adopt the behavior of shareholders and defend the exclusive means of their sustenance.

– If people no longer can work in self production, nor can they work in the market in order to obtain their sustenance, then they have no means of survival so continuing to participate in the shareholder agreement is no longer a rational exchange.

– If people who cannot work in the market are willing to work to maintain the shareholder agreement for shareholders (maintain the commons, including the commons of property rights, which makes the voluntary organization of production possible) then it is rational to pay them to construct the voluntary organization of production and to return to being consumers within that market – their contribution being not the consumption, but the production of the voluntary organization of production itself. However it is also rational to limit those people to one child so that they both can reproduce, but not commit the immoral act of imposing costs upon those who are productive, by generating additional offspring. This then constitutes a voluntary exchange and productive work, even if those people are not participating in the production of goods and services, they are participating in and being paid for the effort of constructing the voluntary organization of production.

So to say that it is not rational or scientific or necessary to experiment in the economy, or that such experimentation is not empirical (open to observation and measurement), is clearly false. It is merely that there are moral and immoral means of doing so, and that monetary policy as we currently practice it is immoral – and not very intelligent. It produces the predicted results. So it is clearly scientific and ‘true’. But that does not mean it isn’t immoral and harmful. And the cumulative effect of this policy is empirically genocidal by all extant measures.

SO BACK TO OCCAM’S RAZOR:

Isn’t the purpose of Rationalist and Cosmopolitan arguments of the heterodox so-called, Austrians, merely convoluted verbal justification for rebelling against political experimentation in the manipulation of the economy for the purpose of producing commons? Isn’t all their obscurantism just pseudoscientific justification for the desire to justify non-contribution to the commons? Isn’t it just an elaborate excuse for free riding?

Isn’t the more simple answer that each logic that we have developed was developed to test certain subsets of properties, and that each subset of properties requires testing against error, bias and deception. And that as the complexity of the phenomenon increases we must test or not test those properties intrinsic to the system that we seek to test?

Isn’t our fascination with the rules of mathematics simply because the means of deduction and the means of explanation are nearly identical: mathematical operations? Whereas mathematical discovery, all conclusions are assumed in the axioms and state-independent, whereas the result of human cooperation is determined more so by externalities than by the general rules? And that for any individual, events they experience are kaleidic and economic laws are only predictive in the aggregate?

Isn’t all the information necessary for prediction in an axiomatic system present at the definition of the axioms, while limited and insufficiently predictive information is present in economic laws? Aren’t economic laws the equivalent of bell-curves, rather than demonstrated tails? Isn’t the information necessary to predict tail events many orders of magnitude higher than predicting events in a regular distribution?

So the demonstrated evidence in the history of rationalism, the obvious incentives of rationalists as authoritarians, and the logical conclusion we must come to, is that deductive reasoning is non-predictive. Because deduction did not produce general economic rules, and it cannot identify candidates for general rules. It can only test whether general rules are true regardless of their origins, and explain those general rules as a set of operations.

Because we are not scientifically testing, experimenting with, those laws of human behavior, but we are scientifically testing the interactions of those various laws of human behavior in kaleidic action, and taking advantage of altering those phenomenon of human activity just as we take advantage of altering the course of events of physical phenomenon. We are not testing first principles but the interaction between emergent phenomenon caused by the use of those principles in real time.

The laws of the physical universe and of man, appear to be trivial, but the emergent phenomenon of those simple rules appears to be infinite and unpredictable, even if they are explainable.

The physical universe and man, may in fact, follow predictable regular rules. Those rules are only interesting and useful in so far as we can learn how to bend them, and break them, for our use.

Property rights for example, bend and break human behavior. Credit and interest for example let us bend and break human behavior. Monogamous marriage lets us bend and break human behavior. The extension of property rights and the prohibition on inbreeding bent and broke the human behavior that made high velocity economies possible. First principles of human behavior may exist but novel means of manipulating it for the production of prosperity are always available to us.

THE PURPOSE OF TRUTH IS TESTIMONY – OUR INFORMATION SYSTEM

Just as we may not interfere with the monetary system because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by informational distortion, we may not interfere with the ‘truthful’ information system created by verbal error, bias, distortion and deception, because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by error, bias, and deception.

There is no reason we must hide our group evolutionary strategies, other than for the purposes of parasitism – lying. And if we wish to understand the law of human cooperation, it is that cooperation is only rational in the absence of parasitism, and that only truthful, fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality constitutes ‘true’ information. And that all else is, just as monetary information is,

THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER SOMETHING IS EMPIRICAL OR RATIONAL, BUT WHETHER IT IS TRUE, TRUTHFULLY STATED, AND WARRANTED.

And there is but one universal moral principle:

(a) truthfully stated

(b) fully informed

(c) productive

(d) warrantied

(e) voluntary exchange

(f) free of negative externality

And there is but one universal moral warrant: that any statement is:

(a) internally consistent (logically tested)

(b) externally correspondent (evidentially tested as meaningfully predictive and/or explicative)

(c) falsifiable and falsified (tested for parsimony)

(d) existentially possible (operationally defined)

(e) moral(independent of immoral transfer)

As such, since German Rationalism, and Jewish Cosmopolitan Rationalism is not warranted, truthful speech, and cannot constitute a moral, voluntary exchange, and is equal in immorality to economic disinformation created by distortion of the money supply.

It’s not that Keynesian economics is unscientific it’s that it’s immoral. It’s not so much that German Rationalism and Jewish Cosmopolitan rationalism are not simply a backwards-expression of intuitionism and operationalism under empiricism, despite it’s inability to produce insights and only explain them. It’s instead, that the rationalist position is an attempt to intellectual outlaw investigation into emergent economic phenomenon – which is the purpose of scientific investigation, just as much as experimental psychology is the discipline that investigates first principles – and which has discovered the reason for our long list of cognitive biases that produce non-rational actions not anticipated by the classical model.

There is no need for German and Jewish dishonest Rationalism, any more than there is a need for Keynesian dishonest economics. Liberty is possible under science, because science is the language of morality – of truthful speech free of involuntary transfer, by fraud. Liberty is a synonym for objective morality.

Our solution is neither British Keynesian immorality nor German and Jewish immorality, nor anglo-american pseudoscientific immorality (neo-puritanism), but truth speaking, and moral, voluntary exchange across peoples with different evolutionary strategies.

Truth, Science, and Morality are synonyms.

And we would all be better off without all the immorality, pseudoscience, rationalism, and lying.

Voluntary exchange is enough.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

Source date (UTC): 2014-12-26 07:10:00 UTC

December 26, 2014
SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IM

SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IMMORAL INFORMATION DISTORTION EQUAL TO THE INFORMATION DISTORTION OF KEYNSIAN ECONOMICS.

(mind-blowing)(creative)(draft one)

Occam’s razor:

Is it more likely that German rationalism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, both of which were intentionally designed as obscurant anti-scientific deceptions to re-impose their culture’s authoritarianism as a replacement for the faith needed to maintain group competitive evolutionary strategy, are correct in their classification of economics as an axiomatic logic (logically operational system), and that such a discipline is somehow not subject to the same moral and epistemological constraint in demonstrative method, as are all disciplines that claim to construct laws?

Or is it more likely that all disciplines – economics and mathematics included – seek to produce laws from which they can construct models – and that the hypotheses, theories, and laws within those models, require the same moral constraints in demonstrated method regardless of discipline – logical(internally consistent), experimental (externally correspondent), operational(existentially possible), intuitionistic (subjectively testable), and moral (constrained to voluntary transfers) – BUT (and that BUT is important) that each discipline requires only some subset of such properties given the domain of inquiry?

In other words, do not the moral rules developed in science constitute a universal method of moral inquiry into the production of true statements, regardless of discipline? Or are there no universal laws of moral inquiry for the purpose of developing truthful statements?

Is it more likely that more complex systems require greater moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and less complex systems less moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and that whether we require more or less constraint prior to making truth claims, depends upon the properties from which any given system of reasoning is constituted?

COMPARISONS

So lets compare the different approaches on just a few axis:

1) Some economic laws are deducible VS Economic Regularities are explainable by deduction, and thus those hypothesis obtain the status of theory, and when all marginally impactful permutations are identified, these theories can be claimed truthfully as laws.

2) All economic laws are deducible VS Some economic laws are deducible perhaps, but that does not they are not empirically based (obtained through observation). It means only that no instrumentation other than human-sense-perception is needed to make those observations and deductions. While most non-trivial economic phenomenon and the hypotheses theories and laws we use to describe them are ONLY instrumentally and empirically observable. But once observed, with the assistance of further empirical observations, they are also explainable by deduction using sympathetic testing.

3) Economic laws are deterministic VS Economic Laws are imprecise general rules of arbitrary precision, that demonstrate the greatest variation in outcome, of all general rules of arbitrary precision in all systems dependent upon the operational use of regular patterns (other than language), in all the logics (identity, mathematics, physics, economics, and language) with the least (precise) determinacy of the logics; because:

(a) humans act to bend such laws constantly, for personal gain, and;

(b) humans attempt to mitigate determinacy (equilibrium) by constructing various permanent disequilibrium that they can continue to extract benefit from, and;

(c) because causal density (opportunity) is so high, any equilibrating effect can be offset by any other equilibrating effect, and often function in combination, and;

(d) because non-regular events, outside the normal distribution (shocks/black swans) are more influential and less predictable than regular patterns.

4) that economics is unique methodological area of inquiry VS economics benefits merely from the fact that we can subjectively test first principles, whereas in physical science, as yet, we do not know the first principles, while in identity, naming, mathematics, we do. Even if we do not know it *yet* in physics, economics, language, and imagination. If we know the first principles of any system, we can in fact, explain all phenomenon using those first principles. Even if we cannot imagine or deduce or hypothesize all consequentially emergent phenomenon. And since we cannot deduce all economic phenomenon (there are many unsolved problems of economics, as well as mathematics, and certainly of science). It may be possible that in any complex system we will never exhaust all emergent phenomenon (although this certainly seems unlikely if the universe is deterministic).

UNDERSTANDING ARBITRARY PRECISION IN GENERAL RULES

(note: this sequence is a particularly interesting new idea)

The meaning of “arbitrary precision” across disciplines must be understood:

(a) The predictive precision of Identity (laws of categorization) remains tautological no matter what we do.

(b) The predictive precision of naming (laws of numbering) remains operational and tautological no matter what we do.

(c) The predictive precision of Mathematical laws (laws of relations) remains constant independent of physical scale. But since mathematics is an axiomatic system, we cannot take action to alter the consequences of mathematical systems (grok that for a second).

(d) The predictive precision of Physical laws (laws of causality) currently varies dependent upon physical scale because we do not know the first principles of the physical universe – yet. And we can alter the course of physical events and benefit from them – in fact the purpose of human action is to predict and alter the course of physical events in order to benefit from them.

(e) The predictive precision of Economic Laws (laws of human cooperation) varies considerably, and we constantly alter the course of events to benefit from them, by attempting to outwit the altered course of events.

(f) The predictive precision of Linguistic laws (laws of communication/negotiation) are extremely imprecise,demonstrating extraordinary variability, with only a few general, and somewhat deterministic rules such as the evolution toward song, or tonal speech, which requires less effort from the speaker, but the meaning of such speech appears both functional (increasing in information density while gradually losing earlier meaning).

(g) The predictive precision of Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can imagine things) is unknown, but at least if operationally limited, appears to be FUNCTIONALLY unlimited. (A function is the name for collection of mental operations reduced to a general rule that obviates the need for performing more primitive operations – a mental habit that we can trust.)

(h) The predictive precision of Inverse Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can describe categories that we cannot imagine), even if we can ever construct such a set of laws, is nearly useless except as a check on our claims of Laws of Imagination. This is because functions (general rules of arbitrary precision constituting deterministic results of complex operations) even if we cannot conceptualize the content of those functions (cannot operationalize them), appear at present to be infinitely scalable even if decreasingly precise.

This is the problem with economic laws – they are extremely imprecise compared to physical laws, although possibly more precise than linguistic, imaginary and inverse-imaginary laws. Predicting the future location of water and gas molecules in real world phenomenon is almost impossible except at very loose degrees of precision. Predicting the future actions of man in real world scenarios is even less precise. We can explain, historically, what man accomplished, but we cannot predict what any individual will experience.

Because of the time and complexity of human phenomenon, just as in physical phenomenon, we can act to alter the course of events to some degree, within the bounds of those imprecise laws.

Now there may be consequences to these actions: saving and interest have positive cumulative consequences, and expansionary credit has negative cumulative consequences. But that is not to say that we cannot distinguish between those actions that we can take to alter the course of events that produce positive and negative consequences. And that we cannot act to profit from the positive, and avoid actions that are negative. Banking and interest are economic actions. Weights and measures are positive economic actions. Laws that suppress free riding in all forms are positive economic actions. States as Insurer of last resort appear to produce a mix of positive and negative but overwhelmingly positive results. All these institutional actions constitute good policy – the production of beneficial commons that facilitate cooperation and prosperity.

Furthermore, the extension of organized suppression of free-riding into the bureaucracy, and into the system of representation, by eliminating the monopoly bureaucracy, and eliminating political representation, and eliminating legislative law, might be an additional institutional improvement that would facilitate human cooperation and prosperity.

Now we can argue that the Keynesian attempt to distort the monetary information system by involuntarily increasing everyone’s risk through ‘lying’ about demand, and therefore increasing employment and consumption is a terrible means by which to interfere with the economy. It is only slightly better than the destruction of the information system by which we cooperate in the economy by socialist and communist folly. But we may not say that there are other economic institutions that we could experimentally construct that would provide improved means of cooperation, and prosperity that would not constitute lies, any more than credit and interest constitute lies.

For example,

– To create an urban market, members (shareholders) must suppress the profitability of raiding and conquest of their market by those who are not shareholders.

– If tribal raiders and herdsman want to participate in an urban market then they must eschew theft and raiding for entry into the market. That is a voluntary exchange.

– If farmers work the land, and want to participate in the market using their excess production in order to buy goods that they cannot produce themselves, they must obey the rules of buyers and sellers set by the shareholders of the market.

– If people wish to abandon self production, and work entirely within the market they must adopt the behavior of shareholders and defend the exclusive means of their sustenance.

– If people no longer can work in self production, nor can they work in the market in order to obtain their sustenance, then they have no means of survival so continuing to participate in the shareholder agreement is no longer a rational exchange.

– If people who cannot work in the market are willing to work to maintain the shareholder agreement for shareholders (maintain the commons, including the commons of property rights, which makes the voluntary organization of production possible) then it is rational to pay them to construct the voluntary organization of production and to return to being consumers within that market – their contribution being not the consumption, but the production of the voluntary organization of production itself. However it is also rational to limit those people to one child so that they both can reproduce, but not commit the immoral act of imposing costs upon those who are productive, by generating additional offspring. This then constitutes a voluntary exchange and productive work, even if those people are not participating in the production of goods and services, they are participating in and being paid for the effort of constructing the voluntary organization of production.

So to say that it is not rational or scientific or necessary to experiment in the economy, or that such experimentation is not empirical (open to observation and measurement), is clearly false. It is merely that there are moral and immoral means of doing so, and that monetary policy as we currently practice it is immoral – and not very intelligent. It produces the predicted results. So it is clearly scientific and ‘true’. But that does not mean it isn’t immoral and harmful. And the cumulative effect of this policy is empirically genocidal by all extant measures.

SO BACK TO OCCAM’S RAZOR:

Isn’t the purpose of Rationalist and Cosmopolitan arguments of the heterodox so-called, Austrians, merely convoluted verbal justification for rebelling against political experimentation in the manipulation of the economy for the purpose of producing commons? Isn’t all their obscurantism just pseudoscientific justification for the desire to justify non-contribution to the commons? Isn’t it just an elaborate excuse for free riding?

Isn’t the more simple answer that each logic that we have developed was developed to test certain subsets of properties, and that each subset of properties requires testing against error, bias and deception. And that as the complexity of the phenomenon increases we must test or not test those properties intrinsic to the system that we seek to test?

Isn’t our fascination with the rules of mathematics simply because the means of deduction and the means of explanation are nearly identical: mathematical operations? Whereas mathematical discovery, all conclusions are assumed in the axioms and state-independent, whereas the result of human cooperation is determined more so by externalities than by the general rules? And that for any individual, events they experience are kaleidic and economic laws are only predictive in the aggregate?

Isn’t all the information necessary for prediction in an axiomatic system present at the definition of the axioms, while limited and insufficiently predictive information is present in economic laws? Aren’t economic laws the equivalent of bell-curves, rather than demonstrated tails? Isn’t the information necessary to predict tail events many orders of magnitude higher than predicting events in a regular distribution?

So the demonstrated evidence in the history of rationalism, the obvious incentives of rationalists as authoritarians, and the logical conclusion we must come to, is that deductive reasoning is non-predictive. Because deduction did not produce general economic rules, and it cannot identify candidates for general rules. It can only test whether general rules are true regardless of their origins, and explain those general rules as a set of operations.

Because we are not scientifically testing, experimenting with, those laws of human behavior, but we are scientifically testing the interactions of those various laws of human behavior in kaleidic action, and taking advantage of altering those phenomenon of human activity just as we take advantage of altering the course of events of physical phenomenon. We are not testing first principles but the interaction between emergent phenomenon caused by the use of those principles in real time.

The laws of the physical universe and of man, appear to be trivial, but the emergent phenomenon of those simple rules appears to be infinite and unpredictable, even if they are explainable.

The physical universe and man, may in fact, follow predictable regular rules. Those rules are only interesting and useful in so far as we can learn how to bend them, and break them, for our use.

Property rights for example, bend and break human behavior. Credit and interest for example let us bend and break human behavior. Monogamous marriage lets us bend and break human behavior. The extension of property rights and the prohibition on inbreeding bent and broke the human behavior that made high velocity economies possible. First principles of human behavior may exist but novel means of manipulating it for the production of prosperity are always available to us.

THE PURPOSE OF TRUTH IS TESTIMONY – OUR INFORMATION SYSTEM

Just as we may not interfere with the monetary system because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by informational distortion, we may not interfere with the ‘truthful’ information system created by verbal error, bias, distortion and deception, because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by error, bias, and deception.

There is no reason we must hide our group evolutionary strategies, other than for the purposes of parasitism – lying. And if we wish to understand the law of human cooperation, it is that cooperation is only rational in the absence of parasitism, and that only truthful, fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality constitutes ‘true’ information. And that all else is, just as monetary information is,

THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER SOMETHING IS EMPIRICAL OR RATIONAL, BUT WHETHER IT IS TRUE, TRUTHFULLY STATED, AND WARRANTIED.

And there is but one universal moral principle:

(a) truthfully stated

(b) fully informed

(c) productive

(d) warrantied

(e) voluntary exchange

(f) free of negative externality

And there is but one universal moral warrant: that any statement is:

(a) internally consistent (logically tested)

(b) externally correspondent (evidentially tested as meaningfully predictive and/or explicative)

(c) falsifiable and falsified (tested for parsimony)

(d) existentially possible (operationally defined)

(e) moral(independent of immoral transfer)

As such, since German Rationalism, and Jewish Cosmopolitan Rationalism is not warranted, truthful speech, and cannot constitute a moral, voluntary exchange, and is equal in immorality to economic disinformation created by distortion of the money supply.

It’s not that Keynesian economics is unscientific it’s that it’s immoral. It’s not so much that German Rationalism and Jewish Cosmopolitan rationalism are not simply a backwards-expression of intuitionism and operationalism under empiricism, despite it’s inability to produce insights and only explain them. It’s instead, that the rationalist position is an attempt to intellectual outlaw investigation into emergent economic phenomenon – which is the purpose of scientific investigation, just as much as experimental psychology is the discipline that investigates first principles – and which has discovered the reason for our long list of cognitive biases that produce non-rational actions not anticipated by the classical model.

There is no need for German and Jewish dishonest Rationalism, any more than there is a need for Keynesian dishonest economics. Liberty is possible under science, because science is the language of morality – of truthful speech free of involuntary transfer, by fraud. Liberty is a synonym for objective morality.

Our solution is neither British Keynesian immorality nor German and Jewish immorality, nor anglo-american pseudoscientific immorality (neo-puritanism), but truth speaking, and moral, voluntary exchange across peoples with different evolutionary strategies.

Truth, Science, and Morality are synonyms.

And we would all be better off without all the immorality, pseudoscience, rationalism, and lying.

Voluntary exchange is enough.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

Source date (UTC): 2014-12-26 07:00:00 UTC

December 26, 2014
(INTRODUCTORY READING 3) SCIENCE IS THE DISCIPLINE OF SPEAKING TRUTHFULLY – IN A

(INTRODUCTORY READING 3)

SCIENCE IS THE DISCIPLINE OF SPEAKING TRUTHFULLY – IN ALL DISCIPLINES

———————————————————————————-

Science is a moral discipline wherein we criticize our ideas, so that we can speak them truthfully:

— We test our reasoning with logic for internal consistency.

— We test our observations with external correspondence.

— We test existence of our premises with operations.

— We test the scope of our theory with falsifications.

Once we have tested our theories by these means, then we can say that we speak truthfully – and as such do no harm.

The central argument regarding truth:

… that humans in order to cooperate, humans evolved sympathy for intent – and are marginally indifferent in their judgement of intentions. This allows us to sympathetically test most human incentives if subject to the same stimuli (information). It is also why juries can functions, since this sympathetic testing of intentions is the criteria by which juries render decisions.

… that we cannot however sympathize with the equivalent of intentions (first principles) of the physical universe. So while we intuit and and can test man’s intentions, we cannot measure and test the universe’s first principles. As such, the best we can do is testify to observations and measurements of those phenomenon until at some point we know those first principles – if that is ever possible.

… but our observations must also be reduced to stimuli that can be sympathetically tested by others, and insulated from our deception, bias and error.

… we call this process ‘science’, but the practice of science is little more than a set of moral rules that instruct us as to how to eliminate deception, bias and error. The scientific method then, is merely a moral discipline: the means by which we struggle to speak the truth, as truthfully as we may possibly accomplish given the frailty of our reason.

… that giving witness to one’s observations, is testable by reproduction of a set of operational definitions. That operational definitions produce the equivalent of names, just as positional numbering provides quantities with names. Such names are insulated from deception, distraction, loading, framing and overloading. Theories are not. While we cannot demonstrate the absolute parsimony of a theory (that we know of), we can demonstrate that we truthfully conveyed our observations. In other words, we can testify truthfully to an ordered set of facts, even if we cannot testify truthfully to parsimony of a theory.

….that it is possible to state instead that all outputs of scientific investigation are true, if they are truthfully represented – where ‘scientific investigation” refers to the use of the scientific method, regardless of field of inquiry. But that we seek the most parsimonious statement of a theory, and we can never know that we have obtained it, we can only develop consensus that we cannot cause it to fail. This is, as far as I know, the best non-platonic description of truth available. Everything else is a linguistic contrivance for one purpose or another – possibly to obscure ignorance, and possibly to load ideas with moral motivation. Scientists load their contrivance of truth, and mathematicians load their contrivance of numbers, limits, and a dozen other things – most of which obscure linguistic ‘cheats’ to give authority to that which is necessary for the construction of general rules. (ie: the problem of arbitrary precision).

… that Popper did no investigation into science or the history of science prior to making his argument, and that as yet, we do not have a systematic account of the history of science. However, what history we do have, both distant and recent, is that science operates by criticism upon failure, where failure is demonstrated by via overextension of the theory.

…The reason for overextension rather than criticism as the operational preference being that it is economically inefficient (expensive) to pursue criticism rather than to extend a theory to its point of failure then criticize it. And as far as we know, this is how science functions in practice, and must work, because it is how all human endeavors must work. Because while a small number of scientists may seek the ‘truth’ (or whatever a platonist means by it), what scientists try to do is solve problems – ie: to manufacture recipes for useful cognition.

… Popper’s advice was merely moral given that the scope of inquiry in all human fields had surpassed that of human scale, where tests are subjectively verifiable. (I think this is an important insight because it occurred in all fields.) Einstein for example, operationalized observations (relative simultaneity for example) over very great distances approaching the speed of light using Lorenz transformations. And as Bridgman demonstrated, the reason Einstein’s work was novel was because prior generations had NOT been operationalizing statements ,and as such, more than a generation and perhaps two were lost to failure of what should have been an obvious solution. (See the problem of length, which I tend to refer to often as the best example.) I addressed this in a previous post, and what popper did was give us good advice, and while he made an argument that appears logical, like most rational arguments, unsupported by data, it is not clear he was correct, and in fact, it appears that he was not. The question is not a rational but empirical one.

… Popper unlike Misesian Pseudoscience, or Rothbardian Immoral Verbalisms, was engaged in a moral attempt both in politics and in science, and perhaps in science as a vehicle for politics, to prevent the pseudoscientific use of science – particularly by fascist and communists, to use the findings of science as a replacement for divine authority by which to command man. What popper did, particularly with his platonism, was to remove the ability for the findings of science to be used as justification for the removal of human choice. Popper, Mises, and Hayek were responsible for undermining pseudoscientific authoritarianism. Of the three popper is perhaps less articulate (possibly to obscure his objective), but certainly not wrong, so to speak. While mises’ appeal to authoritarianism (which is part and parcel of jewish culture) was entirely pseudoscientific, by claiming that economics was deductive rather than empirical, and justifying it under apriorism, instead of as I’ve stated, understanding that he was merely trying to apply operationalism to economic activity, which would merely demonstrate that Keynesian economics was immoral and deterministic, not unscientific.

But Popper, Mises, Hayek, Bridgman and Brouwer, did not find a solution to restoring the western aristocratic conditions for public speech.

They too were a lost in platonism a bit. Bridgman and Brouwer did understand that something was wrong, and were very close,b ut they could not make the moral argument. We have had a century now of attacks by verbal contrivance and we can demonstrate the destruction of our civilization by way of it. So the moral argument is no longer one of undemonstrated results. WE have the results. And we have a generation of men, myself included, trying to repair it.

One must speak truthfully, because no other truth is knowable. Intellectual products that are brought to market must be warrantied just as are all other products that are brought to market, and the warranty that you can provide is operational definitions (recipes, experience), not theories (psychologism, projections). And if you are not willing to stand behind your product then you should not bring it to market. Because you have no right to subject others to harm.

Intellectuals produce ideas (myself included), that is our product. We are paid in measly terms most of the time, for our product, but that is what we do. But it is no different from hot coffee or dangerous ladders, or defective gas tanks.

And given that one particularly prolific group of people has created marxism, socialism, postmodernism, libertine-libertarianism, and neoconservatism, it is about time we stopped allowing them to ship lousy products into society.

And rather than regulate them by government, the common law and universal standing will allow punishment of those who bring bad products to market.

Source date (UTC): 2014-12-23 08:10:00 UTC

December 23, 2014
POSITIONING AUSTRIAN ECON IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY (posted in new school of austr

POSITIONING AUSTRIAN ECON IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

(posted in new school of austrian economics)

—

(Note: This is a draft that I am working on. And even for people who follow me, and who have philosophical training in the sciences, this may still be a challenge to digest. For those who do not follow me it may be difficult going but you will find some very useful ideas inside the cracker jack box.)

—

Lets start off with a deceptively simple, common question, that leads us to a very complex journey:

QUESTION: –“Is it a contradiction to accept Austrian theories (ie. business cycle theory) but to also accept empirical methodology?”– Robert Beattie

ANSWER: No.

THE TALE OF THREE CITIES: THE ISLAND, THE FOREST AND THE GHETTO

You will find largely vapid arguments in the Austrian community that state that in practice, Austrian economists do this or that by empirical means. Which is a meaningless argument of course. It says nothing about what is different in their discipline – they might also ride unicycles. You will find arguments that the primary difference between mainstream and Austrian Economics is the business cycle. This is also partly correct. But also that business cycles are not predictable – even though this is actually probably not true. Instead, it’s that it’s, socially and legally disruptive, and expensive to collect the data and even if we did it would influence the outcome. You will find that in some quarters Austrian economics is cast as the study of information – which is fairly accurate, since that is how Physics has also evolved as a discipline. You will find some groups saying that it is the study of human action – which again is a meaningless verbalism, as if all other fields were not also studies of man’s actions (and far better at producing results). You will find that Austrian economics is often discussed in Misesian terms. But this is nonsense as well. Mises split off from Menger’s german rationalist school and created a Jewish cosmopolitan school more reflective of Cosmopolitan political interests and as such, was more political than scientific. The propaganda campaign conducted by the Mises institute – the Middle class cosmopolitan version of the lower class Cosmopolitan Frankfurt School – by the use of the technique of Marxist Critique of heaping undue praise, and appropriating the terms “Libertarian” and “Austrian” has been marginally successful in framing the vernacular. But the fact remains that whether German rationalist or Jewish Cosmopolitan, both branches of Austrian economics attempt to study human cooperation, and reflect particularist, nationalist, if not tribal, political oppositions to anglo universalist empiricism framed in scientific language. It is this framing that separates anglo-islander, german-flatlander and Jewish-disaporic thought. Kantian rationalism is an attempt to conflate truth and duty. Jewish disasporic thought is an attempt to preserve authority and separatism. Anglo thought is best seen as an emanating from the safety of an ivory tower defended by the seas, and ignoring or at least discounting nearly infinitely the need for our political thought to assist us in group cohesion. And the German and Jewish Schools intent on preserving their group cohesion in the face of anglo universal empiricism.

But underneath those political aspirations – anglo island dweller and navy, german land holder and army, or jewish migrant ghetto dweller and trader – the scientific proposition they each intuit, and seek to use to their group’s political advantage in the enlightenment, can be found.

But we must go looking for it carefully:

POSITIONING AUSTRIANISM IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT

Austrian Economics is best understood as a higher scientific standard, wherein any instrumental observation (regular correlation), must also be operationally constructed (existentially possible) in order to be testified to as truthful. (In common vernacular:true).

A sequence of sympathetically testable human operations in economics are identical in class to a sequence of possible mathematical operations in mathematics: they determine existential possibility.

In mathematics we explore using the same operations as instruments as we do to construct our proofs: the analogy to truth in math. We use the same descriptions to explore with and demonstrate with. But that coincidence is unique to mathematics.

In the study of human cooperation that we call economics we hypothesize using many different instruments to arrive at a theory – most of which depend upon the evidence of demonstrated preference recorded as monetary transactions – but unless we can explain a theory as the RESULT of a sequence of sympathetically testable human operations, then it is not existentially possible, and as such the theory cannot be truthfully testified to be ‘true’. The impossible cannot be true.

But unlike mathematical operations in the construction of proofs, or physical transformations and measurements in physical science – a violation of which are merely an error in understanding, recording, measuring, testing, which may cause others to bear costs in order to refute – when we make untrue statements in economic policy, WE CAUSE THEFTS.

Unfortunately Mises intuits this approximate way to articulate the difference in disciplines, but as a German rationalist and Jewish hermeneuticist, rather than anglo analytic empiricist, he made a pseudoscientific proposal instead: praxeology. (Note: to qualify as pseudoscientific one must claim a discipline is a science or scientific but at the same time not follow the scientific method.)

As far as I know, in my work I have corrected this error and restated the Austrian position in ratio scientific terms as a economic operationalism: the extension of analysis beyond human scales of perception and as such the need to add the requirement for operational tests of existential possibility to ensure that verbal expressions reflect existentially possible phenomenon, and not imaginary content or assumptions.

EINSTEIN, BRIDGMAN, BROUWER, HOPPE,

Hoppe came very close to figuring it out but was too committed to imprecision of aprioism and rationalism – both of which are of limited use and only of use at human scale of perception (in reductio argument), just as Newtonian physics is limited to use at near-human scales of perception. However, when we speak of economics, we almost immediately exceed the limits of human scales of perception – which is precisely why we require the money and prices

Poincare was the most vocal critic of analogistic pseudosciences (correlation is just a form of empirical analogy not an operational description). It was Einstein who demonstrated that apriorism was dead by showing that if we cannot depend upon such basic premises as time and length, then we can depend upon no premises for the purpose of deducing apriori statements whatsoever. And next, Bridgman, Brouwer, and Bishop then explained why we cannot depend upon premises: because only a sequence of operations (and measures) expose changes in the properties of premises that analogies (words) obscure and imply are constant. In other words, terms refer to meaning (analogy) and operations refer to reality (truth). However, the human mind, which evolved reason and language together, cannot remember or manipulate long strings of operations, so we must reduce long strings of operations to analogies (words) which we remember by virtue of association(meaning), and verify those reductions of operations(and measurements) to words, whenever the scale (context) of the general rule (statement in words) changes.

So for those of us that correctly intuit that something is immoral and wrong with Keyesian and New-Keynesian macro, we are partly right: correlative economics was expressly invented to obscure the systems of redistribution and theft that such policies institute and perpetuate. Analogies, even if they are empirically statistical or rational and therefore verbal analogies, are still merely analogies, and only operations can be demonstrated to be true for more than trivial theories within the very limited human scales of perception.

Analogies are good for the transfer of meaning – and to some degree they are necessary for the purpose of condensing into the verbal and mental equivalent of functions that which is too complex to understand as a series of operations (counting numbers and the square root of two are the most obvious examples). But analogies are not the same as truths, any more than poetry is the same as scientific recipe, or the same as adding colorful and illustrious details for the purpose of entertainment on a witness stand is telling the truth.

The only possible means of knowing whether our analogous words, have exceeded the bounds of their construction, is by testing their construction by operationalist means – operations and measures.

Austrian economics then asks us, as does intuitionism and construction in mathematics, and operationalism in science, and operationism in psychology, to test whether a economic propositions are open to operational construction: whether they are decidable propositions by an actor given the information he is exposed to in real time.

We do not require external instrumentation to test whether propositions are rational for an actor to decide, because humans are marginally indifferent in our sympathetic capacity: in other words, we are similar enough to cooperate and therefore similar enough to empathize (sympathize) with one another’s incentives. If not (as our ape relatives often demonstrate they cannot, and our dog friends demonstrate they can) we could not cooperate. We can cooperate because we can sympathetically determine intent. As such in matters of cooperation we can sympathize with one another sufficiently to decide preferential propositions marginally indifferently. As such we are, ourselves intrinsically able to perform sympathetic tests, as well as judge an equal’s sign in mathematics, and as well as a scale in physical matters, or as well as any other instrumental measurement that we can construct.

The practitioners of science took under consideration those topics that were beyond human scale. **Science is best understood as discipline of truth telling – not a means of investigating the world. The fact that scientists had to find ways of truth telling at scale helped them develop their moral principles of truth telling that we call the scientific method. However, there is nothing particular to the study of physical phenomenon in that moral method.

The revolution in thinking that we learned from science after the various revolutions in scale that occurred in the 1800’s, was that we must place a higher constraint upon truth telling in social matters for large populations outside of the family and tribe, just as we had placed a higher standard upon truth telling in the physical sciences when the scale also exceeded our human perceptions.

MORALS RULES AS AVAILABLE AS OPERATIONS

Why? Because the operations (moral rules) in each population differ according to necessity, accident and intent. But most importantly, the moral rules in each population reflect their group’s competitive strategies.

Loosely this means that macro economic policy can be practiced at most across a heterogeneous people, otherwise, it is a surreptitious invisible means of conducting genetic warfare by redistributing wealth between competing families and tribes.) Only operational analysis of MORALS will make this evident. And this insight is why I have argued for the past decade that economics as practiced is an immoral discipline.

There are limits to all general rules when scale is exceeded. In the case of economics, the use of policy beyond the nation-state is immoral-in-fact because consequences of conquest via consumption credit and interest; but it is also immoral in the sense that we do not analyze the operations that are changed by its implementation – the extant moral codes and their consequences. Nor do we analyze the normative or human capital changes that occur as a result of our actions. In the case of the west we have undermined our ancient moral codes as well as our demographics – Keynesian induced consumption is suicidal. We enjoy consumption, but we enjoy narcotics drugs and alchohol. Whether we enjoy something is not a measure in and of itself. It means only that we have found a means of producing a chemical reaction in our bodies.

THE IMPOSITION OF RULE

The counter proposition is that we evolved and imposed laws and religions to unite peoples, and are now evolving economics (rule by consumption, credit and interest) to unite peoples. But the uniting of peoples is only beneficial for the conduct of warfare – and it is demonstrably dysgenic, since only separatist peoples appear to evolve above the median. Fiat money, the nation state, the empire, evolved for the purpose of war making:conquest.

When you are trying to institute property rights so that people can cooperate, then that is beneficial for those with potential, and only in marginal cases does it deny peoples from participation in the market and harm their competitive abilities. In other words,imposition of property rights facilitates cooperation and may be eugenic to some degree – which we have seen.

But when you try to institute economic redistribution the opposite occurs: evolutionarily advantageous separatist populations have the choice only of adopting the Jewish and Chinese diasporic strategies, and abandoning traditional land-holder morality, or of being the subjects of conquest by rates of dysgenic competitors now funded by that redistribution. (Which we see now worldwide.) So while law makes cooperation possible as we increasingly impose a uniform standard, and while religion makes war at scale possible, macro economics across heterogeneous groups makes dysgenia possible, and nothing else.

AUSTRIAN ECON: MORAL ECONOMICS AT MAXIMUM SCALE

Austrian economics then, is the study of moral economics at maximum scales before the return on economic policy is negative: nation states. And Keynesian macro is the justification for immoral economics (the imposition of rule by consumption, credit and interest) for the purpose of conquest, just as monotheistic religion was developed for the purpose of rule, conquest, and the making of war. This is a simple unavoidably proposition without possibility of refutation.

The question of economics is instead- how can we increase the volume of economic activity without committing immoral acts? This is what separates moral Austrian Economics from immoral correlative economics. And we must see Keynesian macro economics for what it is: a statistical religion of conquest for the purpose of increasing uniform rule by means of consumption, credit and interest, at the expense of formerly separatist gene pools.

And here is the problem; it is only in separatist gene pools that high trust society has developed – extending kinship trust to near kin who demonstrate identical morphology and norms. And economic velocity sufficient to conduct redistribution is dependent upon levels of trust that is only possible in homogenous societies. As such the Keynesian model across nation-state boundaries is destructive (as we have seen in all of world history) because it destroys the trust that make redistribution possible at homogenous-polity levels.

Truth and volition are central to western civilization and unique to western political systems. Marxist, Keynesian, Freudian, Cantorian, Misesian pseudosciences are violations of the central competitive strategy of western civilization: truth before the jury of ones peers, the hight trust that evolves from pervasive truth telling, and the velocity of economy that develops from trust.

Cheers.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute,

Kiev

See Horowitz for the best example of more colloquial language

http://www.cato-unbound.org/…/empirics-austrian-economics

Source date (UTC): 2014-12-06 05:26:00 UTC

December 6, 2014
POSITIONING AUSTRIAN ECON IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY — (Note: This is a draft tha

POSITIONING AUSTRIAN ECON IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

—

(Note: This is a draft that I am working on. And even for people who follow me, and who have philosophical training in the sciences, this may still be a challenge to digest. For those who do not follow me it may be difficult going but you will find some very useful ideas inside the cracker jack box.)

—

Lets start off with a deceptively simple, common question, that leads us to a very complex journey:

QUESTION: –“Is it a contradiction to accept Austrian theories (ie. business cycle theory) but to also accept empirical methodology?”– Robert Beattie

ANSWER: No.

THE TALE OF THREE CITIES: THE ISLAND, THE FOREST AND THE GHETTO

You will find largely vapid arguments in the Austrian community that state that in practice, Austrian economists do this or that by empirical means. Which is a meaningless argument of course. It says nothing about what is different in their discipline – they might also ride unicycles. You will find arguments that the primary difference between mainstream and Austrian Economics is the business cycle. This is also partly correct. But also that business cycles are not predictable – even though this is actually probably not true. Instead, it’s that it’s, socially and legally disruptive, and expensive to collect the data and even if we did it would influence the outcome. You will find that in some quarters Austrian economics is cast as the study of information – which is fairly accurate, since that is how Physics has also evolved as a discipline. You will find some groups saying that it is the study of human action – which again is a meaningless verbalism, as if all other fields were not also studies of man’s actions (and far better at producing results). You will find that Austrian economics is often discussed in Misesian terms. But this is nonsense as well. Mises split off from Menger’s german rationalist school and created a Jewish cosmopolitan school more reflective of Cosmopolitan political interests and as such, was more political than scientific. The propaganda campaign conducted by the Mises institute – the Middle class cosmopolitan version of the lower class Cosmopolitan Frankfurt School – by the use of the technique of Marxist Critique of heaping undue praise, and appropriating the terms “Libertarian” and “Austrian” has been marginally successful in framing the vernacular. But the fact remains that whether German rationalist or Jewish Cosmopolitan, both branches of Austrian economics attempt to study human cooperation, and reflect particularist, nationalist, if not tribal, political oppositions to anglo universalist empiricism framed in scientific language. It is this framing that separates anglo-islander, german-flatlander and Jewish-disaporic thought. Kantian rationalism is an attempt to conflate truth and duty. Jewish disasporic thought is an attempt to preserve authority and separatism. Anglo thought is best seen as an emanating from the safety of an ivory tower defended by the seas, and ignoring or at least discounting nearly infinitely the need for our political thought to assist us in group cohesion. And the German and Jewish Schools intent on preserving their group cohesion in the face of anglo universal empiricism.

But underneath those political aspirations – anglo island dweller and navy, german land holder and army, or jewish migrant ghetto dweller and trader – the scientific proposition they each intuit, and seek to use to their group’s political advantage in the enlightenment, can be found.

But we must go looking for it carefully:

POSITIONING AUSTRIANISM IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT

Austrian Economics is best understood as a higher scientific standard, wherein any instrumental observation (regular correlation), must also be operationally constructed (existentially possible) in order to be testified to as truthful. (In common vernacular:true).

A sequence of sympathetically testable human operations in economics are identical in class to a sequence of possible mathematical operations in mathematics: they determine existential possibility.

In mathematics we explore using the same operations as instruments as we do to construct our proofs: the analogy to truth in math. We use the same descriptions to explore with and demonstrate with. But that coincidence is unique to mathematics.

In the study of human cooperation that we call economics we hypothesize using many different instruments to arrive at a theory – most of which depend upon the evidence of demonstrated preference recorded as monetary transactions – but unless we can explain a theory as the RESULT of a sequence of sympathetically testable human operations, then it is not existentially possible, and as such the theory cannot be truthfully testified to be ‘true’. The impossible cannot be true.

But unlike mathematical operations in the construction of proofs, or physical transformations and measurements in physical science – a violation of which are merely an error in understanding, recording, measuring, testing, which may cause others to bear costs in order to refute – when we make untrue statements in economic policy, WE CAUSE THEFTS.

Unfortunately Mises intuits this approximate way to articulate the difference in disciplines, but as a German rationalist and Jewish hermeneuticist, rather than anglo analytic empiricist, he made a pseudoscientific proposal instead: praxeology. (Note: to qualify as pseudoscientific one must claim a discipline is a science or scientific but at the same time not follow the scientific method.)

As far as I know, in my work I have corrected this error and restated the Austrian position in ratio scientific terms as a economic operationalism: the extension of analysis beyond human scales of perception and as such the need to add the requirement for operational tests of existential possibility to ensure that verbal expressions reflect existentially possible phenomenon, and not imaginary content or assumptions.

EINSTEIN, BRIDGMAN, BROUWER, HOPPE,

Hoppe came very close to figuring it out but was too committed to imprecision of aprioism and rationalism – both of which are of limited use and only of use at human scale of perception (in reductio argument), just as Newtonian physics is limited to use at near-human scales of perception. However, when we speak of economics, we almost immediately exceed the limits of human scales of perception – which is precisely why we require the money and prices

Poincare was the most vocal critic of analogistic pseudosciences (correlation is just a form of empirical analogy not an operational description). It was Einstein who demonstrated that apriorism was dead by showing that if we cannot depend upon such basic premises as time and length, then we can depend upon no premises for the purpose of deducing apriori statements whatsoever. And next, Bridgman, Brouwer, and Bishop then explained why we cannot depend upon premises: because only a sequence of operations (and measures) expose changes in the properties of premises that analogies (words) obscure and imply are constant. In other words, terms refer to meaning (analogy) and operations refer to reality (truth). However, the human mind, which evolved reason and language together, cannot remember or manipulate long strings of operations, so we must reduce long strings of operations to analogies (words) which we remember by virtue of association(meaning), and verify those reductions of operations(and measurements) to words, whenever the scale (context) of the general rule (statement in words) changes.

So for those of us that correctly intuit that something is immoral and wrong with Keyesian and New-Keynesian macro, we are partly right: correlative economics was expressly invented to obscure the systems of redistribution and theft that such policies institute and perpetuate. Analogies, even if they are empirically statistical or rational and therefore verbal analogies, are still merely analogies, and only operations can be demonstrated to be true for more than trivial theories within the very limited human scales of perception.

Analogies are good for the transfer of meaning – and to some degree they are necessary for the purpose of condensing into the verbal and mental equivalent of functions that which is too complex to understand as a series of operations (counting numbers and the square root of two are the most obvious examples). But analogies are not the same as truths, any more than poetry is the same as scientific recipe, or the same as adding colorful and illustrious details for the purpose of entertainment on a witness stand is telling the truth.

The only possible means of knowing whether our analogous words, have exceeded the bounds of their construction, is by testing their construction by operationalist means – operations and measures.

Austrian economics then asks us, as does intuitionism and construction in mathematics, and operationalism in science, and operationism in psychology, to test whether a economic propositions are open to operational construction: whether they are decidable propositions by an actor given the information he is exposed to in real time.

We do not require external instrumentation to test whether propositions are rational for an actor to decide, because humans are marginally indifferent in our sympathetic capacity: in other words, we are similar enough to cooperate and therefore similar enough to empathize (sympathize) with one another’s incentives. If not (as our ape relatives often demonstrate they cannot, and our dog friends demonstrate they can) we could not cooperate. We can cooperate because we can sympathetically determine intent. As such in matters of cooperation we can sympathize with one another sufficiently to decide preferential propositions marginally indifferently. As such we are, ourselves intrinsically able to perform sympathetic tests, as well as judge an equal’s sign in mathematics, and as well as a scale in physical matters, or as well as any other instrumental measurement that we can construct.

The practitioners of science took under consideration those topics that were beyond human scale. **Science is best understood as discipline of truth telling – not a means of investigating the world. The fact that scientists had to find ways of truth telling at scale helped them develop their moral principles of truth telling that we call the scientific method. However, there is nothing particular to the study of physical phenomenon in that moral method.

The revolution in thinking that we learned from science after the various revolutions in scale that occurred in the 1800’s, was that we must place a higher constraint upon truth telling in social matters for large populations outside of the family and tribe, just as we had placed a higher standard upon truth telling in the physical sciences when the scale also exceeded our human perceptions.

MORALS RULES AS AVAILABLE AS OPERATIONS

Why? Because the operations (moral rules) in each population differ according to necessity, accident and intent. But most importantly, the moral rules in each population reflect their group’s competitive strategies.

Loosely this means that macro economic policy can be practiced at most across a heterogeneous people, otherwise, it is a surreptitious invisible means of conducting genetic warfare by redistributing wealth between competing families and tribes.) Only operational analysis of MORALS will make this evident. And this insight is why I have argued for the past decade that economics as practiced is an immoral discipline.

There are limits to all general rules when scale is exceeded. In the case of economics, the use of policy beyond the nation-state is immoral-in-fact because consequences of conquest via consumption credit and interest; but it is also immoral in the sense that we do not analyze the operations that are changed by its implementation – the extant moral codes and their consequences. Nor do we analyze the normative or human capital changes that occur as a result of our actions. In the case of the west we have undermined our ancient moral codes as well as our demographics – Keynesian induced consumption is suicidal. We enjoy consumption, but we enjoy narcotics drugs and alchohol. Whether we enjoy something is not a measure in and of itself. It means only that we have found a means of producing a chemical reaction in our bodies.

THE IMPOSITION OF RULE

The counter proposition is that we evolved and imposed laws and religions to unite peoples, and are now evolving economics (rule by consumption, credit and interest) to unite peoples. But the uniting of peoples is only beneficial for the conduct of warfare – and it is demonstrably dysgenic, since only separatist peoples appear to evolve above the median. Fiat money, the nation state, the empire, evolved for the purpose of war making:conquest.

When you are trying to institute property rights so that people can cooperate, then that is beneficial for those with potential, and only in marginal cases does it deny peoples from participation in the market and harm their competitive abilities. In other words,imposition of property rights facilitates cooperation and may be eugenic to some degree – which we have seen.

But when you try to institute economic redistribution the opposite occurs: evolutionarily advantageous separatist populations have the choice only of adopting the Jewish and Chinese diasporic strategies, and abandoning traditional land-holder morality, or of being the subjects of conquest by rates of dysgenic competitors now funded by that redistribution. (Which we see now worldwide.) So while law makes cooperation possible as we increasingly impose a uniform standard, and while religion makes war at scale possible, macro economics across heterogeneous groups makes dysgenia possible, and nothing else.

AUSTRIAN ECON: MORAL ECONOMICS AT MAXIMUM SCALE

Austrian economics then, is the study of moral economics at maximum scales before the return on economic policy is negative: nation states. And Keynesian macro is the justification for immoral economics (the imposition of rule by consumption, credit and interest) for the purpose of conquest, just as monotheistic religion was developed for the purpose of rule, conquest, and the making of war. This is a simple unavoidably proposition without possibility of refutation.

The question of economics is instead- how can we increase the volume of economic activity without committing immoral acts? This is what separates moral Austrian Economics from immoral correlative economics. And we must see Keynesian macro economics for what it is: a statistical religion of conquest for the purpose of increasing uniform rule by means of consumption, credit and interest, at the expense of formerly separatist gene pools.

And here is the problem; it is only in separatist gene pools that high trust society has developed – extending kinship trust to near kin who demonstrate identical morphology and norms. And economic velocity sufficient to conduct redistribution is dependent upon levels of trust that is only possible in homogenous societies. As such the Keynesian model across nation-state boundaries is destructive (as we have seen in all of world history) because it destroys the trust that make redistribution possible at homogenous-polity levels.

Truth and volition are central to western civilization and unique to western political systems. Marxist, Keynesian, Freudian, Cantorian, Misesian pseudosciences are violations of the central competitive strategy of western civilization: truth before the jury of ones peers, the hight trust that evolves from pervasive truth telling, and the velocity of economy that develops from trust.

Cheers.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute,

Kiev

Note: (The net is that we would all be better off if we just honestly pursued the scientific truth rather than invented universalism(error), rationalism (justification), and cosmopolitanism (pseudoscience), as pretenses in vain attempts to suggest that our means of group competition should be adopted as the universal standard, rater than that the universal standard is voluntary exchange, and that we remain, as always, competitors in commerce rather than competitors in religion and war.)

See Horowitz for the best example of more colloquial language

http://www.cato-unbound.org/…/empirics-austrian-economics

Source date (UTC): 2014-12-06 05:24:00 UTC

December 6, 2014