(Draft: I have almost got this worked out. Not quite. But almost) If you believe that voluntary exchange is the test of moral action, then it’s only logical that you follow that reasoning through to its logical consequence: that property rights are obtained by exchanging them with one another; and that in order to exchange those rights, voluntarily, one must possess an incentive to do so – or at least, no disincentive not to. Since property rights describe prohibitions on involuntary transfer of property on a scale from the very basic forms of: murder, violence, destruction and theft, to the more complex forms of theft by fraud, omission, obscurantism, impediment, externalization, free riding, rent seeking, corruption, conspiracy, and conquest – each of us can grant different people different rights as we choose. And we do. We generally grant friends, family and associates greater rights, and others lesser rights, and foes none at all. The more dependent we are on members outside of the family and close relationships for our economic survival and prosperity, the more valuable is the extension of property rights to others, because those rights reduce transaction costs. In a world of shop keepers and craftsmen producing complex goods for one another, everyone has equal incentives. In a world of 50% unemployed poor 40% labor and clerical, 9% professional and executive, and 1% financial, it is very hard to see why the unemployed poor are not wiser to form some means of extraction from those with more. Trade is merely the best form of obtaining what we desire, but it is not the only. I don’t see much difference between Walter Block’s ghetto ethic justification of blackmail and the Danegeld. None at all. I don’t see any difference between profiting from the tragedy of others, and organizing an extractive state. That’s because there isn’t any difference. To demand property rights from someone without compensation is in itself, an act of attempted theft. This is not because the demand violates some abstract concept of the common good. The only common good we know of is increasing cooperation in a division of knowledge and labor while constantly suppressing free riding on others. Instead, it’s because (a) while in exchange, higher respect for property rights decreases transaction costs because it decreases risk, but also (b) the more divergent are our interests the higher the compensation each party must offer for the observation of property rights by the other. Conversely, the more identical are our interests, the lower the compensation each party must offer for the observation of property rights by the other. That is, in practice, what we humans do. In every society we know of. Ever. THE RATIONAL CHOICE TO COOPERATE If I grant you respect for property rights, don’t know why I would do that if all I was buying was protection from violence fraud and theft, and not buying trust and therefore protection from blackmail, fraud by omission, fraud by obscurantism, free riding, rent seeking, because corruption, because only the very WEAK would do that, and only out of desperation. (People of the Ghetto) I don’t really understand why I would give up the opportunity to kill, steal, enslave, or otherwise entertain myself with you if I still had to worry about your behavior. Or inversely, why would it be rational for me to grant you property rights if that meant that you could lie, cheat, deceive, engage in corruption and engage in blackmail? The assumption of humility necessary for us to abandon violence and enter into debate; or the necessary grace we must display in our homogenous polity most of which is an extended family, is, as Hoppe shows in Argumentation, based upon the prior assumption of the grant of property rights. However, we should not assume that the consequence is the cause: we only grant each other the grace and humility because we have already agreed to put away our violence, deception and coercion. But for what reason have we all, given our different talents, numbers, and tribal abilities, chosen to grant one another those rights in the first place? Trust. Trust reduces transaction costs and the velocity of production. The division of labor saves time an increases velocity. Trust saves time and therefore increases velocity. It is possible to possess a division of labor in a low trust society, but it’s velocity (wealth) will be limited. Whereas, if one increases trust and reduces transaction costs and that group will outcompete all other groups with less trust. We have freed up man from physical labor. POLITICS: EXTENDING IN-GROUP SUPPRESSION TO OUT-GROUP MEMBERS The problem of politics, is providing an institutional means by which to accomplish this goal while preserving the low transaction costs of the high trust society. The problem for human’s evolutionary psychology was the balance between free riding and cooperation. The problem we face in our institutions is conducting that balance between free riding and cooperation. ALL our advances in cooperation: morality, the division of labor, law, money, prices, contracts, interest, accounting – all of them – are extensions of our ability to cooperate in larger numbers while sensing and perceiving free riding. So if we no longer have common interests in the preservation of property rights against the monopoly state, we must purchase that common interest in the preservation of property rights and diminishing the monopoly state, by paying those who have LESS interest in preserving those rights to police those rights. Depriving those who do not respect or police property of that payment. And forcing restitution, punishing, ostracizing, and if necessary, exterminating those people who persist in violating property rights. That payment is moral, because it is a voluntary exchange. Asking those with no rational interest in liberty to choose self deprivation rather than engaging in statism is not only irrational, and immoral, but it’s a use of obscurant language to conduct theft by fraud. We can either break into a multitude of small communities with heterogenous sets of property rights, or we can pay large communities (large markets) to participate in the formation and preservation of property rights. But we must abandon the obscurantist, fraudulent, parasitic lie of Rothbardian ghetto ethics to do it. The source of liberty is the organized application of violence by a minority willing to pay the high price of suppressing all free riding in all its forms from a population in exchange for property rights. What remains at the end of that suppression is some system of property rights. The highest form of suppression eliminates the need for the state entirely. But it requires we suppress every single means of involuntary extraction from others. THE EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VALUE OF INDIVIDUALS In a heterogeneous polity that makes use of natural sources of energy to replace labor, and that uses technology to replace clerical work, the vast majority of people serve only three functions: 1) as consumers; 2) as police of property in all its forms; 3) to provide care of the commons; 4) to provide care and service for others. The work of production has increasingly fallen to a minority. But the organization of voluntary and dynamic production, and the constitution of liberty, cannot be obtained without paying them for their services, since they no longer have the opportunity to engage in worthwhile production as compensation for their policing of property, care of the commons, and service of others. If any member of the population chooses to police, care, and serve then they are due dividends from production. Otherwise they are merely slaves.
Form: Full Essay
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The Aristocratic Ethic Of Voluntary Exchange. (BHL Part 2)
(Draft: I have almost got this worked out. Not quite. But almost) If you believe that voluntary exchange is the test of moral action, then it’s only logical that you follow that reasoning through to its logical consequence: that property rights are obtained by exchanging them with one another; and that in order to exchange those rights, voluntarily, one must possess an incentive to do so – or at least, no disincentive not to. Since property rights describe prohibitions on involuntary transfer of property on a scale from the very basic forms of: murder, violence, destruction and theft, to the more complex forms of theft by fraud, omission, obscurantism, impediment, externalization, free riding, rent seeking, corruption, conspiracy, and conquest – each of us can grant different people different rights as we choose. And we do. We generally grant friends, family and associates greater rights, and others lesser rights, and foes none at all. The more dependent we are on members outside of the family and close relationships for our economic survival and prosperity, the more valuable is the extension of property rights to others, because those rights reduce transaction costs. In a world of shop keepers and craftsmen producing complex goods for one another, everyone has equal incentives. In a world of 50% unemployed poor 40% labor and clerical, 9% professional and executive, and 1% financial, it is very hard to see why the unemployed poor are not wiser to form some means of extraction from those with more. Trade is merely the best form of obtaining what we desire, but it is not the only. I don’t see much difference between Walter Block’s ghetto ethic justification of blackmail and the Danegeld. None at all. I don’t see any difference between profiting from the tragedy of others, and organizing an extractive state. That’s because there isn’t any difference. To demand property rights from someone without compensation is in itself, an act of attempted theft. This is not because the demand violates some abstract concept of the common good. The only common good we know of is increasing cooperation in a division of knowledge and labor while constantly suppressing free riding on others. Instead, it’s because (a) while in exchange, higher respect for property rights decreases transaction costs because it decreases risk, but also (b) the more divergent are our interests the higher the compensation each party must offer for the observation of property rights by the other. Conversely, the more identical are our interests, the lower the compensation each party must offer for the observation of property rights by the other. That is, in practice, what we humans do. In every society we know of. Ever. THE RATIONAL CHOICE TO COOPERATE If I grant you respect for property rights, don’t know why I would do that if all I was buying was protection from violence fraud and theft, and not buying trust and therefore protection from blackmail, fraud by omission, fraud by obscurantism, free riding, rent seeking, because corruption, because only the very WEAK would do that, and only out of desperation. (People of the Ghetto) I don’t really understand why I would give up the opportunity to kill, steal, enslave, or otherwise entertain myself with you if I still had to worry about your behavior. Or inversely, why would it be rational for me to grant you property rights if that meant that you could lie, cheat, deceive, engage in corruption and engage in blackmail? The assumption of humility necessary for us to abandon violence and enter into debate; or the necessary grace we must display in our homogenous polity most of which is an extended family, is, as Hoppe shows in Argumentation, based upon the prior assumption of the grant of property rights. However, we should not assume that the consequence is the cause: we only grant each other the grace and humility because we have already agreed to put away our violence, deception and coercion. But for what reason have we all, given our different talents, numbers, and tribal abilities, chosen to grant one another those rights in the first place? Trust. Trust reduces transaction costs and the velocity of production. The division of labor saves time an increases velocity. Trust saves time and therefore increases velocity. It is possible to possess a division of labor in a low trust society, but it’s velocity (wealth) will be limited. Whereas, if one increases trust and reduces transaction costs and that group will outcompete all other groups with less trust. We have freed up man from physical labor. POLITICS: EXTENDING IN-GROUP SUPPRESSION TO OUT-GROUP MEMBERS The problem of politics, is providing an institutional means by which to accomplish this goal while preserving the low transaction costs of the high trust society. The problem for human’s evolutionary psychology was the balance between free riding and cooperation. The problem we face in our institutions is conducting that balance between free riding and cooperation. ALL our advances in cooperation: morality, the division of labor, law, money, prices, contracts, interest, accounting – all of them – are extensions of our ability to cooperate in larger numbers while sensing and perceiving free riding. So if we no longer have common interests in the preservation of property rights against the monopoly state, we must purchase that common interest in the preservation of property rights and diminishing the monopoly state, by paying those who have LESS interest in preserving those rights to police those rights. Depriving those who do not respect or police property of that payment. And forcing restitution, punishing, ostracizing, and if necessary, exterminating those people who persist in violating property rights. That payment is moral, because it is a voluntary exchange. Asking those with no rational interest in liberty to choose self deprivation rather than engaging in statism is not only irrational, and immoral, but it’s a use of obscurant language to conduct theft by fraud. We can either break into a multitude of small communities with heterogenous sets of property rights, or we can pay large communities (large markets) to participate in the formation and preservation of property rights. But we must abandon the obscurantist, fraudulent, parasitic lie of Rothbardian ghetto ethics to do it. The source of liberty is the organized application of violence by a minority willing to pay the high price of suppressing all free riding in all its forms from a population in exchange for property rights. What remains at the end of that suppression is some system of property rights. The highest form of suppression eliminates the need for the state entirely. But it requires we suppress every single means of involuntary extraction from others. THE EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VALUE OF INDIVIDUALS In a heterogeneous polity that makes use of natural sources of energy to replace labor, and that uses technology to replace clerical work, the vast majority of people serve only three functions: 1) as consumers; 2) as police of property in all its forms; 3) to provide care of the commons; 4) to provide care and service for others. The work of production has increasingly fallen to a minority. But the organization of voluntary and dynamic production, and the constitution of liberty, cannot be obtained without paying them for their services, since they no longer have the opportunity to engage in worthwhile production as compensation for their policing of property, care of the commons, and service of others. If any member of the population chooses to police, care, and serve then they are due dividends from production. Otherwise they are merely slaves.
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The N.A.P. Is Insufficient For Suppression Of Demand For The State – In Fact, the NAP Is “Unethical” By Definition
(I wanted to thank Jason Maher for very intelligent comments. But also to respond to criticisms, and perhaps to fill a few gaps.) This post is part of a discussion on Argumentation Ethics. 1) In that thread, my purpose was to illustrate that neither AE, nor performative contradiction, are causal arguments. However, since both correctly assume self ownership is a necessity, then that the single assumption is sufficient to deduce all of the institutional solutions that Hoppe addressed in his work. It’s weak causal argumentative support, but it demonstrates internal consistency. And, in both logic and mathematics, whenever we construct a proof, we require internal consistency. Internal consistency does not determine external correspondence. And external correspondence is the only test of ‘truth’. But his arguments are internally consistent, and that’s something that doesn’t happen very often in ethics. 2) The rest of my post (and most of my work) is designed to articulate the universally DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS demonstrated by man, and to argue how, given such a descriptive ethics, liberty can be achieved as a system of NORMATIVE ETHICS. 3) The reason this construction is necessary is to correct the FAILURE of libertarian arguments to gain political support – or even to constrain the state. Or more simply: if we have better rational and economic arguments, then why do conservatives succeed in resisting the state, but libertarians fail to resist the state? The answer is that humans vote and act, morally, not rationally. (And it’s necessary for them to do so for many reasons, not the least of which is limited cognitive ability in real time, combined with fragmentary knowledge and living in an environment surrounded by others who are engaged in limited theft and violence, but pervasive deception, fraud, obscurantism, free riding, rent seeking and conspiracy. So the purpose of my work is to attempt to correct libertarian ethics such that the failed effort to gain popular support can either be corrected by improvements to libertarian ethics such that they are preferable to a political majority, or to alter the libertarian strategy such that we abandon both the attempt to obtain a political majority (or even an effective resistance), and attempt a separate solution. The various means which I’ve attempted to suggest are too long for this forum. NOW, TO JASON’S INSIGHTFUL COMMENTS –“An interesting conceptual division of methods to nick what belongs to someone else. Mr. Doolittle’s principle argument is the the Non Aggression Principle can only deal with #1 and part of #4, but is completely powerless against #2 and #3. Specifically, he speaks of the NAP lacking a mechanism for dealing with classes 2 and 3, and even encourages them…”– You are correct. Yes. –“”Private property is contrary [to] the female reproductive strategy””– This fact may seem humorous to you but the consequences explain why the introduction of women into the voting pool has driven us consistently toward a redistributive society, despite the fact that none of such would have occurred without the introduction of women in the voting pool. (I can’t vouch for Australia because I don’t know the data, But it’s true in the states and Canada. In Canada, without the French vote, the mix would be as conservative as the united states. Which is why conservative Canadians want Quebec to secede.) The female reproductive strategy is not monogamous, but polyamorous for support and protection, but to capture the better genes she can run across from those multiple encounters. And then to retain the burden of care, but to place the burden of upkeep on the tribe. Wherever monogamous marriage (the nuclear family, or the northern european absolute nuclear family) declines women return to this strategy via proxy of the state. Property rights that accompanied animal husbandry and agrarian settlement, inverted matrilineal reproductive control, and placed reproductive control in the hands of males – something the marxists have argued against since Engels wrote his tome on it. I can go into this at depth but lets just say that the evidence is that women cause the change in property rights policy and that they demonstrate a return to community property in their voting patterns. –“NAP covers externalities easily… complete allocation of private property rights to avoid “tragedy of the commons” and then allowing people to sue for damage to their property.”– –“NAP covers fraud too since it is basically theft through breach of contract.”– –“NAP doesn’t cover asymmetric information to the degree that it simply means two different people have different information. But having different information isn’t a property rights violation and is simply the state of nature. It is impossible and absurd to talk about all people in the world having identical information.”– Individual contracts place an extremely high transaction cost on all exchanges. So if you are one of the owners of an enormous shopping mall, and you rent space for stores to merchants, and you want to maximize your revenue, will you, or will you not, want to decrease transaction costs? People are entirely cognizant of transaction costs. The high trust society eliminates them, by a normative prohibition on all involuntary transfers, not just those transfers that constitute aggression. Further, no society exists that has property rights and liberty as we know it EXCEPT where there has been a near prohibition on all involuntary transfers – because it is the only way to reduce demand for the state: demand for the mall owners so to speak, to reduce transaction costs. We must remember that for humans, loss aversion, and altruistic punishment are MORE ACTIVATING (we are more passionate about them) than self interest. So all our decisions are asymmetrically weighted against risk. So the libertarian errors are those of incorrect attribution of praxeological analysis to transactions. And the reason for that praxeological error is that mises and rothbard both made the error of using commodity purchases and ordinal preferences, where commodity purchases are marginally indifferent except on price, and where human differences are not ordinal but a network, and where that network demonstrates necessary biases against risk and necessary cooperative biases that punish offenders> Think of it this way. If we did not operate by such rules, then transaction costs would be infinite, and we would not exist. It is not possible for humans to function without these prohibitions. It is non logical for libertarians to rely on the NAP, which structurally contains errors that are impossible for humans to cooperate using. I am aware that it is quite unlikely that you will, at first reading, drop your high investment in rothbardian and misesian logic. And I suspect that this one argument is insufficient to convince you. But you will have a very hard time both rationally and empirically circumventing that logic. So it is not that I err, or fail to grasp, or have not made sufficient efforts in this area of inquiry. It is that I am not trying to JUSTIFY liberty, but instead am trying to explain how to obtain it as a preference, because it is not justifiable. and it is not justifiable because while liberty is in our reproductive interests. It is not in the reproductive interests of all. Or even the majority. —“And perhaps more importantly, the NAP is not the only basis for anarchy. David Friedman is one of the most famous living anarchists and he (and I) argue based on consequences, not NAP.”— Well, I never made that statement. I’m making the statement that NAP is insufficient for DESCRIBING what people do. And that the weakness of the NAP explains why we fail to understand why even those people who prefer government out of their lives, demonstrate a demand for government under conditions that the NAP prescribes. The NAP only prohibits crime. It does not prohibit unethical or immoral conduct. To obtain voluntary participation you must forbid both unethical and immoral conduct, otherwise individuals will demand intervention to prohibit it. By having the state, a population trades free riding, theft, unethical and immoral conduct that they cannot avoid for rent seeking and corruption that they can avoid. You cannot eliminate rent seeking and corruption via the state without also retaining the prohibition on unethical and immoral actions suppressed by the state. Its non logical. I am trying to reform libertarianism to repair the errors in Rothbardian ethics in order to explain why we lose. And the NAP is one of the reasons that we lose: because it prohibits criminality but not unethical or immoral behavior. And if the NAP fails to prohibit unethical and immoral behavior, and If we claim to have a lock on ethics, then what is the basis for that claim? If we have a lock on ethics, then why do we fail? Are humans naturally unethical? That would mean that natural law was a false basis for liberty. This is because aggression is not the test of the ethics of property. It is only the test of criminality. Ethical constraint and moral constraint are place higher demands on property rights. Blackmail, as Rothbard argues, is not a violation of the NAP. It is a voluntary exchange. What is it about blackmail that we can say is moral or ethical? It should be clear at this point that the NAP is not a test of ethical or moral behavior, but only of criminal behavior. THE NAP IS LESS OF A REASON FOR A VOLUNTARY SOCIETY The NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society if we merely exchange free riding, rent seeking and corruption via the state, which we can both avoid and which we rarely experience, for unethical and immoral behavior which is pervasive in society, and we cannot avoid or fail to experience. Praxeology demands that we attribute rational choice to individuals. It’s non-praxeological to assert that the exchange of pervasive and daily thefts is preferable to infrequent and invisible thefts. If only for the transaction costs to each of us. So no, the NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society. People see the state, rationally, as the lesser evil between pervasive criminality, unethical behavior, and immoral behavior. They willingly trade rent seeking and corruption that they cannot see for criminality, unethical, and immoral behavior. And they are rightly rational to do so. So what is the means by which we eliminate the state’s free riding, rent seeking and corruption, while also prohibiting the criminal, unethical, and immoral? What is the basis for property rights if we must prohibit the criminal, unethical, immoral, AND the CORRUPT? NAP does not tell us this. Our reliance on the argumentative value of the NAP is the reason we fail. The NAP is in fact a RECIPE FOR FAILURE, because it is an unethical and immoral standard for the construction of property rights, norms and the common law. THE NAP IS ONE OF THE REAONS WE FAIL. Without prior promise of constraint of blackmail, we cannot reduce demand for the state. Private Property only developed where unethical and immoral conduct was suppressed at every possible level. The EVIDENCE is that the demand for private property only exists in the suppression of immoral and unethical conduct. Criminality is insufficient. So it’s not RATIONAL to argue that the NAP is sufficient. The trust necessary for private property must exist PRIOR to the demand for private property, and the reduction of demand for the state. Further, it’s not evident (it’s contrary to the evidence) that the market suppresses unethical and immoral behavior. Just the opposite. The expansion of the market INCREASES opportunity for immoral and unethical behavior. Immoral and unethical behavior is cheaper than honest ethical and moral behavior, which imposes costs on the participants. Property rights are a cost. Every time they are respected. Forgoing those opportunities requires trust. The result of forgoing opportunities and TRUST creates property rights. Not the other way around. Private property does not create trust. Once you suppress criminal, unethical and immoral behavior, the only POSSIBLE means of interaction is via private property. We cannot confuse cause and consequence. TRUST FIRST. PROPERTY SECOND. STATE LAST. So, again, trust (willingness to take risks / low transaction cost exchange) requires the suppression of criminal, unethical and immoral behavior. And the trust that appears to be sufficient for demand for private property requires near total suppression of unethical behavior. We must suppress even MORE unethical and rent seeking and corrupt behavior in order to reduce demand for the state. If we are to define property rights as the basis of a moral and peaceful society, then what is the definition of property rights that prohibits not only criminal behavior (the NAP) but also unethical, immoral, as well as free riding, rent seeking, and corruption? I think that it looks like the state would be the natural means of transforming criminal, unethical, immoral behavior into free riding, rent seeking and corruption in an effort to decrease transaction costs. Now, how do we FURTHER suppress free riding, rent seeking and corruption without the state? Privatization. But for privatization we must have a set of property rights that increase suppression of free riding, rent seeking and corruption, without sacrificing the reason for the state: suppression of unethical and immoral behavior. It’s non logical to ask people to yet bear again that which they have rid themselves of, by clear and demonstrated preference, almost universally. People have already demonstrated that they are willing to trade unethical and immoral behavior, for corrupt and rent seeking behavior. And they were rational to do so. You cannot tell them that they are gaining something by simply reverting them to a previous state that they have already rejected. We can only offer them something BETTER. Which is to ALSO prohibit rent seeking and corruption AS WELL as unethical and immoral behavior. So no. The NAP was a terrible mistake for the liberty movement. It was tragic. I understand why they resorted to ghetto ethics, because they didn’t understand where liberty and the high trust society came from. But now that we do (or at least I do) we must base any argument that we deem ethically superior on a set of property rights that is a net gain, not a net loss, for the population. This is very difficult for Rothbardians to swallow, but pride and personal investment in a failed ideology are less important than the achievement of freedom.
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Reforming Libertarian Ethics
FAIR WARNING (I dont engage in justification. I try to determine the truth. And so if you manage to get through this little essay, you might not emerge with your high investment in rothbardian libertarianism intact.) PART 1 THE AXIOM OF SELF OWNERSHIP Regarding: “…the self-ownership axiom is the only one of those under consideration that is sound…” Ethical statements cannot be ‘sound’ since that’s an allegorical and untestable statement. The testable term is ‘internally consistent’. However internal consistency (error free construction) doesn’t tell us anything about external correspondence (truth). Instead, ethical statements must adhere to a higher standard of argument than the internally consistent: Ethical arguments must be: a) preferable (to their absence) b) necessary c) sufficient d) possible e) durable (survivable over time) How does the self ownership Axiom survive this test? a) The S.O. axiom Is probably preferable (I can’t imagine a rational creature for whom it wouldn’t be preferable. I think it’s a precondition of autonomous sentience. So I have to stipulate that while I can’t determine the preferences of others, that it is hard for me to understand how it isn’t preferable for any being for whom action in real time is necessary for survival.) b) it may or may not be sufficient; c) it is certainly possible since it’s demonstrably extant; d) it is rationally, praxeologically, and demonstrably durable. Self Ownership and the NAP are very hard to argue with, except with regard to sufficiency. Are Self Ownership, Private Property, and NAP sufficient? They are sufficient for the purposes that Hoppe has put them to: which is the ability solve (almost) all problems of human cooperation while relying on self ownership, private property, and NAP. The questions are: a) whether the these rules are sufficient to obtain sufficient voluntary adoption and adherence such that this libertarian state of affairs are possible? b) is there an alternative axiom or set of axioms that permits the deduction of the various solutions to voluntary cooperation? c) is there a superior alternative axiom or set of axioms that permit the deduction of the various solutions to the problem of liberty (voluntary cooperation). It would be unscientific to suggest that no other argument exists other than {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. (Self ownership, Private Property, Homesteading, Voluntary Exchange and Non Aggression). It is also pretty hard to imagine something more compact with the same explanatory power. Why? Because these three statements: 1) Metaphysics: Self Ownership:(Existence); 2) Epistemology: Private Property with Homesteading and Voluntary Exchange :(Scope); 3) Ethics: NonAggressionPrinciple:(Test); …are pretty narrow requirements for an axiomatic system. In fact, one statement per major domain of philosophy is so compact that it’s pretty hard to argue that it can be improved upon. Instead, it’s actually kind of awe-inspiring that all of the philosophy of human cooperation can be reduced to just these three statements. Even better, technically all five philosophical domains are answered by SO,PP+H+VE,NAP: 4) Politics: Politics is solved by market, anarchy and voluntary insurance organizations. 5) Aesthetics: Aesthetics is satisfied by the fact that we stipulate that liberty is desirable. So, if you’re asking the question, ‘how can we cooperate peacefully and voluntarily?’ and Hoppe has demonstrated that from these simple axioms we can cooperate peacefully and voluntarily, then it isn’t NECESSARY to devise an alternative axiomatic system. (I”m not even sure it’s helpful) It may be accurate to state that we not claim (actually, that **HE** not claim) no other set of statements would be superior (even if it is improbable) . But that is not to say that it is necessary, since he has demonstrated them to be sufficient for the deduction of all the institutions formal and informal for a voluntary system of cooperation. WEAKNESSES? SUFFICIENCY. (Now, lest you assume I am an apologist, I’ll take this a little farther.) “BUT” (and it’s a big but) is the set {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} sufficient for voluntary and therefore preferential adoption of such set, either empirically (historically) or rationally (praxeologically)? And I think that is probably where it fails to sustain scrutiny, because we can demonstrate that the demand for external intervention (the state) does not decrease sufficiently in any population, to permit the rational and praxeologically testable, preferential and demonstrably voluntary, adoption of anarchy, in any population by other than by a tiny minority – at least as it stands. So while {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} may be sufficient for the DEDUCTION of all means of voluntary cooperation, it does not provide sufficient INCENTIVE to reduce demand for external (state) intervention by a sufficient body of the population such that the a self-interested monopoly bureaucracy is not necessary for either: (a) the systematic enforcement, of private property for the prevention of free riding, theft and violence, or; (b) necessary for the systematic violation of private property to compensate for predation, as well as preventing theft and violence. Again, it appears that {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} is sufficient for deduction of the informal and formal institutions of voluntary cooperation, but provides an insufficient incentive for the voluntary adoption of informal and informal institutions of voluntary cooperation. In that case, if the incentives are insufficient, then we have two possible means of constructing anarchy under {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}: (i) involuntary coercion under threat of boycott, ostracization, and/or threat of violence. (ii) improvement of incentives such that anarchy is voluntarily adoptable (praxeologically possible). (iii) A combination of both. So, let us see if either or both solutions are possible or necessary. HISTORY History tells us that liberty only exists where nearly all involuntary transfers of property are prohibited – including those which are not visible or known of. And the few circumstances where all involuntary transfers of property were prohibited was limited to european warriors who granted each other prohibition on involuntary transfer (property rights) in exchange for military service. Property rights were a ‘right’ that was obtained in a contract for voluntary exchange. The incentive to gain access to the privilege of private property was one that was both materially, and reproductively advantageous. These property rights were an artifact of the accumulation of wealth first in simple goods, cattle and horses, later in land and built capital. Fighters who took risks, kept their winnings. Later, all free men kept their property. Later under manorialism and agrarian farming, a married couple was needed for the rental of land. This delayed marriage, and forced the absolute nuclear family that we understand today. When the church sought to break up the large landholders they interfered with inheritance rights, which are the source of the family structure, and consequently, the source of moral code variation, throughout the world. To break up the families they prohibited inbreeding out to as many as eight or even twelve generations, and granted women property rights. The combination of property rights for all, the near elimination of free riding, even by family members (offspring), and the persistence of the militia as a fighting force, created the high trust universal social order we call the protestant ethic. The enlightenment’s intellectual effort was an experiment in both justifying the middle class seizure of political power, and transferring the rights of the upper and ‘middle’ classes (small business owners : ie: farmers) to all land holders. The culmination of this experiment was the near prohibition on involuntary transfers that was embodied in the American Constitution. The aristocracy of everyone who had a stake in the preservation of property rights. (Unfortunately, that experiment has shown that universal enfranchisement, especially the enfranchisement of women, was incompatible with liberty, because participatory government by those whose interest is to seek rents and free riding, is an organized means of disempowering armed property owners, and systematically removing their property rights. Thereby returning us to the consanguineous or serial-marriage family structure in corporate (state) form. LIBERTARIAN ETHICS: NECESSITY. BUT SUFFICIENCY? It’s kind of hard to disagree with libertarian ethics as stated in {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. If only because they’re necessary, and the alternative to disagreeing with libertarian ethics, is demonstrably, a nearly universally undesirable state of affairs involving constant property violations (theft and violence) that make cooperation in a division of labor all but impossible – even among members of a consanguineous community of primitive hunter gatherers it may be beneficial. Lets look at classes of involuntary transfers of property as people demonstrate them: (1) Criminal statements are those that involve violence and theft. (2) Ethical statements are those which prohibit involuntary transfer of property by asymmetry of information between those internal to the action. (3) Moral statements are those which by definition apply to unknown persons external to the action: anonymous involuntary transfers of property. (4) Conspiratorial Statements: Statements of Political Morality (conspiracy) are those which prevent the organized and systemic involuntary transfer of property, whether criminal, ethical, or moral. The NAP only has a mechanism for fairly simple, obvious property violations: criminal violence and theft of class (1) The NAP has no mechanism for any of class (2) or class (3), and arguably sanctions and encourages these involuntary transfers by NOT preventing them. The NAP prevents class (1) PORTIONS of class (4), but it does not prohibit class (2) and (3) portions of class (4). Now, if you are a member of the majority tribe, you will suppress (1) to increase trust and therefore productivity. But if you are an extractive minority tribe without political power, you may in fact prefer to preserve (1) as a means of competing with and draining the majority of resources. We libertarians tend to laud intersubjectively verifiable actions. But again, those actions that are intersubjectively verifiable may be visible, they may be verifiable. But they are trivially primitive in scope because they are limited to merely theft and violence – and only to fraud where it is specifically defended against by written warranty in advance. As such intersubjective verifiability is, like the NAP too simple a test for the suppression of ethical and moral violations that are required for the development of sufficient trust that liberty can exist by voluntary adoption, because the demand for a third party to prevent these transgressions by way of law-making, and institutional formation, is all but eliminated. The NAP is insufficient criteria for the suppression of sufficient involuntary transfers of property to counter the demonstrated universal human disdain for ‘cheating’. This is because private property open to intersubjective verifiability is insufficient a description for the types of property people demonstrate that they TREAT as their property. So it is one thing to state that we can deduce all necessary formal and informal institutions for the support of private property from the {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. It is another to state that we can either deduce sufficient institutions formal and informal, or create sufficient incentives for the voluntary adoption of those institutions, from {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. Just as it is demonstrable both rationally and empirically that socialism is impossible because of the impossibility of twin problems of economic calculation, and the absence of incentives, we also must observe that the set {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} is demonstrably impossible because of the impossibility of suppressing sufficient cheating that people will possess the rational incentives, because planning and organizing are higher risk and more expensive under a low trust ethic, to adopt {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. This is a very damning criticism of the sufficiency of {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. Or correctly stated, it is a just as damning and inescapable criticism of the NAP, as economic calculation and incentives were for the socialist means of production. Once you understand this you will realize that {SO,PP+H+VE} survive, but that {NAP} is as great a logical failure as was the socialist means of production. It is non rational to ask humans to adopt the NAP since it suppresses crime, but not ethical, moral, and arguably, not even conspiratorial, violations of one’s property rights, as people demonstrate their understanding of property rights by their behavior. PART 2: THE RESISTANCE TO LIBERTY: GENDERS, RACES, CLASSES, AND AGES: VOLUNTARY COOPERATION, COMPETITIVENESS AND PROPORTIONALITY. (undone) =================== POST SCRIPT 1 ————– (a) the market cannot suppress sufficient ‘cheating’ that property rights will be willingly given in exchange (respected) by masses of individuals; nor that the demand for third party intervention (government) will be suppressed as a substitute for failure to suppress ‘cheating’. Nor that those who specialize in organizing against the market will forgo their opportunity to exploit this demand for intervention. (b) the source of property rights (and liberty as we know it) was not natural, was the product of a combination of the organized application of violence to both concentrate capital, and to suppress all forms of theft, cheating and free riding; as well as certain rare genetic biases in the west, the fertility and water availability of land, the hostile winters, and forcible destruction of familialism and tribalism by the church, so that it could interfere with inheritance practices and purchase land from the large land holders. (c) Given the diversity of reproductive strategies, and the different capabilities of the classes, private property is undesirable and poses a threat to many of their reproductive abilities. We are no longer equal enough, as we were under agrarianism and animal husbandry, that the marginal difference in our abilities is neutralized by mental and emotional discipline. While most humans can be disciplined and tamed for farm labor, not all humans can be taught to calculate using abstract concepts. As such the division of knowledge and labor provides sufficiently asymmetric rewards that the incentive to conform to property rights is non-rational for most actors. (d) Hoppe correctly deduced that from the institution of private property we can in fact solve all institutional problems necessary for cooperation at scale in a complex division of knowledge and labor. Unfortunately, this state of affairs is undesirable by a majority of the population whose reproductive strategies rely on tactics outside of voluntary cooperation in the market, for success. (e) Private property is contrary the the female reproductive strategy. Nuclear marriage is the optimum compromise between male and female reproductive differences. (f) Therefore it is praxeologically non-rational, and anti-scientific, to suggest that liberty will be willingly adopted without the forcible suppression of the reproductive ability of the lower classes, and the ability of women to return to their natural reproductive bias, by restoring communal property via the state. (g) As such, there are three options available to those of us who desire liberty, that we may employ one or all of: i) forcible application of organize violence to re-obtain our liberty. ii) modification of the ethics of liberty to suppress sufficient means of ‘cheating’ that demand for third party intervention (the state) will be diminished. iii) extension of the hoppeian model of competing private institutions to preserve his solution to the problem of monopoly bureaucracy, yet permit the resolution of reproductive differences between classes which cannot be solved by individual action in the market, and only collective action via organizational proxies. At my present level of skill I believe this is about as simply as I can articulate the idea. Rothbard used the low trust of the ghetto, and it was a failure because, regardless of rothbard’s arguments, any person from a high trust society will reject rothbardian ethics as immoral. Hoppe used the high trust of the homogenous polity to restore the city state, but did not answer the problem of incentives in the absence of the absolute nuclear family. My solution is to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the polity and to attempt to offer ethical and institutional solutions to the problem of cooperation in heterogeneous polities. Because what we are doing demonstrably hasn’t succeeded, and with what we have learnd over the past twenty years about human cognitive and gentic biases, it is non-rational to think that we have provided sufficient incentives for the voluntary adoption of property rights (and in particular, high trust property rights, not the low trust property rights of rothbard). Pretty damning criticism I think. But we need to keep advancing our philosophy until we find an answer. My answer might not be right, but it is likely to be less wrong. Cheers. ————- POST SCRIPT 2 ————- One last simple fact: people demonstrate that they are willing to pay something like twice as much to punish a cheater as they are desirous of personal gain. (at least in-group). This means that decisions of rational actors are morally non-netural, and this further erodes the misesian and rothbardian ordinality of preferences, as well as the value of prices, as well as the argument to indifference in all transactions. Prices are less important than signals and far less important than the suppression of cheating. If you combine this with both differences in reproductive strategies and the different abilities of the classes, then the argument that prices (and economics) are more material than morals falls. People will act morally if you suppress immorality well enough. but since their dislike of immorality is higher than their desire for other satisfactions, you must suppress far more than rothbard’s ghetto ethics if you want the obtain even basic private property rights. And you must suppress nearly all cheating if you want to eliminate the demand for government. As far as we know, this level of suppression of cheating can only be accomplished in a small homogenous outbred polity. (scandinavia). And it is possible that it is a genetic bias (I am not sold on that). (I think I went to far again too fast with that bit… sorry.) ———— POST SCRIPT 3 ———— One more try at the elevator speech. To reduce the demand for intervention, and obtain property right voluntarily, the standard of etics must be far and above those of the NAP. They must extend to all involuntary transfers, of all kinds, under all circumstances. and as far as I can tell, that requires the right of ostracization (exclusion). Hoppe was right so far as he took it. On everything. His generation did not have the science, so they had to rely on deduction alone. We have science. So I use it.
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Reforming Libertarian Ethics
FAIR WARNING (I dont engage in justification. I try to determine the truth. And so if you manage to get through this little essay, you might not emerge with your high investment in rothbardian libertarianism intact.) PART 1 THE AXIOM OF SELF OWNERSHIP Regarding: “…the self-ownership axiom is the only one of those under consideration that is sound…” Ethical statements cannot be ‘sound’ since that’s an allegorical and untestable statement. The testable term is ‘internally consistent’. However internal consistency (error free construction) doesn’t tell us anything about external correspondence (truth). Instead, ethical statements must adhere to a higher standard of argument than the internally consistent: Ethical arguments must be: a) preferable (to their absence) b) necessary c) sufficient d) possible e) durable (survivable over time) How does the self ownership Axiom survive this test? a) The S.O. axiom Is probably preferable (I can’t imagine a rational creature for whom it wouldn’t be preferable. I think it’s a precondition of autonomous sentience. So I have to stipulate that while I can’t determine the preferences of others, that it is hard for me to understand how it isn’t preferable for any being for whom action in real time is necessary for survival.) b) it may or may not be sufficient; c) it is certainly possible since it’s demonstrably extant; d) it is rationally, praxeologically, and demonstrably durable. Self Ownership and the NAP are very hard to argue with, except with regard to sufficiency. Are Self Ownership, Private Property, and NAP sufficient? They are sufficient for the purposes that Hoppe has put them to: which is the ability solve (almost) all problems of human cooperation while relying on self ownership, private property, and NAP. The questions are: a) whether the these rules are sufficient to obtain sufficient voluntary adoption and adherence such that this libertarian state of affairs are possible? b) is there an alternative axiom or set of axioms that permits the deduction of the various solutions to voluntary cooperation? c) is there a superior alternative axiom or set of axioms that permit the deduction of the various solutions to the problem of liberty (voluntary cooperation). It would be unscientific to suggest that no other argument exists other than {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. (Self ownership, Private Property, Homesteading, Voluntary Exchange and Non Aggression). It is also pretty hard to imagine something more compact with the same explanatory power. Why? Because these three statements: 1) Metaphysics: Self Ownership:(Existence); 2) Epistemology: Private Property with Homesteading and Voluntary Exchange :(Scope); 3) Ethics: NonAggressionPrinciple:(Test); …are pretty narrow requirements for an axiomatic system. In fact, one statement per major domain of philosophy is so compact that it’s pretty hard to argue that it can be improved upon. Instead, it’s actually kind of awe-inspiring that all of the philosophy of human cooperation can be reduced to just these three statements. Even better, technically all five philosophical domains are answered by SO,PP+H+VE,NAP: 4) Politics: Politics is solved by market, anarchy and voluntary insurance organizations. 5) Aesthetics: Aesthetics is satisfied by the fact that we stipulate that liberty is desirable. So, if you’re asking the question, ‘how can we cooperate peacefully and voluntarily?’ and Hoppe has demonstrated that from these simple axioms we can cooperate peacefully and voluntarily, then it isn’t NECESSARY to devise an alternative axiomatic system. (I”m not even sure it’s helpful) It may be accurate to state that we not claim (actually, that **HE** not claim) no other set of statements would be superior (even if it is improbable) . But that is not to say that it is necessary, since he has demonstrated them to be sufficient for the deduction of all the institutions formal and informal for a voluntary system of cooperation. WEAKNESSES? SUFFICIENCY. (Now, lest you assume I am an apologist, I’ll take this a little farther.) “BUT” (and it’s a big but) is the set {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} sufficient for voluntary and therefore preferential adoption of such set, either empirically (historically) or rationally (praxeologically)? And I think that is probably where it fails to sustain scrutiny, because we can demonstrate that the demand for external intervention (the state) does not decrease sufficiently in any population, to permit the rational and praxeologically testable, preferential and demonstrably voluntary, adoption of anarchy, in any population by other than by a tiny minority – at least as it stands. So while {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} may be sufficient for the DEDUCTION of all means of voluntary cooperation, it does not provide sufficient INCENTIVE to reduce demand for external (state) intervention by a sufficient body of the population such that the a self-interested monopoly bureaucracy is not necessary for either: (a) the systematic enforcement, of private property for the prevention of free riding, theft and violence, or; (b) necessary for the systematic violation of private property to compensate for predation, as well as preventing theft and violence. Again, it appears that {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} is sufficient for deduction of the informal and formal institutions of voluntary cooperation, but provides an insufficient incentive for the voluntary adoption of informal and informal institutions of voluntary cooperation. In that case, if the incentives are insufficient, then we have two possible means of constructing anarchy under {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}: (i) involuntary coercion under threat of boycott, ostracization, and/or threat of violence. (ii) improvement of incentives such that anarchy is voluntarily adoptable (praxeologically possible). (iii) A combination of both. So, let us see if either or both solutions are possible or necessary. HISTORY History tells us that liberty only exists where nearly all involuntary transfers of property are prohibited – including those which are not visible or known of. And the few circumstances where all involuntary transfers of property were prohibited was limited to european warriors who granted each other prohibition on involuntary transfer (property rights) in exchange for military service. Property rights were a ‘right’ that was obtained in a contract for voluntary exchange. The incentive to gain access to the privilege of private property was one that was both materially, and reproductively advantageous. These property rights were an artifact of the accumulation of wealth first in simple goods, cattle and horses, later in land and built capital. Fighters who took risks, kept their winnings. Later, all free men kept their property. Later under manorialism and agrarian farming, a married couple was needed for the rental of land. This delayed marriage, and forced the absolute nuclear family that we understand today. When the church sought to break up the large landholders they interfered with inheritance rights, which are the source of the family structure, and consequently, the source of moral code variation, throughout the world. To break up the families they prohibited inbreeding out to as many as eight or even twelve generations, and granted women property rights. The combination of property rights for all, the near elimination of free riding, even by family members (offspring), and the persistence of the militia as a fighting force, created the high trust universal social order we call the protestant ethic. The enlightenment’s intellectual effort was an experiment in both justifying the middle class seizure of political power, and transferring the rights of the upper and ‘middle’ classes (small business owners : ie: farmers) to all land holders. The culmination of this experiment was the near prohibition on involuntary transfers that was embodied in the American Constitution. The aristocracy of everyone who had a stake in the preservation of property rights. (Unfortunately, that experiment has shown that universal enfranchisement, especially the enfranchisement of women, was incompatible with liberty, because participatory government by those whose interest is to seek rents and free riding, is an organized means of disempowering armed property owners, and systematically removing their property rights. Thereby returning us to the consanguineous or serial-marriage family structure in corporate (state) form. LIBERTARIAN ETHICS: NECESSITY. BUT SUFFICIENCY? It’s kind of hard to disagree with libertarian ethics as stated in {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. If only because they’re necessary, and the alternative to disagreeing with libertarian ethics, is demonstrably, a nearly universally undesirable state of affairs involving constant property violations (theft and violence) that make cooperation in a division of labor all but impossible – even among members of a consanguineous community of primitive hunter gatherers it may be beneficial. Lets look at classes of involuntary transfers of property as people demonstrate them: (1) Criminal statements are those that involve violence and theft. (2) Ethical statements are those which prohibit involuntary transfer of property by asymmetry of information between those internal to the action. (3) Moral statements are those which by definition apply to unknown persons external to the action: anonymous involuntary transfers of property. (4) Conspiratorial Statements: Statements of Political Morality (conspiracy) are those which prevent the organized and systemic involuntary transfer of property, whether criminal, ethical, or moral. The NAP only has a mechanism for fairly simple, obvious property violations: criminal violence and theft of class (1) The NAP has no mechanism for any of class (2) or class (3), and arguably sanctions and encourages these involuntary transfers by NOT preventing them. The NAP prevents class (1) PORTIONS of class (4), but it does not prohibit class (2) and (3) portions of class (4). Now, if you are a member of the majority tribe, you will suppress (1) to increase trust and therefore productivity. But if you are an extractive minority tribe without political power, you may in fact prefer to preserve (1) as a means of competing with and draining the majority of resources. We libertarians tend to laud intersubjectively verifiable actions. But again, those actions that are intersubjectively verifiable may be visible, they may be verifiable. But they are trivially primitive in scope because they are limited to merely theft and violence – and only to fraud where it is specifically defended against by written warranty in advance. As such intersubjective verifiability is, like the NAP too simple a test for the suppression of ethical and moral violations that are required for the development of sufficient trust that liberty can exist by voluntary adoption, because the demand for a third party to prevent these transgressions by way of law-making, and institutional formation, is all but eliminated. The NAP is insufficient criteria for the suppression of sufficient involuntary transfers of property to counter the demonstrated universal human disdain for ‘cheating’. This is because private property open to intersubjective verifiability is insufficient a description for the types of property people demonstrate that they TREAT as their property. So it is one thing to state that we can deduce all necessary formal and informal institutions for the support of private property from the {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. It is another to state that we can either deduce sufficient institutions formal and informal, or create sufficient incentives for the voluntary adoption of those institutions, from {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. Just as it is demonstrable both rationally and empirically that socialism is impossible because of the impossibility of twin problems of economic calculation, and the absence of incentives, we also must observe that the set {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} is demonstrably impossible because of the impossibility of suppressing sufficient cheating that people will possess the rational incentives, because planning and organizing are higher risk and more expensive under a low trust ethic, to adopt {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. This is a very damning criticism of the sufficiency of {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. Or correctly stated, it is a just as damning and inescapable criticism of the NAP, as economic calculation and incentives were for the socialist means of production. Once you understand this you will realize that {SO,PP+H+VE} survive, but that {NAP} is as great a logical failure as was the socialist means of production. It is non rational to ask humans to adopt the NAP since it suppresses crime, but not ethical, moral, and arguably, not even conspiratorial, violations of one’s property rights, as people demonstrate their understanding of property rights by their behavior. PART 2: THE RESISTANCE TO LIBERTY: GENDERS, RACES, CLASSES, AND AGES: VOLUNTARY COOPERATION, COMPETITIVENESS AND PROPORTIONALITY. (undone) =================== POST SCRIPT 1 ————– (a) the market cannot suppress sufficient ‘cheating’ that property rights will be willingly given in exchange (respected) by masses of individuals; nor that the demand for third party intervention (government) will be suppressed as a substitute for failure to suppress ‘cheating’. Nor that those who specialize in organizing against the market will forgo their opportunity to exploit this demand for intervention. (b) the source of property rights (and liberty as we know it) was not natural, was the product of a combination of the organized application of violence to both concentrate capital, and to suppress all forms of theft, cheating and free riding; as well as certain rare genetic biases in the west, the fertility and water availability of land, the hostile winters, and forcible destruction of familialism and tribalism by the church, so that it could interfere with inheritance practices and purchase land from the large land holders. (c) Given the diversity of reproductive strategies, and the different capabilities of the classes, private property is undesirable and poses a threat to many of their reproductive abilities. We are no longer equal enough, as we were under agrarianism and animal husbandry, that the marginal difference in our abilities is neutralized by mental and emotional discipline. While most humans can be disciplined and tamed for farm labor, not all humans can be taught to calculate using abstract concepts. As such the division of knowledge and labor provides sufficiently asymmetric rewards that the incentive to conform to property rights is non-rational for most actors. (d) Hoppe correctly deduced that from the institution of private property we can in fact solve all institutional problems necessary for cooperation at scale in a complex division of knowledge and labor. Unfortunately, this state of affairs is undesirable by a majority of the population whose reproductive strategies rely on tactics outside of voluntary cooperation in the market, for success. (e) Private property is contrary the the female reproductive strategy. Nuclear marriage is the optimum compromise between male and female reproductive differences. (f) Therefore it is praxeologically non-rational, and anti-scientific, to suggest that liberty will be willingly adopted without the forcible suppression of the reproductive ability of the lower classes, and the ability of women to return to their natural reproductive bias, by restoring communal property via the state. (g) As such, there are three options available to those of us who desire liberty, that we may employ one or all of: i) forcible application of organize violence to re-obtain our liberty. ii) modification of the ethics of liberty to suppress sufficient means of ‘cheating’ that demand for third party intervention (the state) will be diminished. iii) extension of the hoppeian model of competing private institutions to preserve his solution to the problem of monopoly bureaucracy, yet permit the resolution of reproductive differences between classes which cannot be solved by individual action in the market, and only collective action via organizational proxies. At my present level of skill I believe this is about as simply as I can articulate the idea. Rothbard used the low trust of the ghetto, and it was a failure because, regardless of rothbard’s arguments, any person from a high trust society will reject rothbardian ethics as immoral. Hoppe used the high trust of the homogenous polity to restore the city state, but did not answer the problem of incentives in the absence of the absolute nuclear family. My solution is to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the polity and to attempt to offer ethical and institutional solutions to the problem of cooperation in heterogeneous polities. Because what we are doing demonstrably hasn’t succeeded, and with what we have learnd over the past twenty years about human cognitive and gentic biases, it is non-rational to think that we have provided sufficient incentives for the voluntary adoption of property rights (and in particular, high trust property rights, not the low trust property rights of rothbard). Pretty damning criticism I think. But we need to keep advancing our philosophy until we find an answer. My answer might not be right, but it is likely to be less wrong. Cheers. ————- POST SCRIPT 2 ————- One last simple fact: people demonstrate that they are willing to pay something like twice as much to punish a cheater as they are desirous of personal gain. (at least in-group). This means that decisions of rational actors are morally non-netural, and this further erodes the misesian and rothbardian ordinality of preferences, as well as the value of prices, as well as the argument to indifference in all transactions. Prices are less important than signals and far less important than the suppression of cheating. If you combine this with both differences in reproductive strategies and the different abilities of the classes, then the argument that prices (and economics) are more material than morals falls. People will act morally if you suppress immorality well enough. but since their dislike of immorality is higher than their desire for other satisfactions, you must suppress far more than rothbard’s ghetto ethics if you want the obtain even basic private property rights. And you must suppress nearly all cheating if you want to eliminate the demand for government. As far as we know, this level of suppression of cheating can only be accomplished in a small homogenous outbred polity. (scandinavia). And it is possible that it is a genetic bias (I am not sold on that). (I think I went to far again too fast with that bit… sorry.) ———— POST SCRIPT 3 ———— One more try at the elevator speech. To reduce the demand for intervention, and obtain property right voluntarily, the standard of etics must be far and above those of the NAP. They must extend to all involuntary transfers, of all kinds, under all circumstances. and as far as I can tell, that requires the right of ostracization (exclusion). Hoppe was right so far as he took it. On everything. His generation did not have the science, so they had to rely on deduction alone. We have science. So I use it.
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Prohibiting Magical, Socialist, Postmodern, and Pseudoscientific Arguments, as Immoral Deceptions
(This is profound, and a lot to grasp. I have copied it here from elsewhere.) While one might say that ‘it does not matter what we do, that discipline over there, is none of our concern, because whether true or not, this technique is useful to us’. The fact is that such a statement is arbitrary and preferential and not ‘true’ remains. If instead of placing higher value on one’s personal utility in an isolated domain, one places higher value on suppressing immoral political speech such that freedom is possible, one might reach a different conclusion. Just as high trust ethics are possible by the suppression of additional immoral actions over low trust ethics, higher trust ethics are possibly by the suppression of further immoral actions. In low trust ethics, asymmetric knowledge is an ethical means of profit. In high trust ethics profit from asymmetric knowledge is immoral. In ‘higher trust ethics’ (In propertarianism) we place a greater ethical constraint, such that profit from obscurantism, mysticism, and platonism are prohibited. If operational language will allow you to express an idea and serves the needs of one’s function, then it is immoral to rely on platonic argument. If symmetrical knowledge will allow you to cooperate with another then it is immoral to express your thoughts in asymmetric terms. (incomplete information). If telling the truth will allow you to cooperate with another then it is immoral and unethical to express your thoughts in fraudulent terms. If voluntarily cooperating with someone such that you can obtain something without stealing, then it is immoral to steal from them. If is possible to cooperate with someone such that you can both survive then it is immoral to kill them. So, we must, in order to suppress increasingly complex forms of crime, ethical violation and immoral violation, we must forgo opportunities for self benefit by restraint, then to suppress the use of obscurant, mystical, platonic deceptions requires that we refrain, even at cost, from obscurant, mystical, and platonic statements. That this is in fact, what is required of Science (to make statements in operant language), then why is it that we cannot require this level of TRUTH in all other disciplines – especially if it prevents criminal, unethical, and immoral behavior, and enables as great a leap in cooperation as the high trust ethic did over the low trust ethic? Again, I believe I have solved the problem. But it may be just too much to ask for someone else to understand unless I am able to either condense it to a Confucian riddle, or extend it to a Hayekian narrative, or a Darwinian exposition of cases. ETHICAL BEHAVIOR COMES AT A HIGH COST. Ergo: If you want a politically ethical society we must pay this cost: the abandonment of the convenience of imaginary objects and confusing the utility of a conceptual tool with the existence and truth of that tool as a construction. This is how to make politics ‘scientific.’ We outlawed violence. We outlawed theft. We outlawed fraud. We suppressed fraud-by-omission with warranty. We suppressed free riding with marital structure and property rights. We tried to suppress corruption with the constitution, but it failed. It failed because the constitution was not precise enough – in no small part because it should have specified original intent. We have failed to suppress mysticism, monotheism, marxian obscurantism, and Hegelian and postmodern conflation of mysticism and obscurantism. The requirement for scientific speech makes such arguments impossible. It means that public discourse is a property-commons, and one may not free ride or privatize it for one’s own convenience. Because it is immoral to do so. This is pretty profound. But again, it may be that such a profound statement is not of interest to you. But to me, as someone who has tried to solve the problem of ethics in an ethically and morally heterogeneious polity and to protect us from another dark age of ignorance and mysticism that Marx, Freud and Cantor have tried to drive us into, it is of a greater priority, and it is entirely worthy of the cost. -Cheers ================ END NOTES FOR LATER REFERENCE 1) If i say that the square root if two is the name for a function but is not reducible to a number, and cannot be demonstrated to be possible, that does not in fact prevent me from using the name of that function as a symbol in deduction, because in no circumstance is infinite precision applicable. 2) (Lest we lose sight of the source of my argument here, I am trying to define extensions of political morality such that we can create institutions that permit the cooperation of individuals and groups holding heterogeneous moral codes, each of which reflects a different reproductive strategy. If you are going to create a means of resolving differences between moral codes, what constraints does one place upon the formation of argument, procedure, policy, and law, such that suppression of discounts would be possible, and theft by obscurant means would be impossible. How do we prevent the use of deception via various forms of obscurantism in a polity consisting of morally and ethically heterogeneous individuals and groups? If, as I’m arguing, mathematics is justificationary, but need not be, and need not be without sacrifice of functionality, and if it can be such that mathematicians (or members of this group) can be fooled into justificationary positions, then how would we prevent the ‘leakage’ from either this group’s ideology or the platonism of mathematics, (or that of socialists and totalitarians) into law? 3) limits solve the problem of arbitrary precision (general rules) when in physics, correspondence with reality provides the ‘limit’ of precision. This is the difference between math (the study of pure relations independent of context) and the study of reality (relations within context). But that does not mean that when we make a reference to any mathematical object, we are naming a function (label for the result of operations) not naming an extant entity. That by definition a number system can be used to construct the rules for any n dimensional construct deterministically because of the constancy of relations, we should not confuse the determinacy we have ourselves described in constant relations, with existence. I cannot speak something into material existence other than the vibrations caused with my voice. I actually find this subject fascinating because it sort of renders most of the world ‘childish’. 4) what good does a personal philosophy of ethical (interpersonal) action, and moral (political) action do you when the others do not share a marginally indifferent ethic and moral code? So, for example, what good does it do you if the vast majority economically, politically, or physically deprive you of any ability to act on this code? Politics is a contract, not a personal philosophy. And you might say that you will offer others these terms that you prefer. But if you must construct a contract (constitution) what terms must exist in this contract to make your personal philosophy both ethical and moral, possible to act upon? 5) a) Empirical means “observable”, not quantifiable: “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.” Which is of course, the difference between the motion of planets vs unicorns (and infinity). That which is empirical is different from that which is imaginary. It is observable in time. (Very common mistake btw. You are not alone.) b) So, again, existence is different from utility. I can tell a fable with a unicorn, and I can imitate arbitrary precision with infinity. But that is different from saying such a thing exists scientifically (empirically). When you say that something is infinite, you are in fact, RELYING ON INDUCTION. (Ouch. I know.) c) God, and magic for that matter, are ‘older’ old hat. And they well served the purpose of their authors. Just as does infinity. d) Why is it that we need the ‘concept of limits’ (a form of justification)? It’s arbitrary precision instead of contextual precision – general rules independent of context versus precision determined by context. Why is it that we can use boolean logic (boolean algebra) for computation? (see Turing) And what utility does the function limit() serve in transforming contextual precision into arbitrary precision (general rule)? e) Constructivist, Intuitive, computational, operational, empirical, natural – all are expressions in math, logic, philosophy and science of attempts to circumvent the problem of reliance on justification. Departmental math, is justificationary. f) So, again, given that the difference is unnecessary and justificationary, and imaginary, while if stated operationally, math is descriptive, deductive, natural and ‘real’, and that the necessity of this conversation is DEMONSTRATION of the very problem of justificationary logic, even among people who assert that they deny the existence of justification, it should be somewhat obvious by now that there exists in fact the problem of externalizing immoral, unreal, illogical, platonism that is exported by justificationary departmental mathematics. g) Given that mathematical platonism is, like divine intervention, the hand of god, or some other magical mater of existence, ‘correctable’ without sacrifice of functionality in mathematics, then I will return to my asserted thesis that it is immoral to use non-operational, non-constructivist argument in public discourse (the export through obscurant language of error), because the institution of politics, exists for the purpose of transfer of wealth. Further, that we can, by placing the reuqirement for constructivist, operational, language on public discourse, we can (at least in theory) prohibit organized theft, corruption and immorality via justificationary psuedoscience, magic, or the pretense that mathematics can be used to describe phenomenon that is absent of constant relations (economics).
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Prohibiting Magical, Socialist, Postmodern, and Pseudoscientific Arguments, as Immoral Deceptions
(This is profound, and a lot to grasp. I have copied it here from elsewhere.) While one might say that ‘it does not matter what we do, that discipline over there, is none of our concern, because whether true or not, this technique is useful to us’. The fact is that such a statement is arbitrary and preferential and not ‘true’ remains. If instead of placing higher value on one’s personal utility in an isolated domain, one places higher value on suppressing immoral political speech such that freedom is possible, one might reach a different conclusion. Just as high trust ethics are possible by the suppression of additional immoral actions over low trust ethics, higher trust ethics are possibly by the suppression of further immoral actions. In low trust ethics, asymmetric knowledge is an ethical means of profit. In high trust ethics profit from asymmetric knowledge is immoral. In ‘higher trust ethics’ (In propertarianism) we place a greater ethical constraint, such that profit from obscurantism, mysticism, and platonism are prohibited. If operational language will allow you to express an idea and serves the needs of one’s function, then it is immoral to rely on platonic argument. If symmetrical knowledge will allow you to cooperate with another then it is immoral to express your thoughts in asymmetric terms. (incomplete information). If telling the truth will allow you to cooperate with another then it is immoral and unethical to express your thoughts in fraudulent terms. If voluntarily cooperating with someone such that you can obtain something without stealing, then it is immoral to steal from them. If is possible to cooperate with someone such that you can both survive then it is immoral to kill them. So, we must, in order to suppress increasingly complex forms of crime, ethical violation and immoral violation, we must forgo opportunities for self benefit by restraint, then to suppress the use of obscurant, mystical, platonic deceptions requires that we refrain, even at cost, from obscurant, mystical, and platonic statements. That this is in fact, what is required of Science (to make statements in operant language), then why is it that we cannot require this level of TRUTH in all other disciplines – especially if it prevents criminal, unethical, and immoral behavior, and enables as great a leap in cooperation as the high trust ethic did over the low trust ethic? Again, I believe I have solved the problem. But it may be just too much to ask for someone else to understand unless I am able to either condense it to a Confucian riddle, or extend it to a Hayekian narrative, or a Darwinian exposition of cases. ETHICAL BEHAVIOR COMES AT A HIGH COST. Ergo: If you want a politically ethical society we must pay this cost: the abandonment of the convenience of imaginary objects and confusing the utility of a conceptual tool with the existence and truth of that tool as a construction. This is how to make politics ‘scientific.’ We outlawed violence. We outlawed theft. We outlawed fraud. We suppressed fraud-by-omission with warranty. We suppressed free riding with marital structure and property rights. We tried to suppress corruption with the constitution, but it failed. It failed because the constitution was not precise enough – in no small part because it should have specified original intent. We have failed to suppress mysticism, monotheism, marxian obscurantism, and Hegelian and postmodern conflation of mysticism and obscurantism. The requirement for scientific speech makes such arguments impossible. It means that public discourse is a property-commons, and one may not free ride or privatize it for one’s own convenience. Because it is immoral to do so. This is pretty profound. But again, it may be that such a profound statement is not of interest to you. But to me, as someone who has tried to solve the problem of ethics in an ethically and morally heterogeneious polity and to protect us from another dark age of ignorance and mysticism that Marx, Freud and Cantor have tried to drive us into, it is of a greater priority, and it is entirely worthy of the cost. -Cheers ================ END NOTES FOR LATER REFERENCE 1) If i say that the square root if two is the name for a function but is not reducible to a number, and cannot be demonstrated to be possible, that does not in fact prevent me from using the name of that function as a symbol in deduction, because in no circumstance is infinite precision applicable. 2) (Lest we lose sight of the source of my argument here, I am trying to define extensions of political morality such that we can create institutions that permit the cooperation of individuals and groups holding heterogeneous moral codes, each of which reflects a different reproductive strategy. If you are going to create a means of resolving differences between moral codes, what constraints does one place upon the formation of argument, procedure, policy, and law, such that suppression of discounts would be possible, and theft by obscurant means would be impossible. How do we prevent the use of deception via various forms of obscurantism in a polity consisting of morally and ethically heterogeneous individuals and groups? If, as I’m arguing, mathematics is justificationary, but need not be, and need not be without sacrifice of functionality, and if it can be such that mathematicians (or members of this group) can be fooled into justificationary positions, then how would we prevent the ‘leakage’ from either this group’s ideology or the platonism of mathematics, (or that of socialists and totalitarians) into law? 3) limits solve the problem of arbitrary precision (general rules) when in physics, correspondence with reality provides the ‘limit’ of precision. This is the difference between math (the study of pure relations independent of context) and the study of reality (relations within context). But that does not mean that when we make a reference to any mathematical object, we are naming a function (label for the result of operations) not naming an extant entity. That by definition a number system can be used to construct the rules for any n dimensional construct deterministically because of the constancy of relations, we should not confuse the determinacy we have ourselves described in constant relations, with existence. I cannot speak something into material existence other than the vibrations caused with my voice. I actually find this subject fascinating because it sort of renders most of the world ‘childish’. 4) what good does a personal philosophy of ethical (interpersonal) action, and moral (political) action do you when the others do not share a marginally indifferent ethic and moral code? So, for example, what good does it do you if the vast majority economically, politically, or physically deprive you of any ability to act on this code? Politics is a contract, not a personal philosophy. And you might say that you will offer others these terms that you prefer. But if you must construct a contract (constitution) what terms must exist in this contract to make your personal philosophy both ethical and moral, possible to act upon? 5) a) Empirical means “observable”, not quantifiable: “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.” Which is of course, the difference between the motion of planets vs unicorns (and infinity). That which is empirical is different from that which is imaginary. It is observable in time. (Very common mistake btw. You are not alone.) b) So, again, existence is different from utility. I can tell a fable with a unicorn, and I can imitate arbitrary precision with infinity. But that is different from saying such a thing exists scientifically (empirically). When you say that something is infinite, you are in fact, RELYING ON INDUCTION. (Ouch. I know.) c) God, and magic for that matter, are ‘older’ old hat. And they well served the purpose of their authors. Just as does infinity. d) Why is it that we need the ‘concept of limits’ (a form of justification)? It’s arbitrary precision instead of contextual precision – general rules independent of context versus precision determined by context. Why is it that we can use boolean logic (boolean algebra) for computation? (see Turing) And what utility does the function limit() serve in transforming contextual precision into arbitrary precision (general rule)? e) Constructivist, Intuitive, computational, operational, empirical, natural – all are expressions in math, logic, philosophy and science of attempts to circumvent the problem of reliance on justification. Departmental math, is justificationary. f) So, again, given that the difference is unnecessary and justificationary, and imaginary, while if stated operationally, math is descriptive, deductive, natural and ‘real’, and that the necessity of this conversation is DEMONSTRATION of the very problem of justificationary logic, even among people who assert that they deny the existence of justification, it should be somewhat obvious by now that there exists in fact the problem of externalizing immoral, unreal, illogical, platonism that is exported by justificationary departmental mathematics. g) Given that mathematical platonism is, like divine intervention, the hand of god, or some other magical mater of existence, ‘correctable’ without sacrifice of functionality in mathematics, then I will return to my asserted thesis that it is immoral to use non-operational, non-constructivist argument in public discourse (the export through obscurant language of error), because the institution of politics, exists for the purpose of transfer of wealth. Further, that we can, by placing the reuqirement for constructivist, operational, language on public discourse, we can (at least in theory) prohibit organized theft, corruption and immorality via justificationary psuedoscience, magic, or the pretense that mathematics can be used to describe phenomenon that is absent of constant relations (economics).
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Aristocratic Egalitarianism: The Unique Culture Of The North Sea Peoples
[I] hope to convince you that the argument that follows is very close to the final word on the American experiment, if not the Anglo experiment, and that nullification first, secession second, and civil war third, are the only alternatives to extinction of the unique high trust society of the Northern Europeans. STATEMENTS a) Our values are politically, economically, morally and even genetically, irreconcilable. b) If we do not vehemently fight the opposition both in words, ideas, politics and economics, they will win, and the only high trust society on earth will be rendered extinct. c) Compromise on manners, ethics, morals, norms, traditions, family structure, and political structure, can only, as it has in the past, lead to surrender and consequential defeat. WHY? [D]emocracy is a means for resolving conflicts in priority among members of an extended family with similar ethics, morals, family structures, and goals. Democracy cannot resolve conflicts over different ends, driven by different ethics, morals, family structures and goals – ONLY THE MARKET CAN. That is the virtue of the market and why protestants and jews rely so heavily on the market: it tolerates diversity of ends, while allowing cooperation on means. One of the virtues of small democratic states in the pre-unification Germanic model (Lotharingian region) is that states must compete for citizens. This small-state network means that, just like foreign quarters in medieval cities, local direct democracy is possible, and people can move elsewhere. And in turn this flexibility forces competition between states. The swiss model, which accommodates people with different languages and preferences, currently operates on this same principle and as yet we have devised no better. If people have no choice then they must use the government as a means of conquering the opposition rather than one of finding a means of voluntary exchange between groups with diverse interests. INTER-MORAL TRADE REQUIRES SEPARATE STATES. [I]f the state acts as the insurer of last resort, redistributor of gains, and monopolistic canon of property rights and obligations, then the state cannot. via democracy. provide a means of reconciling conflicts in ends. it is not possible. Democracy cannot resolve conflicts it can only select priorities. Democracy between people with dissimilar morals and ends, is merely forcible conquest using the force of violence through the proxy of the state as a means of conquest of one group by another. The indirect use of violence is still the use of violence. The market can only function across polities with heterogeneous strategies: manners, ethics, morals, signals, myths, traditions, family structures, and structures of production, BETWEEN STATES where states can employe trade policy (collective bargaining) and can neutralize the competitive differences between members of the opposing moral codes. NO ALTERNATIVE [A]s such, there is no alternative to defeat except nullification, secession, and the construction of states with different manners, ethics, morals, signals, myths, traditions, family structures, and structures of production. The divide in the USA is between the Protestant (Northern European, North Sea, Germanic-Scandinavian), high trust ethic, and the rest of the world’s lower trust ethic. The difference in these ethics is the use of the Absolute Nuclear Family (ANF) and the total prohibition that the ANF places on free-riding and all other discounts. The ANF suppresses, intentionally, and systemically, the reproduction of the lower classes. It is a form of market based eugenics, driven entirely by merit. However, the lower classes and the merchant classes and the political classes, have incentives to instead, increase the rates of reproduction of the lower classes. As such, the difference between these models and the requirement for both (a) marriage, and (b) total financial independence prior to reproduction, is irreconcilable with the rest of the world’s use of the family and the state to seek free riding, rents and a multitude of corruptions to further their family interest. As such the diversely populated state, with non-ANF families, and particularly poor single mothers, is antithetical to the North Sea (protestant) ethic, and is necessary for the rest of the world’s ethic. In fact, the very purpose of the ANF is to suppress if not outlaw the reproduction of these dependent classes. Currently these dependent classes are suppressing the reproduction of the middle and upper middle classes, and ensuring old age poverty for even the hardest working. This moral, ethical, familial, social, political and economic difference is not an arbitrary difference, and the multitude of consequences that arise from this difference in strategies explains the difference in the great waves of indo-european commercial, rational, scientific, productive and military successes (and consequential failures) since the development of pastoralism – despite being a poorer, less populous people, on the edge of the bronze and iron ages. The fantasy of the enlightenment was ‘the aristocracy of everyone’. It was the excuse that the middle classes used to seize power from the landed nobility, now that trade had surpassed agrarianism as the primary means of production and economic wealth. However, this scheme relied upon the perpetuation of the ANF and related social model. Without the perpetuation of the ANF and absolute private property rights, the ‘aristocracy of everyone’ was impossible to maintain under representative democracy. Had the British and Americans not surrendered the house of commons and the house of representatives, or the house of lords and the Senate, and instead had created a house of the ‘unpropertied’ it might have been possible to use the government as a means of establishing trade policy between the classes, and the ‘aristocracy of everyone’ could have survived. But universal democracy and the destruction of the differences between the houses, and the consequential the merger of class interests into a democratic body, thus eliminated the ability to conduct contractual exchanges between classes on the one hand, and gave the unpropertied majority – especially feminists and socialists – the ability to dismantle both the ANF and the private property rights that both sustained and enforced the ANF, and neutralized the difference in reproductive interests of the genders. CONQUEST OF THE ANF-NORTH SEA PEOPLE The redistributive state, under the French totalitarian model, and with the support of Kantian philosophy, followed by increasing numbers of waves including marxists, postmodernists, and totalitarian humanists, has systematically attacked the ANF’s eugenic suppression of all economic rents and discounts. And the reason for the success, argumentatively, against the ANF system, is that such a system was never written down, but existed only as handed-down, intergenerational tradition, and metaphysical value judgments embedded in moral habits. THE CULTURE THAT SUPPRESSES ALL DISCOUNTS (ALL FREE-RIDING) [I]n economic terms, a discount, is any reduction that you can obtain from the full cost of something under perfect circumstances. This may seem like a confusing terminology, but in economics, the terminology developed for discussing commodities and commodity prices. Commodities are defined where only price determines the difference between one unit and another. Objects that are not commodities, say are used cars. Unless you have a complete video record of the history of the vehicle, it’s not possible to really know what you’re buying and the seller is in a similar position. Horses are even worse since they cannot easily be ‘repaired’. Stolen goods are something yet again. You can buy something very cheaply but that discount comes at a price. Lying is another way to get a discount in an exchange. So a discount is anything you can do or apply to modify a price where you are fully informed and there is no marginal difference between units because you are fully informed. The ANF North Sea social model, is a moral strategy, for the TOTAL SUPPRESSION of ALL DISCOUNTS thereby forcing all individuals into the market and suppressing the reproduction of those that cannot compete in it.
(Note: since writing this piece, I have changed from the use of economic language of referring to “discounts”, to term that is common between economic, anthropological and moral fields: “free riding”. While neither “discounts” or “free-riding” is likely familiar to the general reader, they are effectively synonyms for the same behavior – trying to get something without producing yourself something in exchange.)
Those discounts, in economic terms are: 1. Violence (asymmetry of force) 2. Theft (asymmetry of control) 3. Fraud (false information) 4. Omission (Omitting information) 5. Obscurantism (Obscuring information) 6. Obstruction (Inhibiting someone else’s transaction) 7. Externalization (externalizing costs of any transaction) 8. Free Riding (using externalities for self benefit) 9. Socializing Losses (externalization to commons) 10. Privatizing Gains (appropriation of commons) 11. Rent Seeking (organizational free riding) 12. Corruption ( organized rent seeking) 13. Conspiracy (organized indirect theft) 14. Extortion (Organized direct theft) 15. War (organized violence) The North Sea (Protestant) model suppresses ALL of these, including the ability to seek support from one’s family. It is a unique moral code. The moral code consists in: 1. Requirement that all property be categorized as Private Property 2. Requirement for Voluntary Exchange 3. Requirement for Speaking the Truth 4. Requirement for Symmetry of knowledge (the whole truth) 5. Requirement for Warranty as proof of symmetry 6. Requirement for proof of work (you must add value to a thing to profit from it.) 7. Prohibition on familial, tribal, and political free riding and rents. 8. Right of exclusion (boycott, and ostracization) THE REVERSAL OF THE ANF MORAL CODE AND ANF-SOCIAL-ECONOMIC SYSTEM [U]ntil 1960, even with the addition Roosevelt’s socialistic policies, membership in the USA’s ethical and moral system requires adoption of the ANF. It was possible to force this model on immigrants because (a) dislocation from existing family, tribe and culture and (b) the gift of land, and (c) the use of first private, then state credit to allow them to enter into the consumer class. However, with the end of farming, and the rise of ’employment’ most people have now left the ownership culture, except for their homes. Further, the feminist movement has succeeded in advocating support for single mothers, for fostering easy divorces, and for subjecting males to permanent rents without sex, affection, or the ability to accumulate savings for their sustenance in late life. We are now in a situation where nearly half of americans will soon be born to unmarried parents, and doomed to perpetual poverty due to the failure of the ability for couples to form households in order to reduce costs. That is the story of america. As such, the war on the ANF and the Protestant, North Sea, model is nearly complete, both here and in Europe. As such, the ANF ethical system is antithetical to the rest of humanity. And, because of its competitive success against lower trust groups, the world rebels against it. And immigrants, single women, and single mothers, all of whom possess incentives to REVERSE this eugenic system of ethics, fight it at every opportunity. Our system of government, and the aspiration of the enlightenment to create ‘an aristocracy of everyone’ failed rapidly, within one generation, after we added women to the voting pool. Whereby they sought to, in increasing numbers, break the compromise that the nuclear family provided between conflicting female and male reproductive strategies. In increasing numbers, women have voted, and minorities with them, to seek rents against the high trust society and to dismantle the ANF, the compromise between the genders, and the ethical and moral and political system that suppressed the reproductive abilities of the underclasses. As it stands, single women largely determine the outcome of national elections and the female head of household has largely undermined the truce between the genders that is present in marriage, and has systematically undermined the ability of pair-bonded men and women from accumulating and concentrating property behind success, and instead, redistributed from the successful to masses of free riders and rent seekers. French totalitarian humanists (catholics), Marxists, Socialists, Feminists, Postmodernists, Academicists (the church having been replaced by the secular academia’s promotion of the state) and now totalitarian democratic socialist humanists in politics that have been trained by those academics, all have sought to undermine the ANF High trust model. But they have done so without comprehension of the consequences of doing so. It is not possible both to possess a high trust society, and to dismantle the ANF ethical system, nor the marriage tradition that it depends upon. It isnt possible. It is not empirically demonstrable, nor is it rationally arguable. At least, not unless human incentives are infinitely fungible, and there are no laws in economics. Genetics, neuroscience, experimental psychology, and economics have proved the prior – to the great disappointment of progressives. And the failure of socialism and communism, and the requirement for money, prices and incentives, that are created by the capitalist mode of production, along with the current failure of Keynesian economics for political, moral and behavioral reasons, have disproved the latter. We are not infinitely morally fungible, we require incentives to cooperate rather than free-ride, and there are laws to economics seated in the properties of human beings, that are unbridgeable. Namely, we all possess a passionate instinct to suppress disproportionality: unfairness. And that we are happily redistributive within an extended family possessing shared values and signals, but increasingly hostile to those who compete with those values and signals. Diversity is the antithesis of intra-state cooperation, and the utilitarian justification of inter-state cooperation. DIFFERENT STRATEGIES [T]hese reproductive difference are impossible to reconcile. As a politically unpleasant contrast, the same applies to Jewish culture and their Ethics of Critique. Jews, like Northern Europeans also hold a competitive advantage; precisely because they suppress all possible ‘discounts’ amongst themselves, but do not suppress the same portfolio of discounts outside of their group. In fact, they seek at every opportunity to obtain discounts outside of their group, while the host population tries equally to suppress them. ANF North Sea Protestant strategy, on the other hand, is to try to include others in their system by enfranchising them into the culture of prohibited discounts. However, this works to suppress the lower classes, rather than simply prey upon them. But both the ANF Protestant ethical model, and the Jewish ethical model, are disadvantageous of the lower classes. The ANF through suppression of reproduction, and Jewish through exploitation of asymmetry of knowledge, and avoidance of paying into the commons. Of these two models the ANF Protestant can hold territory, but the Jewish cannot, since ANF relies upon numbers and armies, and the jewish relies upon operating as a minority population inside of a land-holding majority, in order to maintain their advantage. Both of these models conflict with the catholic model of systematic free riding, rent seeking and corruption of the lower trust society – precisely what we see in the catholic versus protestant countries. Or as we see in the difference between Catholic, Jewish and Protestant supreme court justice positions. For these reasons both the Protestant ethical model and the Jewish ethical model, are not preferable by the lower classes. And as late as the 1920’s, prior to the arrival of eastern european jews, the ‘ethical difference between a New England Presbyterian and an American Jew, was indistinguishable.” This was not meant as a compliment to either by the catholics. THIS IS A DIFFERENCE IN THE VISION OF MANKIND AND OUR ENVIRONMENT [A]re we, in the primitive model, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, limiting our behavior by the limits that nature places upon us, in the dysgenic model of production, reproduction, and cooperation. Or are we improving ourselves, and preserving the planet, via the eugenic model of production, reproduction, and cooperation, like our agrarian and pastoral ancestors. Or are we living on some faith that technology will solve this problem for us, via some miracle of transhumanism? Or do we select the strategy that best suits our reproductive interests: the lower classes the first, the middle classes the second, and the intellectuals and elites the third? Because that is precisely the strategy each class uses. SECESSION IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE SOLUTION [T]he only possible solution if we are to take advantage of the technical and economic utility of the modern credit and insurance provided by the corporeal state, is to secede into different states each of whom supports the reproductive and economic interests of the different cultures and their moral codes. If we do not, we will either be totally conquered as the romans and greeks were, and we no longer have northern barbarians to restore our culture as the medieval’s did. Universalism, homogeneity, monopoly, are evolutionarily and technologically fragile strategies. Diverse polities cooperating by the market, using the state as collective bargainer, insurer and creditor, is the only solution. Otherwise, as the Chinese, the Byzantines, The Iranians and the Muslims have discovered, the bureaucracy eventually is constrained only by the maximum amount of extraction that it can place upon the population, in an effort to perpetuate itself, and hold other competitors at bay through the promise of war. FUTURE [A]ny study of world his certain that we are approaching some possible civil war., That will occur when the remaining people of the ANF cultures, and those that are allied with them, no longer believe that convincing others of their model will be possible. I believe if they understand this argument, that they will understand that it is no longer possible. This conflict between strategies for our civilization, is the deciding argument of our times. For the next twenty years, demographics will mandate that this conflict continue. We can lose, as did the Romans and the Greeks. We can secede. Or we can fight and reconquer. But we cannot compromise, since these social strategies are incommensurable without the intervention of a state the neutralize differences via trade policy. Just as “Core States” in different civilizations neutralize trade policy between civilizations. The weakness in european civilization is actually tolerance and inclusion. Tolerance without limit is not tolerance but submission. Inclusion without limit is not inclusive it is conquest, in exchange for not paying the high cost of protecting higher generations. And the ANF is counter intuitive and uncomfortable for the rest of humanity. And like the Jews, we are being exterminated, systematically, for our reproductive and social strategy. Despite all the amazing contributions that European civilization has given to the world, NO MAN IS A HERO TO HIS DEBTORS. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev http://www.propertarianism.com/
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Aristocratic Egalitarianism: The Unique Culture Of The North Sea Peoples
[I] hope to convince you that the argument that follows is very close to the final word on the American experiment, if not the Anglo experiment, and that nullification first, secession second, and civil war third, are the only alternatives to extinction of the unique high trust society of the Northern Europeans. STATEMENTS a) Our values are politically, economically, morally and even genetically, irreconcilable. b) If we do not vehemently fight the opposition both in words, ideas, politics and economics, they will win, and the only high trust society on earth will be rendered extinct. c) Compromise on manners, ethics, morals, norms, traditions, family structure, and political structure, can only, as it has in the past, lead to surrender and consequential defeat. WHY? [D]emocracy is a means for resolving conflicts in priority among members of an extended family with similar ethics, morals, family structures, and goals. Democracy cannot resolve conflicts over different ends, driven by different ethics, morals, family structures and goals – ONLY THE MARKET CAN. That is the virtue of the market and why protestants and jews rely so heavily on the market: it tolerates diversity of ends, while allowing cooperation on means. One of the virtues of small democratic states in the pre-unification Germanic model (Lotharingian region) is that states must compete for citizens. This small-state network means that, just like foreign quarters in medieval cities, local direct democracy is possible, and people can move elsewhere. And in turn this flexibility forces competition between states. The swiss model, which accommodates people with different languages and preferences, currently operates on this same principle and as yet we have devised no better. If people have no choice then they must use the government as a means of conquering the opposition rather than one of finding a means of voluntary exchange between groups with diverse interests. INTER-MORAL TRADE REQUIRES SEPARATE STATES. [I]f the state acts as the insurer of last resort, redistributor of gains, and monopolistic canon of property rights and obligations, then the state cannot. via democracy. provide a means of reconciling conflicts in ends. it is not possible. Democracy cannot resolve conflicts it can only select priorities. Democracy between people with dissimilar morals and ends, is merely forcible conquest using the force of violence through the proxy of the state as a means of conquest of one group by another. The indirect use of violence is still the use of violence. The market can only function across polities with heterogeneous strategies: manners, ethics, morals, signals, myths, traditions, family structures, and structures of production, BETWEEN STATES where states can employe trade policy (collective bargaining) and can neutralize the competitive differences between members of the opposing moral codes. NO ALTERNATIVE [A]s such, there is no alternative to defeat except nullification, secession, and the construction of states with different manners, ethics, morals, signals, myths, traditions, family structures, and structures of production. The divide in the USA is between the Protestant (Northern European, North Sea, Germanic-Scandinavian), high trust ethic, and the rest of the world’s lower trust ethic. The difference in these ethics is the use of the Absolute Nuclear Family (ANF) and the total prohibition that the ANF places on free-riding and all other discounts. The ANF suppresses, intentionally, and systemically, the reproduction of the lower classes. It is a form of market based eugenics, driven entirely by merit. However, the lower classes and the merchant classes and the political classes, have incentives to instead, increase the rates of reproduction of the lower classes. As such, the difference between these models and the requirement for both (a) marriage, and (b) total financial independence prior to reproduction, is irreconcilable with the rest of the world’s use of the family and the state to seek free riding, rents and a multitude of corruptions to further their family interest. As such the diversely populated state, with non-ANF families, and particularly poor single mothers, is antithetical to the North Sea (protestant) ethic, and is necessary for the rest of the world’s ethic. In fact, the very purpose of the ANF is to suppress if not outlaw the reproduction of these dependent classes. Currently these dependent classes are suppressing the reproduction of the middle and upper middle classes, and ensuring old age poverty for even the hardest working. This moral, ethical, familial, social, political and economic difference is not an arbitrary difference, and the multitude of consequences that arise from this difference in strategies explains the difference in the great waves of indo-european commercial, rational, scientific, productive and military successes (and consequential failures) since the development of pastoralism – despite being a poorer, less populous people, on the edge of the bronze and iron ages. The fantasy of the enlightenment was ‘the aristocracy of everyone’. It was the excuse that the middle classes used to seize power from the landed nobility, now that trade had surpassed agrarianism as the primary means of production and economic wealth. However, this scheme relied upon the perpetuation of the ANF and related social model. Without the perpetuation of the ANF and absolute private property rights, the ‘aristocracy of everyone’ was impossible to maintain under representative democracy. Had the British and Americans not surrendered the house of commons and the house of representatives, or the house of lords and the Senate, and instead had created a house of the ‘unpropertied’ it might have been possible to use the government as a means of establishing trade policy between the classes, and the ‘aristocracy of everyone’ could have survived. But universal democracy and the destruction of the differences between the houses, and the consequential the merger of class interests into a democratic body, thus eliminated the ability to conduct contractual exchanges between classes on the one hand, and gave the unpropertied majority – especially feminists and socialists – the ability to dismantle both the ANF and the private property rights that both sustained and enforced the ANF, and neutralized the difference in reproductive interests of the genders. CONQUEST OF THE ANF-NORTH SEA PEOPLE The redistributive state, under the French totalitarian model, and with the support of Kantian philosophy, followed by increasing numbers of waves including marxists, postmodernists, and totalitarian humanists, has systematically attacked the ANF’s eugenic suppression of all economic rents and discounts. And the reason for the success, argumentatively, against the ANF system, is that such a system was never written down, but existed only as handed-down, intergenerational tradition, and metaphysical value judgments embedded in moral habits. THE CULTURE THAT SUPPRESSES ALL DISCOUNTS (ALL FREE-RIDING) [I]n economic terms, a discount, is any reduction that you can obtain from the full cost of something under perfect circumstances. This may seem like a confusing terminology, but in economics, the terminology developed for discussing commodities and commodity prices. Commodities are defined where only price determines the difference between one unit and another. Objects that are not commodities, say are used cars. Unless you have a complete video record of the history of the vehicle, it’s not possible to really know what you’re buying and the seller is in a similar position. Horses are even worse since they cannot easily be ‘repaired’. Stolen goods are something yet again. You can buy something very cheaply but that discount comes at a price. Lying is another way to get a discount in an exchange. So a discount is anything you can do or apply to modify a price where you are fully informed and there is no marginal difference between units because you are fully informed. The ANF North Sea social model, is a moral strategy, for the TOTAL SUPPRESSION of ALL DISCOUNTS thereby forcing all individuals into the market and suppressing the reproduction of those that cannot compete in it.
(Note: since writing this piece, I have changed from the use of economic language of referring to “discounts”, to term that is common between economic, anthropological and moral fields: “free riding”. While neither “discounts” or “free-riding” is likely familiar to the general reader, they are effectively synonyms for the same behavior – trying to get something without producing yourself something in exchange.)
Those discounts, in economic terms are: 1. Violence (asymmetry of force) 2. Theft (asymmetry of control) 3. Fraud (false information) 4. Omission (Omitting information) 5. Obscurantism (Obscuring information) 6. Obstruction (Inhibiting someone else’s transaction) 7. Externalization (externalizing costs of any transaction) 8. Free Riding (using externalities for self benefit) 9. Socializing Losses (externalization to commons) 10. Privatizing Gains (appropriation of commons) 11. Rent Seeking (organizational free riding) 12. Corruption ( organized rent seeking) 13. Conspiracy (organized indirect theft) 14. Extortion (Organized direct theft) 15. War (organized violence) The North Sea (Protestant) model suppresses ALL of these, including the ability to seek support from one’s family. It is a unique moral code. The moral code consists in: 1. Requirement that all property be categorized as Private Property 2. Requirement for Voluntary Exchange 3. Requirement for Speaking the Truth 4. Requirement for Symmetry of knowledge (the whole truth) 5. Requirement for Warranty as proof of symmetry 6. Requirement for proof of work (you must add value to a thing to profit from it.) 7. Prohibition on familial, tribal, and political free riding and rents. 8. Right of exclusion (boycott, and ostracization) THE REVERSAL OF THE ANF MORAL CODE AND ANF-SOCIAL-ECONOMIC SYSTEM [U]ntil 1960, even with the addition Roosevelt’s socialistic policies, membership in the USA’s ethical and moral system requires adoption of the ANF. It was possible to force this model on immigrants because (a) dislocation from existing family, tribe and culture and (b) the gift of land, and (c) the use of first private, then state credit to allow them to enter into the consumer class. However, with the end of farming, and the rise of ’employment’ most people have now left the ownership culture, except for their homes. Further, the feminist movement has succeeded in advocating support for single mothers, for fostering easy divorces, and for subjecting males to permanent rents without sex, affection, or the ability to accumulate savings for their sustenance in late life. We are now in a situation where nearly half of americans will soon be born to unmarried parents, and doomed to perpetual poverty due to the failure of the ability for couples to form households in order to reduce costs. That is the story of america. As such, the war on the ANF and the Protestant, North Sea, model is nearly complete, both here and in Europe. As such, the ANF ethical system is antithetical to the rest of humanity. And, because of its competitive success against lower trust groups, the world rebels against it. And immigrants, single women, and single mothers, all of whom possess incentives to REVERSE this eugenic system of ethics, fight it at every opportunity. Our system of government, and the aspiration of the enlightenment to create ‘an aristocracy of everyone’ failed rapidly, within one generation, after we added women to the voting pool. Whereby they sought to, in increasing numbers, break the compromise that the nuclear family provided between conflicting female and male reproductive strategies. In increasing numbers, women have voted, and minorities with them, to seek rents against the high trust society and to dismantle the ANF, the compromise between the genders, and the ethical and moral and political system that suppressed the reproductive abilities of the underclasses. As it stands, single women largely determine the outcome of national elections and the female head of household has largely undermined the truce between the genders that is present in marriage, and has systematically undermined the ability of pair-bonded men and women from accumulating and concentrating property behind success, and instead, redistributed from the successful to masses of free riders and rent seekers. French totalitarian humanists (catholics), Marxists, Socialists, Feminists, Postmodernists, Academicists (the church having been replaced by the secular academia’s promotion of the state) and now totalitarian democratic socialist humanists in politics that have been trained by those academics, all have sought to undermine the ANF High trust model. But they have done so without comprehension of the consequences of doing so. It is not possible both to possess a high trust society, and to dismantle the ANF ethical system, nor the marriage tradition that it depends upon. It isnt possible. It is not empirically demonstrable, nor is it rationally arguable. At least, not unless human incentives are infinitely fungible, and there are no laws in economics. Genetics, neuroscience, experimental psychology, and economics have proved the prior – to the great disappointment of progressives. And the failure of socialism and communism, and the requirement for money, prices and incentives, that are created by the capitalist mode of production, along with the current failure of Keynesian economics for political, moral and behavioral reasons, have disproved the latter. We are not infinitely morally fungible, we require incentives to cooperate rather than free-ride, and there are laws to economics seated in the properties of human beings, that are unbridgeable. Namely, we all possess a passionate instinct to suppress disproportionality: unfairness. And that we are happily redistributive within an extended family possessing shared values and signals, but increasingly hostile to those who compete with those values and signals. Diversity is the antithesis of intra-state cooperation, and the utilitarian justification of inter-state cooperation. DIFFERENT STRATEGIES [T]hese reproductive difference are impossible to reconcile. As a politically unpleasant contrast, the same applies to Jewish culture and their Ethics of Critique. Jews, like Northern Europeans also hold a competitive advantage; precisely because they suppress all possible ‘discounts’ amongst themselves, but do not suppress the same portfolio of discounts outside of their group. In fact, they seek at every opportunity to obtain discounts outside of their group, while the host population tries equally to suppress them. ANF North Sea Protestant strategy, on the other hand, is to try to include others in their system by enfranchising them into the culture of prohibited discounts. However, this works to suppress the lower classes, rather than simply prey upon them. But both the ANF Protestant ethical model, and the Jewish ethical model, are disadvantageous of the lower classes. The ANF through suppression of reproduction, and Jewish through exploitation of asymmetry of knowledge, and avoidance of paying into the commons. Of these two models the ANF Protestant can hold territory, but the Jewish cannot, since ANF relies upon numbers and armies, and the jewish relies upon operating as a minority population inside of a land-holding majority, in order to maintain their advantage. Both of these models conflict with the catholic model of systematic free riding, rent seeking and corruption of the lower trust society – precisely what we see in the catholic versus protestant countries. Or as we see in the difference between Catholic, Jewish and Protestant supreme court justice positions. For these reasons both the Protestant ethical model and the Jewish ethical model, are not preferable by the lower classes. And as late as the 1920’s, prior to the arrival of eastern european jews, the ‘ethical difference between a New England Presbyterian and an American Jew, was indistinguishable.” This was not meant as a compliment to either by the catholics. THIS IS A DIFFERENCE IN THE VISION OF MANKIND AND OUR ENVIRONMENT [A]re we, in the primitive model, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, limiting our behavior by the limits that nature places upon us, in the dysgenic model of production, reproduction, and cooperation. Or are we improving ourselves, and preserving the planet, via the eugenic model of production, reproduction, and cooperation, like our agrarian and pastoral ancestors. Or are we living on some faith that technology will solve this problem for us, via some miracle of transhumanism? Or do we select the strategy that best suits our reproductive interests: the lower classes the first, the middle classes the second, and the intellectuals and elites the third? Because that is precisely the strategy each class uses. SECESSION IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE SOLUTION [T]he only possible solution if we are to take advantage of the technical and economic utility of the modern credit and insurance provided by the corporeal state, is to secede into different states each of whom supports the reproductive and economic interests of the different cultures and their moral codes. If we do not, we will either be totally conquered as the romans and greeks were, and we no longer have northern barbarians to restore our culture as the medieval’s did. Universalism, homogeneity, monopoly, are evolutionarily and technologically fragile strategies. Diverse polities cooperating by the market, using the state as collective bargainer, insurer and creditor, is the only solution. Otherwise, as the Chinese, the Byzantines, The Iranians and the Muslims have discovered, the bureaucracy eventually is constrained only by the maximum amount of extraction that it can place upon the population, in an effort to perpetuate itself, and hold other competitors at bay through the promise of war. FUTURE [A]ny study of world his certain that we are approaching some possible civil war., That will occur when the remaining people of the ANF cultures, and those that are allied with them, no longer believe that convincing others of their model will be possible. I believe if they understand this argument, that they will understand that it is no longer possible. This conflict between strategies for our civilization, is the deciding argument of our times. For the next twenty years, demographics will mandate that this conflict continue. We can lose, as did the Romans and the Greeks. We can secede. Or we can fight and reconquer. But we cannot compromise, since these social strategies are incommensurable without the intervention of a state the neutralize differences via trade policy. Just as “Core States” in different civilizations neutralize trade policy between civilizations. The weakness in european civilization is actually tolerance and inclusion. Tolerance without limit is not tolerance but submission. Inclusion without limit is not inclusive it is conquest, in exchange for not paying the high cost of protecting higher generations. And the ANF is counter intuitive and uncomfortable for the rest of humanity. And like the Jews, we are being exterminated, systematically, for our reproductive and social strategy. Despite all the amazing contributions that European civilization has given to the world, NO MAN IS A HERO TO HIS DEBTORS. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev http://www.propertarianism.com/
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Is The Immorality of Mathematical Platonism Enough To End It.
Math was constructed from, and must, of necessity, consist of a series of operations. And consequently, all mathematics is reducible to a few simple operations. (Which is why computers can calculate.) In practice. everything we can think of can be reduced to adding or removing one, and the test of equality. (As an aside, this is why we can explain more possibilities with mathematics than the physical universe can demonstrate in reality: because the universe does not have this level of freedom due to the apparent complexity of its interacting forces.) The act of adding and subtracting the symbols we call numerals and positional numbers, is an obvious and common example of creating symbols to replace what would be tedious and incomprehensible repetitions. This necessity to use symbols to condense information into usable components (categories) is what our brains need to do. Imagine trying to do all operations by counting? It would be impossible. We could not function without these symbols. Furthermore, describing mathematical equations and proofs as operations is both verbally and syntactically burdensome. And since these operations are largely simple, and can be accurately reduced to symbols (named functions) there is little value in articulating them as operations. So mathematicians have developed a multitude of symbols and names for what are not extant objects, but names of functions (sets of operations) – just as every other discipline creates heavily loaded terms in order to allow informationally dense communication with fewer words. Most ‘numbers’ are anything but: they are names, glyphs and symbols, for functions that consist of large numbers of operations. “The natural numbers exist in nature, but all else is the work of man.” The reason for this complexity is that quantitative, and directional relationships are expressed as ratios, and while some ratios are reducible to numbers, others are not. Those that are not reducible must be expressed as functions. We have not invented a mathematical system that can circumvent this problem. It is possible such a thing cannot be done. Now aside from the practical utility of creating symbols, that obscure the operations, there is a practical value in using these names by disconnecting these names from their operations and from correspondence with any given scale. That is, that disconnection allows one to use the logic of mathematics independent of cause, correspondence and scale, to explore ONLY the properties of the relations between the entities in question. And this turns out to be extremely useful for deducing what causes we do not now. And this extraordinary utility has been responsible for the fact that the discipline has laundered time, causality and scale (precision) from the discipline. But one cannot say that a mathematical statement is true without correspondence with the real world. We can say it is internally consistent (a proof), but not that it is true (descriptive of reality via correspondence). Mathematics when ‘wrong’ most recently, with Cantor’s sets, in which he used imaginary objects, infinity, the excluded middle and the the axiom of choice, to preserve this syntactical convenience of names, and in doing so, completed the diversion of mathematics from a logic of truth (external correspondence), to one that is merely a logic of proof (internal consistency). Cantor’s work came at the expense of correspondence, and by consequence at the expense of truth. ie: mathematics does not determine truths, only proofs, because all correspondence has been removed by these ‘contrivances’, whose initial purpose was convenience, but whose accumulated errors have led to such (frankly, absurd) debates, . So the problem with mathematical platonism, which turns out to be fairly useful for the convenience of practitioners, is not so much a technical problem but a MORAL ONE. First, mathematicians, even the best, rarely grasp this concept. Second, since, because it is EASIER to construct mathematical proofs than any other form of logic, it is the gold standard for other forms of logic. And the envy of other disciplines. And as such mathematical platonism has ‘bled’ into other envious fields, the same way that Physics has bled into economics. Worse, this multi-axial new mysticism has been adopted by philosophers from Kant to the Frankfurt school to the postmodernists, to contemporary totalitarian humanists as a vehicle for reinserting arational mysticism into political debate – as a means of obtaining power. Quite contrary to academic opinion, all totalitarianism is, is catholicism restated in non-religious terms, with the academy replacing the church as the constructor of obscurant language. I suspect this fairly significant error is what has plagued the physics community, but we have found no alternative to current approaches. Albeit, I expect, that if we retrained mathematicians, physicists, and economists to require operational language in the expression of mathematical relations, that whatever error we are making in our understanding of physics would emerge within a generation. No infinity can exist. Because no operation can be performed infinitely. We can however, adjust the precision and scale of any proof to suit the context, since any mathematical expression, consists of ratios that, if correspond to reality, we can arbitrarily adjust for increasing precision. Mathematics cannot claim truth without correspondence. Correspondence in measures is a function of scale and the UTILITY of precision, in the CONTEXT of which the operation is calculated (limit). A language of mathematics that is described independent of scale in given context, can be correctly stated. It need not be magian. Fields can still be understood to be imaginary patterns. But the entire reason that we find such things interesting, is a folly of the mind, no different from the illusion of movement in a film. The real world exists. We are weak computers of property in pursuit of our reproduction and amusement. We developed many forms of instrumentalism to extend our weak abilities. We must use instruments and methods to reduce to analogies to experience, those things which we cannot directly do so. It’s just that simple. AGAINST THE PLATONIC (IMAGINARY) WORLD Why must we support imaginary objects, as extant? Especially when the constructive argument (intuitionist) in operational language, can provide equal explanatory power? Why must we rely on ZFC+AC when we have recursive math, or when we can explain all mathematics in operational language without loss of context, scale, precision and utility? Just ’cause it’s easier. But that complexity is a defense against obscurantism and platonism. So it is merely a matter of cost. I understand Popper as trying to solve a problem of meta ethics, rather than anything particularly scientific. And I see most of his work as doing the best he could for the purposes that I’ve stated. Anyone who disagrees with me would have to disagree with my premies and my argument, not rely on the existence of platonist entities (magic) in order to win such an argument. That this is impossible, is at least something that I understand if no one else yet does. I don’t so much need someone to agree with me as constantly improve my argument so that I can test and harden it until it is unassailable or defeated. I think that defeating this argument is going to be very, very, difficult. TIME AND OPERATIONS (ACTIONS) IN TIME One cannot state that abstract ideas can be constructed independent of time, or even that they could be identified without changes in state over time. Or that thought can occur without the passage of time. Or consciousness can occur without the passage of time. Whether I make one choice or another is not material. This question is not a matter of choice, it is a matter of possibility. I can make no choice without the passage of time. I think that the only certain knowledge consists of negations, and that all the rest is conjecture. This is the only moral position to take. And it is the only moral position since argument exists for the purpose of persuasion, and persuasion for cooperation. I keep seeing this sort of desire to promote the rather obvious idea that induction is nonsense – yet everyone uses it, as a tremendous diversion from the fact that induction is necessary for action in real time, whenever the cost of not acting is higher than the cost of acting. Description, deduction, induction, abduction, guessing and intuitive choice are just descriptions of the processes we must use given the amount of information at our disposal. Science has no urgency, and life threatening emergencies do. Popper (and CR-ists for that matter) seem to want to perpetuate either mysticism, or skepticism as religion, rather than make the very simple point that the demands for ‘truth’ increase and decrease given the necessity of acting in time. I guess that I could take a psychological detour into why people would want to do this. But I suspect that I am correct (as I stated in one of these posts) that popper was, as part of his era, trying to react against the use of science and academia to replace the coercive power of the church. So he restated skepticism by establishing very high criteria for scientific truth. And all the nonsense that continues to be written about his work seek to read into platonic tea leaves, when the facts are quite SIMPLE. (Back to Argumentation Ethics at this point.) The fact is that humans must act in real time and as the urgency of action increases so does the demand for truth. Conversely, as the demand for cooperation increases, the demand for truth increases. Finally at the top of the scale we have science, which in itself is an expensive pursuit, and as such one is forbidden to externalize costs to other scientists. (Although if we look at papers this doesn’t actually work that well except at the very top margin.) THE QUESTION IS ONE OF COOPERATION The problem is ECONOMIC AND COOPERATIVE AND MORAL, not scientific. It’s just that simple. We cannot disconnect argument from cooperation without entering the platonic. We cannot disconnect math from context without entering the platonic. We cannot disconnect numbers from identity without entering the platonic. Each form of logic constrains the other. But the logic that constrains them all, is action. Without action, we end up with the delusions we spend most of philosophical discourse on. It’s all nonsense. I understand the difference between the real and the unreal, and the necessity of our various logics as instruments for the reduction of that which we cannot comprehend (sympathize with) to analogies to experience that we can comprehend ( sympathize with). Which is profound if you grasp it. THE PROBLEM OF SYMBOLS AND ECONOMY OF LANGUAGE If you cannot describe something as human action, then you do not understand it. Operational language is the most important, and least articulated canon of science. I do not argue against the economy of language. I argue against the loss of causality and correspondence that accompanies repeated use of economizing terms. ( I am pretty sure I put a bullet in this topic along with apriorism in economics. ) MORAL STANDARDS OF TRUTH Requiring a higher standard of truth places a higher barrier on cooperation. This is most important in matters of involuntary transfer, such as taxation or social and moral norms. Religions place an impossible standard of truth. This is why they are used so effectively to resist the state. Religious doctrine reliant upon faith is argumentatively inviolable. As such, no cooperation can be asked or offered outside of their established terms. … It’s brilliant really. Its why religious groups can resist the predation of the state. I would prefer instead we relied upon a prohibition on obscurant language and the requisite illustration of involuntary transfers, such that exchanges were easily made possible, and discounts (thefts) made nearly impossible. This is, the correct criteria for CR, not the platonic one that is assumed. In this light CR looks correct in practice if incorrect in argument. (There. I did it. Took me a bit.) Curt Doolittle