Curt Doolittle

Form: Full Essay

  • WHY THE GOVERNMENT ‘DOESN’T WORK’ (cross posted for future reference) FACTS 0) T

    WHY THE GOVERNMENT ‘DOESN’T WORK’

    (cross posted for future reference)

    FACTS

    0) The government doesn’t work because it was designed for extended, related families with similar interests, not an empire over those lacking similar interests – particularly interests in reproductive structure (family structure), where the absolute nuclear family of the English is eugenic, and the traditional and inbred family is dysgenic. There is no possible means of reconciling these differences in strategies and their corresponding moral codes.

    1) Democracy (Majority Rule) is a monopolistic form of government, not a pluralistic, or competitive. Given any diversity of opinion, there is no means for both sides to win. Unlike the market, where all participants can win.

    2) Democratic voting can only solve a problem of selecting priorities among a body with similar interests. Democracy cannot be used to select between opposing interests. As such democracy, as was intended, is a means for a homogenous people to select priorities, peacefully rotate power, and suppress dissenters.

    4) The american experiment, was an attempt to create an aristocracy of everyone – or at least everyone who ran a small business or more (a farm). It was a commercial entrepreneur’s dream. This strategy worked for a long time, because immigrants desired land, and would leave traditional family structures behind, come to the states, adopt the nuclear family out of necessity as well as cultural norm, and

    5) The Northern european high trust absolute nuclear family model cannot survive in a heterogeneous polity. It never could. We did a pretty good job with the massive post civil war to great depression era of immigration, by using a large, conquered continent, and forcible indoctrination in to the culture. But we reversed that necessity of conformity within two generations. And by 1963, the combination of racial tensions, feminism, the new proletarians joining the work force, the postwar soldiers in little pink houses, and temporary peak in earning potential by proletarians because of the collapse of the world economy during the wars.

    Our culture, as predicted at the time, did not survive that immigration and attack on our institutions. It was an interesting period in human history. But a unique social model of the North Sea People (british) and a unique period in time (collapse of european civilization) did not create a new norm. Just a short period where everything was in our favor.

    6) Family structure and origin determine morals and political preference. The more inbred a polity (the more outbred the families in it) the more homogenous it is. The more inbred the families are and the less outbred the polity is, the more demand for state intervention to compensate for moral and ethical differences.

    The problem we have today, is that very soon the majority of americans will come from diverse, single parent families. And the majority of wealthy americans will come from homogenous, two parent families. And, as you can see in the voting pattern, what’s happening, is that white married voters are objecting to rents to support single voters.

    I don’t see this changing any time soon. And this diversity of moral and financial interests is too diverse to tolerate. It may be possible to use totalitarianism to destroy the family entirely, but we can measure the impact of that at present, and no society can tolerate it.

    CLOSING

    I don’t know which way this future will fall,. But I do know that it is not possible, purely on incentives, for the high trust high performance society to exist without the nuclear family. We are riding on our history now, but that history will be spent within the next generation.

    – Post Script –

    One not so subtle point.

    Voluntary associations only occur where trust is high because of a homogeneity of values (interests). Civic voluntary associations of any scale only occur where the population is outbred and relies on nuclear families. Wherever diversity is present, demand for government rapidly increases due to irresolvable conflicts between interests, and irresolvable conflicts between implied allocations of property rights between the individual, family and commons.

    So, while it is true to say, as you have (and do often and well) that Voluntary Associations are superior to bureaucratic associations. Or, as the Ancap’s argue, that consumer associations functioning as competing insurance agencies, are superior to bureaucratic associations. One can argue that incommensurability of values in a heterogeneous population can only be solved by bureaucratic tyranny. And in fact, on commensurability alone (the ability to resolve conflict rationally) it is hard to defeat this argument.

    As such, it is not sufficient to state that voluntary associations are preferable to the bureaucracy. Or that consumer associations (insurance agencies) are preferable to the bureaucracy. Unless we first grasp that heterogeneity forces bureaucracy, and homogeneity encourages if not forces, voluntary association.

    This is of course, contrary to libertarian doctrine. But then, libertarian doctrine in this matter is rational, and not empirical. And empirically, libertarian doctrine is false.

    Diversity is possible under private monarchies because no one has access to power. This is perhaps the often lost genius of the Manorial system: without access to power, groups must compete in the market for goods and services for their signals, rather than compete in the government for rents.

    So recommending voluntary associations without first recommending the homogeneous normative environment necessary for voluntary associations is either misleading, self destructive or error.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-15 12:55:00 UTC

  • EMPIRICIAL LANGUAGE VS LINGUISTIC ‘SUPERSTITION’ (Important)(profound) I suppose

    EMPIRICIAL LANGUAGE VS LINGUISTIC ‘SUPERSTITION’

    (Important)(profound)

    I suppose it’s partly that my Americanism is annoying to him, because he really doesn’t pay me any mind, but Hans has only given me I think, three bits of advice. One of them I disagree with. One I have to remind myself every day – how Hayek failed to actually solve the problem . And, one of them was critical: to use established terminology whenever possible.

    I made the same mistake many others do outside of academia, which is, that because existing paradigms are so heavily loaded, it’s tempting to define new terms, in order to load them differently – or in my case, unload them entirely.

    And it turns out that its entirely possible, because philosophy is so littered with frames of reference that one merely must play an intellectual game of conceptual pickup-sticks, and modify the properties of existing concepts to establish an entirely different order.

    I am still troubled by a few problems. The first is that the persistence of the continental model of linguistic ‘superstition’ which uses heavily loaded language, by intention, to

    It is possible that aristoctratic language, that is, the language of science, or ‘truth’ – meaning, unloaded correspondence with observable actions in objective reality, is just more natural to anglos for antiquarian reasons. I am unsure. I do know that ‘duty’ in the anglo metaphysical value system is ‘to each other’ and in the continental system ‘to place in the order’, is quite different. And it is quite different because of ancient land ownership and defense reasons. That this ancient bias served to force the english people into an empirical rather than hierarchical set of conceptual biases, is probably an obvious cause in retrospect. But at this point in time, empiricism, that is, **order independent of hierarchy**, or “unloaded” truth, is embeded into the language so deeply that anglos are indoctrinated into empiricism by simply learning the language.

    This is, of course, after the Absolute Nuclear Family, the next most important reason for forced cultural integration: Language: The Anglo Framework of Ratio Scientific Empiricism.

    And that is why the Postmoderns must undermine the english language here, and not so severely on the continent: Because the language itself prevents loading – either subjective or hierarchical. And without prevention of loading, or without reversing the ability to load the language, it is impossible to obscure inequality of ability and merit.

    One of the reasons I am attempting to reform libertarianism, is because of the German and Jewish fascination with obscurantism in creating pseudosciences: Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, Freud, and Cantor, and I must unfortunately, add Mises and Rothbard to that list. I think for precisely the same reason.

    Unfortunately, the anglo, indo-european fascination with, and intellectual bias toward, space/time and mechanisms, seems to create a vulnerability to pseudoscience created by obscurant and loaded language.

    So, I am taking this german and jewish pattern of obscurant and loaded thought and converting it to RATIO SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE.

    Every month I get closer. If I live long enough I should finish it. Right now I can get most of it across in something on the nature of 5000 words. My expectation, when done, is that I should have reduced this set of complexity down to less than 10K words in its entirety.

    And that reduction has come, because of Hans’ advice, by using and extending the properties of, existing terminology.

    That does not mean that it is trivial to grasp. And mastery of the framework will still require a bit of study. But Propertarianism is, as a philosophy, the most complete and most empirical philosophical system we have yet been able to devise.

    Now, I get a great deal of feedback on my perceived arrogance. But from my extremely skeptical perspective, as someone who has spent a lifetime in pursuit of resolving the problem of political conflict, i’m just speaking as objectively as I can.

    I did not come to libertarianism naturally. I came to libertarianism because I understood that the economic calculation argument, and its obverse, incentives, were the only NECESSARY argument that I could find in all of philosophy. And it was from that initial necessary observation that I was able, with a great deal of work, to express all philosophy in a single consistent framework, by reducing not only all rights, but all of ethics, morals, manners, to the process of voluntary exchange, given the different reproductive strategies of individuals.

    And this is the conflict that I have with both Marxist Dialectic and Rawlsian aggregates: neither are empirical. And they are not empirical, for the sole purpose of forcing cooperation between people who do not wish to involuntarily cooperate, by claiming a commonality of interest on ends, where there is none. And there is only a commonality of interest on means.

    Exchange is observable and empirical.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-12 09:36:00 UTC

  • (CORE) Propertarianism : Uniting Hoppe And Hayek

    “Hayek’s work composes a system of ideas, fully as ambitious as the systems of Mill and Marx, but far less vulnerable to criticism than theirs because it is grounded on a philosophically defensible view of the scope and limits of human reason. ” –John N. Gray, in Hayek on Liberty (1984), Preface, p. ix COMMENT I originally thought I was trying to reconcile Hayek and Mises — at least, that’s what I remember saying to Walter Block — but really, it turns out, that it’s Mises (calculation), Hoppe (institutions), Rothbard (property as calculation) and Hayek (limits of reason) that needed uniting. If you stop for a moment, long enough to grasp that we do not need to JUSTIFY libertarianism (philosophy) as much as simply UNDERSTAND human moral behavior (science), then the question is not what we should choose to believe or prefer to believe, but only what institutions compensate for the deficiencies in our ability to cooperate because of fragmentary knowledge, AND cognitive and moral biases. The result is a libertarian bias in the formation all institutions. The problem is not ‘what we should do’ but ‘what can we not do’ without institutions to assist us in cooperating where we cannot cooperate without them. Where cooperation means to cooperate with people we do not and cannot know on means of achieving multiplicative ends, many of which are in conflict, and all of which represent our individual reproductive strategies. It’s common for us to discuss Capital in all its forms: Financial, Physical, Institutional, Human and Social. But, I don’t like the term ‘social capital’ for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that the term ‘social’ is heavily loaded. But most importantly, because for the female, collectively-biased mind, ‘social’ implies ‘agreement and consent’. Whereas, my preferred term, “informal institutions” consisting of manners, ethics, morals, habits, traditions, rituals, myths, metaphysical biases, is a largely involuntary, non-consensual, habituated rules, reduced to intuitions, many of which we may not even be aware of – and most which we cannot distinguish from biological and genetic instinct. It’s common for us to discuss Capital in all its forms: 1) Human Capital, 2) Informal Institutional Capital, 3) Intellectual Capital, 4) Formal institutional Capital, 5) Physical Capital, 6) Financial Capital, 7) Geographic Capital. And to do so in that order, as a sequence from the human being, to physical space, and each dependent upon its priors. A SYSTEM OF IDEAS Extending property to the full suite of categories which human beings demonstrate that they treat as property, we are able to reconcile the Austro-libertarian program and rescue it from its past errors. We can take calculation and praxeology from mises, and complete praxeology as a biologically based science of incentives, remove deduction from it, but retain praxeology’s ability to test any incentive given the similarity of our sensitivity to incentives. We can take Hayek and show that he simply did not make the connection between the various categories of property and his insights into the limits of information and knowledge. We are able to reduce to very compact form, the theory of human cooperation, as non-arbitrary, entirely rational pursuit of our reproductive strategy in whatever organization we are members of. COMPACTLY STATED To unite these thinkers into ratio-scientific form requires only the following limited steps: 0) Start with private property, and voluntary exchange 1) Add remaining categories of property 2) Add ethical requirement for symmetry and warranty 3) Add ethical requirement against transfer by externality 4) Add ethical requirement for operational language 5) Add ethical requirement for ‘calculability’ (retention of relation) 6) Add institutional government by contract not law. The rest is a set of tactics that require only different levels of technology to achieve the same result. THE REASON FOR MORAL DIVERSITY IS THE EXPRESSION OF REPRODUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM UNDER POST INDUSTRIALISM’S WEALTH People pursue their economic and reproductive interests, but only as long as there is an incentive and a means to do so. We are not equal in our reproductive value – which is obvious. Just as we are not equal in our economic value – value to each other. The diversity of moral biases increases with the diversity of the reproductive structure. If we all exist in nuclear families in one group, and all exist in tribes in another, then the moral code that he nuclear families operate between all members of all groups, will differ from the bifurcated morally of the tribal group. Because the tribal group treats all non-family as another ‘state’ just as the nuclear families treat all individuals as belonging to their family. This creates an asymmetry of morals, since at all times, both sides attempt to keep all rewards in their families. Except that the nuclear family system keeps rewards universally, and the tribal family does not. As such the nuclear family is easy prey to the immorality of the tribal family. Furthermore, under matrilinealism, women trade sex and affection for calories, where as under paternalism men trade calories and security for sex and care-taking using property. In each system there is a bias in reproductive control for each gender. Under the nuclear, traditional, and extended families, our reproductive male and female strategies are politically homogenized since what is politically good for one is good for the other. But under the dissolution of the family into single parenthood, and roaming males, reproductive interests are polarized between each group. And that is what we see in modern democracy, with the only difference that military prowess (power) gives nations a more masculine character, and lack of it gives nations are more feminine character. SCOPE AND SIMPLICITY As I write this I’m reminded that it does take an entire book to cover an ethical topic of this breadth. But comforted slightly that once the breadth is understood as a system, it is possible to reduce it to a compact set of rules or laws, and therefore, both fitting the criteria of explanatory power, and the requirement that society consist of very simple, basic rules, comprehensible to anyone. And since propertarianism is the codification of instinctual biology in verbal form using property as the means of commensurability, then it is both possible for humans to universally sense, perceive, and comprehend those simple basic additions – additions which in effect, ask us to extend and warrantee all exchanges, verbal and material, to all human beings, as if they were members of our traditional family. And as such, create a family in practice despite what are a multitude of families with different preferences, needs, means and ends. Cheers Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev 2013

  • (CORE) Propertarianism : Uniting Hoppe And Hayek

    “Hayek’s work composes a system of ideas, fully as ambitious as the systems of Mill and Marx, but far less vulnerable to criticism than theirs because it is grounded on a philosophically defensible view of the scope and limits of human reason. ” –John N. Gray, in Hayek on Liberty (1984), Preface, p. ix COMMENT I originally thought I was trying to reconcile Hayek and Mises — at least, that’s what I remember saying to Walter Block — but really, it turns out, that it’s Mises (calculation), Hoppe (institutions), Rothbard (property as calculation) and Hayek (limits of reason) that needed uniting. If you stop for a moment, long enough to grasp that we do not need to JUSTIFY libertarianism (philosophy) as much as simply UNDERSTAND human moral behavior (science), then the question is not what we should choose to believe or prefer to believe, but only what institutions compensate for the deficiencies in our ability to cooperate because of fragmentary knowledge, AND cognitive and moral biases. The result is a libertarian bias in the formation all institutions. The problem is not ‘what we should do’ but ‘what can we not do’ without institutions to assist us in cooperating where we cannot cooperate without them. Where cooperation means to cooperate with people we do not and cannot know on means of achieving multiplicative ends, many of which are in conflict, and all of which represent our individual reproductive strategies. It’s common for us to discuss Capital in all its forms: Financial, Physical, Institutional, Human and Social. But, I don’t like the term ‘social capital’ for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that the term ‘social’ is heavily loaded. But most importantly, because for the female, collectively-biased mind, ‘social’ implies ‘agreement and consent’. Whereas, my preferred term, “informal institutions” consisting of manners, ethics, morals, habits, traditions, rituals, myths, metaphysical biases, is a largely involuntary, non-consensual, habituated rules, reduced to intuitions, many of which we may not even be aware of – and most which we cannot distinguish from biological and genetic instinct. It’s common for us to discuss Capital in all its forms: 1) Human Capital, 2) Informal Institutional Capital, 3) Intellectual Capital, 4) Formal institutional Capital, 5) Physical Capital, 6) Financial Capital, 7) Geographic Capital. And to do so in that order, as a sequence from the human being, to physical space, and each dependent upon its priors. A SYSTEM OF IDEAS Extending property to the full suite of categories which human beings demonstrate that they treat as property, we are able to reconcile the Austro-libertarian program and rescue it from its past errors. We can take calculation and praxeology from mises, and complete praxeology as a biologically based science of incentives, remove deduction from it, but retain praxeology’s ability to test any incentive given the similarity of our sensitivity to incentives. We can take Hayek and show that he simply did not make the connection between the various categories of property and his insights into the limits of information and knowledge. We are able to reduce to very compact form, the theory of human cooperation, as non-arbitrary, entirely rational pursuit of our reproductive strategy in whatever organization we are members of. COMPACTLY STATED To unite these thinkers into ratio-scientific form requires only the following limited steps: 0) Start with private property, and voluntary exchange 1) Add remaining categories of property 2) Add ethical requirement for symmetry and warranty 3) Add ethical requirement against transfer by externality 4) Add ethical requirement for operational language 5) Add ethical requirement for ‘calculability’ (retention of relation) 6) Add institutional government by contract not law. The rest is a set of tactics that require only different levels of technology to achieve the same result. THE REASON FOR MORAL DIVERSITY IS THE EXPRESSION OF REPRODUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM UNDER POST INDUSTRIALISM’S WEALTH People pursue their economic and reproductive interests, but only as long as there is an incentive and a means to do so. We are not equal in our reproductive value – which is obvious. Just as we are not equal in our economic value – value to each other. The diversity of moral biases increases with the diversity of the reproductive structure. If we all exist in nuclear families in one group, and all exist in tribes in another, then the moral code that he nuclear families operate between all members of all groups, will differ from the bifurcated morally of the tribal group. Because the tribal group treats all non-family as another ‘state’ just as the nuclear families treat all individuals as belonging to their family. This creates an asymmetry of morals, since at all times, both sides attempt to keep all rewards in their families. Except that the nuclear family system keeps rewards universally, and the tribal family does not. As such the nuclear family is easy prey to the immorality of the tribal family. Furthermore, under matrilinealism, women trade sex and affection for calories, where as under paternalism men trade calories and security for sex and care-taking using property. In each system there is a bias in reproductive control for each gender. Under the nuclear, traditional, and extended families, our reproductive male and female strategies are politically homogenized since what is politically good for one is good for the other. But under the dissolution of the family into single parenthood, and roaming males, reproductive interests are polarized between each group. And that is what we see in modern democracy, with the only difference that military prowess (power) gives nations a more masculine character, and lack of it gives nations are more feminine character. SCOPE AND SIMPLICITY As I write this I’m reminded that it does take an entire book to cover an ethical topic of this breadth. But comforted slightly that once the breadth is understood as a system, it is possible to reduce it to a compact set of rules or laws, and therefore, both fitting the criteria of explanatory power, and the requirement that society consist of very simple, basic rules, comprehensible to anyone. And since propertarianism is the codification of instinctual biology in verbal form using property as the means of commensurability, then it is both possible for humans to universally sense, perceive, and comprehend those simple basic additions – additions which in effect, ask us to extend and warrantee all exchanges, verbal and material, to all human beings, as if they were members of our traditional family. And as such, create a family in practice despite what are a multitude of families with different preferences, needs, means and ends. Cheers Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev 2013

  • Aristocratic Egalitarian Vs Rothbardian Ethics

      (revised and expanded) It’s pretty hard to beat non-aggression as an epistemic test. It’s the only intersubjectively verifiable test. We can’t really know anything else for certain. We can very easily see violence and theft. But, does that inability to know much else for certain, stop us from developing ETHICAL and MORAL rules? LETS LOOK AT ETHICS: The spectrum of Manners, Ethics and Morals. 1) Manners are immediately visible. Just like aggression. 2) Ethics are not immediately visible and intersubjectively verifiable. Ethical rules are principles that compensate for the asymmetry of information of both parties. Probability of adherence to ethical rules that compensate for asymmetry of information, is signaled with manners and a contractual property of ALL exchanges. 3) Morals are not anywhere visible, but are a means of preventing privatization of the commons – involuntary transfer from others. Some are very obvious (having a child our of wedlock and then asking the community to support you), and some are less obvious (promoting a bad idea by arts, writing, speech, or performance: (most advertising). So, the failure to establish means of regulating ethics and morals, other than the NAP, is simply a license for unethical and moral action in any and all exchanges. Rothbard’s argument is that the market is sufficient to constrain ethical and moral behavior. But the EVIDENCE is that this isn’t true. It’s VIOLENCE that constrains it. And violence is constrained by the number of people who can be allied to either support unethical and immoral actions, or to support ethical and moral actions. The rothbardian answer to this problem is to resort to courts. But if NAP alone is the ethical and moral rule in exchanges, then, as Rothbard argues in For a New Liberty, there is no means of court resolution of fraud and immorality: theft by other than visible means. In other words, rothbard gives us the low trust society, and aristocracy, with a higher constraint than NAP, gives us the high trust society. Rothbard’s ethics are ‘what you can get away with in an exchange, called voluntary, but asymmetrical in knowledge.’ Aristocracy gave us ‘what you can get in a voluntary exchange under warranty that knowledge is symmetric’. This is why rothbardian ethics are intolerable to western christians. Demonstrably, at least our version of human beings, find that insufficient. Under aristocratic ethics, ALL involuntary transfer is forbidden EXCEPT that which takes place in the market for productive goods and services, fully under warrantee of symmetry of knowledge. And the further difference is, that fraud by asymmetry (omission) is not just a theft from by one party from another, but a theft from ALL PEOPLE who constantly forgo opportunities for fraud by omission – and in doing so create the HIGH TRUST SOCIETY. In other words, theft or violence (aggression) is an attack on all the institution of property. Property which has been paid for by constantly paying the high cost of respecting others’ monopoly of control. A control over that which they settled, made or obtained in exchange. An attack on any property then, is an attack on, and theft from all SHAREHOLDERS IN THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS. As such all men who respect property rights, as shareholders in paying for that institution, are being stolen from, and as such have standing to enforce, by violence, any offense of property rights by any person, at any time. In most human societies, the “OTHERS” are biological extensions of the family. In yet others, adherents to the religion. But under aristocracy the ‘in-group’ members are those who reciprocally grant and defend property rights regardless of family membership, and the “OTHERS” are those who do NOT reciprocally grant property rights, and defend them. THAT IS THE MEANING OF ARISTOCRACY: a shareholder in the corporation whose assets are private property rights, and the obligation and right to prosecute and demand restitution on the part of either himself OR THE CORPORATION of ALL members of the contract of private property. As such, the contributors to property rights in fact, are owners of the economically productive society, its norms and institutions, and those those that do not equally take responsibility for property rights are the ‘others’: non-family members. Under aristocratic egalitarianism, the high trust WITHIN the genetic FAMILY is extended to the CORPORATE family of fellow shareholders. Thus the family is contractual rather than genetic. that is how the ‘high trust society’ unique to northern europeans was made possible. The title “SIR” meant you had earned the right to carry weapons and enforce property rights. The “right to carry arms’ is identical to ‘the right to private property’. These two are ideas are inseparable. The source of property rights is the organized use of violence to create them. The source of property rights is not some, mystical grant of god or nature, or some necessary natural right – since private property is rare if not unique in the world, it cannot be ‘natural’. In fact, private property is UNNATURAL, which is why it is so IMPORTANT. Without it we cannot form the incentives nor perform the calculation necessary to crate a vast division of knowledge an labor in real time. Aristocracy is the system of social order where by we enter a voluntary contract to use violence to institute, and maintain, private property rights. And we struggle to enfranchise as many people in this UNNATURAL system as possible, so that we have the strength of numbers. This system, private property, is so effective, and has such an affect on status, and the ability to reproduce, that everyone wants to join the societies that have it. The first problem is, (a) THAT THEY WANT IT FOR FREE. And (b) once property rights are a norm, they feel it’s free, because they don’t have to EARN IT any longer with visible payments, only invisible payment (constraints). So the contract isn’t visible and is abused and taken for granted. As such to maintain property rights requires that we perform some ACT of maturity and COGNIZANCE in order to obtain them. Cities in the west were not organically created markets, but deliberate islands of PROPERTY RIGHTS crated by the organized application of violence by the nobility. The island of property rights was crafted out of a land populated by free riders who actively SUPPRESSED the desire of any individual to concentrate capital behind his ideas or wants rather than that of the free riders and rent seekers around him. Which is why Rothbard had to resort to CRUSOE’S ISLAND. On that island, the ocean forms the walls of the ghetto, beyond which is the aristocratic society. Crusoe’s island is one of the reasons libertarianism has failed to gain adoption. The western ethic is to “Make all men aristocrats”. That is what ‘egalitarian aristocracy’ means. That the fools in the enlightenment though men DESIRED to be aristocrats was a catastrophic error. But the fact that MANY do, is enough to form a high trust society. As such, NAP, is “peasant” or “ghetto”, or “gypsy trader” morality. The morality of people who cannot ally to hold land, and develop fixed capital, heavy production systems (metals) and formal institutions of dispute resolution. It not liberty, but the return to partial barbarism. Rothbard gave us the ethics of the traveling merchant, the ghetto, and organized crime. Aristocracy gave us the ethics of the extended family warriors, farmers and shopkeepers – the high trust society. The only people to created liberty as a formal and informal institution were aristocrats. Just how it is.

  • Aristocratic Egalitarian Vs Rothbardian Ethics

      (revised and expanded) It’s pretty hard to beat non-aggression as an epistemic test. It’s the only intersubjectively verifiable test. We can’t really know anything else for certain. We can very easily see violence and theft. But, does that inability to know much else for certain, stop us from developing ETHICAL and MORAL rules? LETS LOOK AT ETHICS: The spectrum of Manners, Ethics and Morals. 1) Manners are immediately visible. Just like aggression. 2) Ethics are not immediately visible and intersubjectively verifiable. Ethical rules are principles that compensate for the asymmetry of information of both parties. Probability of adherence to ethical rules that compensate for asymmetry of information, is signaled with manners and a contractual property of ALL exchanges. 3) Morals are not anywhere visible, but are a means of preventing privatization of the commons – involuntary transfer from others. Some are very obvious (having a child our of wedlock and then asking the community to support you), and some are less obvious (promoting a bad idea by arts, writing, speech, or performance: (most advertising). So, the failure to establish means of regulating ethics and morals, other than the NAP, is simply a license for unethical and moral action in any and all exchanges. Rothbard’s argument is that the market is sufficient to constrain ethical and moral behavior. But the EVIDENCE is that this isn’t true. It’s VIOLENCE that constrains it. And violence is constrained by the number of people who can be allied to either support unethical and immoral actions, or to support ethical and moral actions. The rothbardian answer to this problem is to resort to courts. But if NAP alone is the ethical and moral rule in exchanges, then, as Rothbard argues in For a New Liberty, there is no means of court resolution of fraud and immorality: theft by other than visible means. In other words, rothbard gives us the low trust society, and aristocracy, with a higher constraint than NAP, gives us the high trust society. Rothbard’s ethics are ‘what you can get away with in an exchange, called voluntary, but asymmetrical in knowledge.’ Aristocracy gave us ‘what you can get in a voluntary exchange under warranty that knowledge is symmetric’. This is why rothbardian ethics are intolerable to western christians. Demonstrably, at least our version of human beings, find that insufficient. Under aristocratic ethics, ALL involuntary transfer is forbidden EXCEPT that which takes place in the market for productive goods and services, fully under warrantee of symmetry of knowledge. And the further difference is, that fraud by asymmetry (omission) is not just a theft from by one party from another, but a theft from ALL PEOPLE who constantly forgo opportunities for fraud by omission – and in doing so create the HIGH TRUST SOCIETY. In other words, theft or violence (aggression) is an attack on all the institution of property. Property which has been paid for by constantly paying the high cost of respecting others’ monopoly of control. A control over that which they settled, made or obtained in exchange. An attack on any property then, is an attack on, and theft from all SHAREHOLDERS IN THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS. As such all men who respect property rights, as shareholders in paying for that institution, are being stolen from, and as such have standing to enforce, by violence, any offense of property rights by any person, at any time. In most human societies, the “OTHERS” are biological extensions of the family. In yet others, adherents to the religion. But under aristocracy the ‘in-group’ members are those who reciprocally grant and defend property rights regardless of family membership, and the “OTHERS” are those who do NOT reciprocally grant property rights, and defend them. THAT IS THE MEANING OF ARISTOCRACY: a shareholder in the corporation whose assets are private property rights, and the obligation and right to prosecute and demand restitution on the part of either himself OR THE CORPORATION of ALL members of the contract of private property. As such, the contributors to property rights in fact, are owners of the economically productive society, its norms and institutions, and those those that do not equally take responsibility for property rights are the ‘others’: non-family members. Under aristocratic egalitarianism, the high trust WITHIN the genetic FAMILY is extended to the CORPORATE family of fellow shareholders. Thus the family is contractual rather than genetic. that is how the ‘high trust society’ unique to northern europeans was made possible. The title “SIR” meant you had earned the right to carry weapons and enforce property rights. The “right to carry arms’ is identical to ‘the right to private property’. These two are ideas are inseparable. The source of property rights is the organized use of violence to create them. The source of property rights is not some, mystical grant of god or nature, or some necessary natural right – since private property is rare if not unique in the world, it cannot be ‘natural’. In fact, private property is UNNATURAL, which is why it is so IMPORTANT. Without it we cannot form the incentives nor perform the calculation necessary to crate a vast division of knowledge an labor in real time. Aristocracy is the system of social order where by we enter a voluntary contract to use violence to institute, and maintain, private property rights. And we struggle to enfranchise as many people in this UNNATURAL system as possible, so that we have the strength of numbers. This system, private property, is so effective, and has such an affect on status, and the ability to reproduce, that everyone wants to join the societies that have it. The first problem is, (a) THAT THEY WANT IT FOR FREE. And (b) once property rights are a norm, they feel it’s free, because they don’t have to EARN IT any longer with visible payments, only invisible payment (constraints). So the contract isn’t visible and is abused and taken for granted. As such to maintain property rights requires that we perform some ACT of maturity and COGNIZANCE in order to obtain them. Cities in the west were not organically created markets, but deliberate islands of PROPERTY RIGHTS crated by the organized application of violence by the nobility. The island of property rights was crafted out of a land populated by free riders who actively SUPPRESSED the desire of any individual to concentrate capital behind his ideas or wants rather than that of the free riders and rent seekers around him. Which is why Rothbard had to resort to CRUSOE’S ISLAND. On that island, the ocean forms the walls of the ghetto, beyond which is the aristocratic society. Crusoe’s island is one of the reasons libertarianism has failed to gain adoption. The western ethic is to “Make all men aristocrats”. That is what ‘egalitarian aristocracy’ means. That the fools in the enlightenment though men DESIRED to be aristocrats was a catastrophic error. But the fact that MANY do, is enough to form a high trust society. As such, NAP, is “peasant” or “ghetto”, or “gypsy trader” morality. The morality of people who cannot ally to hold land, and develop fixed capital, heavy production systems (metals) and formal institutions of dispute resolution. It not liberty, but the return to partial barbarism. Rothbard gave us the ethics of the traveling merchant, the ghetto, and organized crime. Aristocracy gave us the ethics of the extended family warriors, farmers and shopkeepers – the high trust society. The only people to created liberty as a formal and informal institution were aristocrats. Just how it is.

  • ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN VS ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS (revised and expanded) It’s prett

    ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN VS ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS

    (revised and expanded)

    It’s pretty hard to beat non-aggression as an epistemic test. It’s the only intersubjectively verifiable test. We can’t really know anything else for certain. We can very easily see violence and theft.

    But, does that inability to know much else for certain, stop us from developing ETHICAL and MORAL rules?

    LETS LOOK AT ETHICS: The spectrum of Manners, Ethics and Morals.

    1) Manners are immediately visible. Just like aggression.

    2) Ethics are not immediately visible and intersubjectively verifiable. Ethical rules are principles that compensate for the asymmetry of information of both parties. Probability of adherence to ethical rules that compensate for asymmetry of information, is signaled with manners and a contractual property of ALL exchanges.

    3) Morals are not anywhere visible, but are a means of preventing privatization of the commons – involuntary transfer from others. Some are very obvious (having a child our of wedlock and then asking the community to support you), and some are less obvious (promoting a bad idea by arts, writing, speech, or performance: (most advertising).

    So, the failure to establish means of regulating ethics and morals, other than the NAP, is simply a license for unethical and moral action in any and all exchanges. Rothbard’s argument is that the market is sufficient to constrain ethical and moral behavior. But the EVIDENCE is that this isn’t true. It’s VIOLENCE that constrains it. And violence is constrained by the number of people who can be allied to either support unethical and immoral actions, or to support ethical and moral actions. The rothbardian answer to this problem is to resort to courts. But if NAP alone is the ethical and moral rule in exchanges, then, as Rothbard argues in For a New Liberty, there is no means of court resolution of fraud and immorality: theft by other than visible means.

    In other words, rothbard gives us the low trust society, and aristocracy, with a higher constraint than NAP, gives us the high trust society. Rothbard’s ethics are ‘what you can get away with in an exchange, called voluntary, but asymmetrical in knowledge.’ Aristocracy gave us ‘what you can get in a voluntary exchange under warranty that knowledge is symmetric’.

    This is why rothbardian ethics are intolerable to western christians. Demonstrably, at least our version of human beings, find that insufficient.

    Under aristocratic ethics, ALL involuntary transfer is forbidden EXCEPT that which takes place in the market for productive goods and services, fully under warrantee of symmetry of knowledge. And the further difference is, that fraud by asymmetry (omission) is not just a theft from by one party from another, but a theft from ALL PEOPLE who constantly forgo opportunities for fraud by omission – and in doing so create the HIGH TRUST SOCIETY.

    In other words, theft or violence (aggression) is an attack on all the institution of property. Property which has been paid for by constantly paying the high cost of respecting others’ monopoly of control. A control over that which they settled, made or obtained in exchange. An attack on any property then, is an attack on, and theft from all SHAREHOLDERS IN THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS. As such all men who respect property rights, as shareholders in paying for that institution, are being stolen from, and as such have standing to enforce, by violence, any offense of property rights by any person, at any time.

    In most human societies, the “OTHERS” are biological extensions of the family. In yet others, adherents to the religion. But under aristocracy the ‘in-group’ members are those who reciprocally grant and defend property rights regardless of family membership, and the “OTHERS” are those who do NOT reciprocally grant property rights, and defend them.

    THAT IS THE MEANING OF ARISTOCRACY: a shareholder in the corporation whose assets are private property rights, and the obligation and right to prosecute and demand restitution on the part of either himself OR THE CORPORATION of ALL members of the contract of private property.

    As such, the contributors to property rights in fact, are owners of the economically productive society, its norms and institutions, and those those that do not equally take responsibility for property rights are the ‘others’: non-family members.

    Under aristocratic egalitarianism, the high trust WITHIN the genetic FAMILY is extended to the CORPORATE family of fellow shareholders. Thus the family is contractual rather than genetic. that is how the ‘high trust society’ unique to northern europeans was made possible.

    The title “SIR” meant you had earned the right to carry weapons and enforce property rights. The “right to carry arms’ is identical to ‘the right to private property’. These two are ideas are inseparable. The source of property rights is the organized use of violence to create them.

    The source of property rights is not some, mystical grant of god or nature, or some necessary natural right – since private property is rare if not unique in the world, it cannot be ‘natural’. In fact, private property is UNNATURAL, which is why it is so IMPORTANT. Without it we cannot form the incentives nor perform the calculation necessary to crate a vast division of knowledge an labor in real time. Aristocracy is the system of social order where by we enter a voluntary contract to use violence to institute, and maintain, private property rights. And we struggle to enfranchise as many people in this UNNATURAL system as possible, so that we have the strength of numbers. This system, private property, is so effective, and has such an affect on status, and the ability to reproduce, that everyone wants to join the societies that have it.

    The first problem is, (a) THAT THEY WANT IT FOR FREE. And (b) once property rights are a norm, they feel it’s free, because they don’t have to EARN IT any longer with visible payments, only invisible payment (constraints). So the contract isn’t visible and is abused and taken for granted.

    As such to maintain property rights requires that we perform some ACT of maturity and COGNIZANCE in order to obtain them.

    Cities in the west were not organically created markets, but deliberate islands of PROPERTY RIGHTS crated by the organized application of violence by the nobility. The island of property rights was crafted out of a land populated by free riders who actively SUPPRESSED the desire of any individual to concentrate capital behind his ideas or wants rather than that of the free riders and rent seekers around him.

    Which is why Rothbard had to resort to CRUSOE’S ISLAND. On that island, the ocean forms the walls of the ghetto, beyond which is the aristocratic society. Crusoe’s island is one of the reasons libertarianism has failed to gain adoption. The western ethic is to “Make all men aristocrats”. That is what ‘egalitarian aristocracy’ means. That the fools in the enlightenment though men DESIRED to be aristocrats was a catastrophic error. But the fact that MANY do, is enough to form a high trust society.

    As such, NAP, is “peasant” or “ghetto”, or “gypsy trader” morality. The morality of people who cannot ally to hold land, and develop fixed capital, heavy production systems (metals) and formal institutions of dispute resolution. It not liberty, but the return to partial barbarism.

    Rothbard gave us the ethics of the traveling merchant, the ghetto, and organized crime. Aristocracy gave us the ethics of the extended family warriors, farmers and shopkeepers – the high trust society. The only people to created liberty as a formal and informal institution were aristocrats.

    Just how it is.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 12:49:00 UTC

  • ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN VS ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS (cross posted and slightly edited

    ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN VS ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS

    (cross posted and slightly edited)

    It’s pretty hard to beat non-aggression as an epistemic test. It’s the only intersubjectively verifiable test. We can’t really know anything else for certain. We can very easily see violence and theft.

    But, does that inability to know much else for certain, stop us from developing ETHICAL and MORAL rules?

    LETS LOOK AT ETHICS: The spectrum of Manners, Ethics and Morals.

    1) Manners are immediately visible. Just like aggression.

    2) Ethics are not immediately visible and intersubjectively verifiable. Ethical rules are principles that compensate for the asymmetry of information of both parties. Probability of adherence to ethical rules that compensate for asymmetry of information, is signaled with manners and a contractual property of ALL exchanges.

    3) Morals are not anywhere visible, but are a means of preventing privatization of the commons – involuntary transfer from others. Some are very obvious (having a child our of wedlock and then asking the community to support you), and some are less obvious (promoting a bad idea by arts, writing, speech, or performance: (most advertising).

    So, the failure to establish means of regulating ethics and morals, other than the NAP, is simply a license for unethical and moral action in any and all exchanges. Rothbard’s argument is that the market is sufficient to constrain ethical and moral behavior. But the EVIDENCE is that this isn’t true. It’s VIOLENCE that constrains it. And violence is constrained by the number of people who can be allied to either support unethical and immoral actions, or to support ethical and moral actions. The rothbardian answer to this problem is to resort to courts. But if NAP alone is the ethical and moral rule in exchanges, then, as Rothbard argues in For a New Liberty, there is no means of court resolution of fraud and immorality: theft by other than visible means.

    In other words, rothbard gives us the low trust society, and aristocracy, with a higher constraint than NAP, gives us the high trust society. Rothbard’s ethics are ‘what you can get away with in an exchange, called voluntary, but asymmetrical in knowledge.’ Aristocracy gave us ‘what you can get in a voluntary exchange under warranty that knowledge is symmetric’.

    This is why rothbardian ethics are intolerable to western christians. Demonstrably, at least our version of human beings, find that insufficient.

    Under aristocratic ethics, ALL involuntary transfer is forbidden EXCEPT that which takes place in the market for productive goods and services, fully under warrantee of symmetry of knowledge. And the further difference is, that fraud by asymmetry (omission) is not just a theft from by one party from another, but a theft from ALL PEOPLE who constantly forgo opportunities for fraud by omission – and in doing so create the HIGH TRUST SOCIETY.

    In other words, theft or violence (aggression) is an attack on all the institution of property. Property which has been paid for by constantly paying the high cost of respecting others’ monopoly of control. A control over that which they settled, made or obtained in exchange. An attack on any property then, is an attack on, and theft from all SHAREHOLDERS IN THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS. As such all men who respect property rights, as shareholders in paying for that institution, are being stolen from, and as such have standing to enforce, by violence, any offense of property rights by any person, at any time.

    In most human societies, the “OTHERS” are biological extensions of the family. In yet others, adherents to the religion. But under aristocracy the ‘in-group’ members are those who reciprocally grant and defend property rights regardless of family membership, and the “OTHERS” are those who do NOT reciprocally grant property rights, and defend them.

    THAT IS THE MEANING OF ARISTOCRACY: a shareholder in the corporation whose assets are private property rights, and the obligation and right to prosecute and demand restitution on the part of either himself OR THE CORPORATION of ALL members of the contract of private property.

    As such, the contributors to property rights in fact, are owners of the economically productive society, its norms and institutions, and those those that do not equally take responsibility for property rights are the ‘others’: non-family members.

    Under aristocratic egalitarianism, the high trust WITHIN the genetic FAMILY is extended to the CORPORATE family of fellow shareholders. Thus the family is contractual rather than genetic. that is how the ‘high trust society’ unique to northern europeans was made possible.

    The title “SIR” meant you had earned the right to carry weapons and enforce property rights. The “right to carry arms’ is identical to ‘the right to private property’. These two are ideas are inseparable. The source of property rights is the organized use of violence to create them.

    The source of property rights is not some, mystical grant of god or nature, or some necessary natural right – since private property is rare if not unique in the world, it cannot be ‘natural’. In fact, private property is UNNATURAL, which is why it is so IMPORTANT. Without it we cannot form the incentives nor perform the calculation necessary to crate a vast division of knowledge an labor in real time. Aristocracy is the system of social order where by we enter a voluntary contract to use violence to institute, and maintain, private property rights. And we struggle to enfranchise as many people in this UNNATURAL system as possible, so that we have the strength of numbers. This system, private property, is so effective, and has such an affect on status, and the ability to reproduce, that everyone wants to join the societies that have it.

    The first problem is, (a) THAT THEY WANT IT FOR FREE. And (b) once property rights are a norm, they feel it’s free, because they don’t have to EARN IT any longer with visible payments, only invisible payment (constraints). So the contract isn’t visible and is abused and taken for granted.

    As such to maintain property rights requires that we perform some ACT of maturity and COGNIZANCE in order to obtain them.

    Cities in the west were not organically created markets, but deliberate islands of PROPERTY RIGHTS crated by the organized application of violence by the nobility. The island of property rights was crafted out of a land populated by free riders who actively SUPPRESSED the desire of any individual to concentrate capital behind his ideas or wants rather than that of the free riders and rent seekers around him.

    Which is why Rothbard had to resort to CRUSOE’S ISLAND. On that island, the ocean forms the walls of the ghetto, beyond which is the aristocratic society. Crusoe’s island is one of the reasons libertarianism has failed to gain adoption. The western ethic is to “Make all men aristocrats”. That is what ‘egalitarian aristocracy’ means. That the fools in the enlightenment though men DESIRED to be aristocrats was a catastrophic error. But the fact that MANY do, is enough to form a high trust society.

    As such, NAP, is “peasant” or “ghetto”, or “gypsy trader” morality. The morality of people who cannot ally to hold land, and develop fixed capital, heavy production systems (metals) and formal institutions of dispute resolution. It not liberty, but the return to partial barbarism.

    Rothbard gave us the ethics of the traveling merchant, the ghetto, and organized crime. Aristocracy gave us the ethics of the extended family warriors, farmers and shopkeepers – the high trust society. The only people to created liberty as a formal and informal institution were aristocrats.

    Just how it is.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 01:49:00 UTC

  • TO TOM : ON THE UTOPIANISM OF LIBERTARIANISM (all) (worth reading) (insight) Rot

    TO TOM : ON THE UTOPIANISM OF LIBERTARIANISM

    (all) (worth reading) (insight)

    Rothbard’s idea is INTENTIONALLY UTOPIAN because he was, like dozens before him, creating a ‘religion’ in pre-democratic political terms, or what in democratic political terms is ‘an ideology’, using OBSCURANT LANGUAGE – the purpose of which is resist criticism, empower argumentation, and create community.

    The MI group (Lew) then took this ideology and used the internet to propagate that ideology the way the marxists used inexpensive pamphlets, newspapers, books and universities. But, Rothbard’s libertarianism is an ideology (religion) not politics (formal institutions of cooperation).

    That Rothbard used the rebellious ethics of the jewish ghetto rather than the the high trust ethics of the aristocratic egalitarian society (protestant christianity) is just because it was familiar to him. Hoppe by contrast, repaired a great deal of Rothbard’s errors, but in doing so left us with not necessarily utopian, but certainly a system of ethics dependent upon equality of ethical and moral action, under the nation states with absolute nuclear families, and therefore fully homogenized property rights. This system cannot tolerate diversity.

    However, by adding monarchies, and strict property rights, hoppe’s argument is such that it is possible to have DIVERSE COMMUNITIES each of which uses its own norms and status signals, but which trades and exchanges according to private property rights. And this is possible because under monarchy and property rights, individuals are denied access to coercive political power. So, in Hoppeian terms, groups may continue to act as extended families.

    What I have tried to do is empirically demonstrate that both genetics of gender, and family structure (the structure of reproduction) determine moral codes. And that the Absolute Nuclear Family is the ultimate compromise between male and female reproductive strategies. But that the evolution of democracy combined with feminism,and the destruction of the nuclear family by feminists in alliance with socialists, has led to a circumstance where women can now ‘marry the state’ for financial support and obtain support from males without exchange of care and sex. This is not unnatural. Humans are naturally serially monogamous and women in history seize both the best male fertility, and the best male support in exchange for sex, that they can – but not from the same person, from many men.

    Property is not natural. It allowed men to control reproduction, and women resent this because it places a greater burden on them to make a choice of husband, and they are stuck with what they get. And they can no longer control group behavior by trading sex and affection. It is this choice, plus the need to create a home and property to support a family that created the compromise that was the protestant ANF.

    For this reason, both Rothbard and Hoppe make the mistake that was made by classical liberals: once included in the voting and work pool, women have sought to restore control over their reproduction and independence from the compromise with males.

    If you want to understand the drive to socialism, there are two axis of cause. This is the first, the second is that small homogenous groups that are out-bred are in fact, family members and as such socialism (in the nordic model) makes sense. There is no ‘belief’ system here. it is all justificationary language. The fact is that the structure of production at any given time can be optimized by a particular structure of reproduction (the family). And that freedom (liberty) is only possible in small, homogenous, out-bred, groups formally forbidden to intermarry as a means of obtaining insurance, and instead, forced to outbreed, and therefore seek insurance from ‘the tribe’ with the state as the insurance broker. This situation cannot change, because it is against the reproductive interests of humans to change. It is suicide to change. Small homogenous outbred families are in fact, highly redistributive, healthy organizations that eliminate near proximity competition and force all competition into the market for goods and services – there is no outlet left. NONE. That is why it works. The ANF, is the genetic institution that creates a compromise. It is, in fact, SOCIALISM. (Let that sink in a bit and it will alter your world.)

    THIS IS, IN NO SMALL PART, THE FIRST SECTION OF MY BOOK. It explains the diversity and immutability of moral codes, and therefore the political expression of morality informal institutions, as relationships between the structure of production and the structure of the family; And it is illogical to expect humans to act otherwise – against their reproductive and experiential interests. It is NOT PRAXEOLOGICALLY RATIONAL to ask people to act against their interests.

    SO ROTHBARD, HOPPE, AND ….

    1) Rothbard (tribal religion of non-landholders)

    2) Hoppe (private nation state of land holders)

    3) Doolittle (private federation of states of land holders)

    With these three models we complete libertarianism in all its possible forms. This is the corpus of solutions from the most ideological and religious (rothbard) to the most practical and moral (hoppe) to the ratio-scientific (doolittle). All of which are founded on property rights – although I have used DESCRIPTIVE property rights across ALL family structures where hoppe and rothbard have use PRESCRIPTIVE property rights and ASSUMED the nuclear family as the unit of reproduction.

    (That’s what I’m up to. ‘Completing’ libertarianism. )

    UTOPIAN?

    Rothbard’s fantasy is clearly utopian. It hasn’t worked very well for the jews, that’s for sure. Except for the postwar period, the entire world has been killing them by the hundreds, thousands and millions for millennia. Comparisons to India’s Gypsies is pretty common, except that gypsies are anti-intellectual at the bottom and jews hyper intellectual at the top. But, what rothbard DID, was reduce all rights to property rights, and give us the answer to human cooperation in doing so.

    Hoppe’s solution is ABSOLUTE GENIUS and so deeply engrained in political discourse by now that everyone’s forgotten it’s his idea already. While Argumentation is an analogy, not a cause, (and so I’m critical of it), he used it to deduce the solution to the problem of monopoly bureaucracy and the state by reducing the state to a contract on property rights, and using insurance companies, which is the states’s actual function, to form a competitive bureaucracy.

    His solution is not empirically derived, it is rationally derived, and he still makes (unfortunately) moral arguments in the rothbardian model, but in fact, he DID SOLVE THE PROBLEM that has been the ‘problem of politics’ for 5000 years. And as far as I know, no other thinker has done this – based on (ack) argumentation or not.

    I won’t go into why argumentation worked despite the fact that it’s a bit silly. That would take me too long. But it allowed Hoppe to deduce the correct answers in almost all cases. IN particular, to immigration. Which again, the migratory, non-property owning, progressive jewish wing of libertarians find understandably uncomfortable.

    END RESULT : A RESEARCH

    There is nothing utopian about a RESEARCH PROGRAM, which is what I see hoppe, rothbard and Hayek pursuing. Hayek did not have information theory. Hoppe did not have the empirical evidence we have today. Rothbard either didn’t understand or din’t want to understand his moral code’s implications. Mises got praxeology backwards. But it was all there. It was all there. We just needed a little more time. And as far as I can tell it is the most valuable political research program since the enlightenment and not matched in creativity since athens.

    Calculation is necessary. Reproduction is necessary. Cooperation is necessary.

    Everything else is preference.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 05:23:00 UTC

  • ON NEGOTIATION : LESSONS LEARNED FROM A LIFETIME OF DEALS ADVICE: —— 1) Have

    ON NEGOTIATION : LESSONS LEARNED FROM A LIFETIME OF DEALS

    ADVICE:

    ——

    1) Have something of value to trade. (Surprising that this should need be said. But it does.)

    2) Do exhaustive research before hand. Try to figure out how to make the other side successful in ways that it does not cost you cash.

    3) Be brutally honest at all times. DO NOT BE CUNNING. Be smart. Be Moral. Education tends to make men cunning, but wisdom makes them moral.

    4) Try very hard to understand the other side, and show that you understand them, and that you agree with them. If you find through this process that they are unethical, then walk. (I do that a lot.)

    5) Work creatively and hard to solve their problems for them. See if they reciprocate, or if they try to take advantage of it. If the former, thank them. If the latter, document it and keep a nice little collection of their sins for use later.

    6) Find out who the decision makers are and what their price points are. That is the ONLY EMPIRICAL value of any purchase. I can’t tell you how laughable most M&A books are. The value of any company is the amount it will take to get the decision makers to flip.

    7) Make very few promises. Hold every one of them. No matter what. Let the environment and their own fantasies mislead them. But never mislead them with your words. This actually puts you in extraordinary control of the situation.

    8 ) Always maintain walkaway power. This is your only real control.

    9) You must sleep in the bed you make. Do not soil it. Maintain personal relations. And do not make a deal that they other side can’t live with if you have to live with them. Trust matters.

    10) Maintain the moral high ground. Get others to do the dirty work. Let the lawyers fuck it up. They always do. But it won’t be your fault. Build trust by coming in and being reasonable, saving the day.

    11) Leave a deal-killer issue open until the last minute that they don’t care about but the BELIEVE that you do. If they play nickel and dime games, accuse them of being unethical over the single point and withdraw. Wait until they offer sufficient rewards to bring you back to the table.

    12) It is OK to have a reputation for being smart and ruthless, but you cannot have one for being a scumbag and a liar. (Unless you are an investment banker. Selling money does not require trust or virtue. You can be as big a scumbag as you want. Most are. Sorry. It’s true. )

    13) Never negotiate for what you really want. Never let them understand what you really want. It makes you vulnerable. I actually retreat very quickly. The purpose of this strategy is actually to avoid being manipulated by ‘cunning fools’, and focusing on mutually beneficial value creation. I cant count on the other side for that, so I just force the issue.

    14) Be very wary of stupid people no matter how profitable it might be. Stupid and cunning, versus moral and wise. Pick the latter. Good people tend to do good things and bad people don’t. Shitty people build shitty companies unless they have phenomenal amounts of money to erase the moral stench.

    15) The corporation and the shareholder thing is a total lie. Management owns the business, and shareholders are just high risk debtors. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

    16) Lawyers have this incredible desire to feel they add value. By and large they don’t. Make sure they do the minimum possible, and that they write in plain language that can be understood by all parties. Make them draw a map of all the documents and what they mean. And summarize the key points. Realistically if you can’t lay it out in plain language by typing it in a text file, then the deal won’t hold up anyway.

    17) Avoid democracy. I write my own shareholders agreements. And I structure them as a dictatorship. And I do it on purpose. And if people don’t like it they can do something else. Democracy is a stupid damned idea no matter what the form of governance. Both private and public boards I have been on fall into the category of members who provide ‘money raising value’ otherwise they’re entirely dead weight. Your board should be owners and investors that you get approval from for taking capital risks. Otherwise they’re too ignorant to make decisions about anything material.

    18) You aren’t important. Everyone else is. The deal isn’t important. The quality of the deal is. The investment in the deal isn’t important. The consequences of the deal are. I find it pretty easy to maintain objectivity. Most people can’t. your ego doesn’t matter. Celebrate if and only if you made a quality deal with positive consequences.

    19) Build a LOT OF RELATIONSHIPS at ALL LEVELS as SOON AS YOU CAN. This removes all the freaking stress of a merger or acquisition. I usually try to get a couple people from every role in the business from the bottom to the top to go visit and have a party with the other side right away.

    20) Never buy anyone more than 20% of your size. It’s like ‘diversity’ in politics. Sounds good to idiots. But really, its a freaking disaster. You cannot assimilate someone that you are not at least 5x the size of, and do it successfully in one year. Most of the time it takes three years. Most of the time the anticipated gains in efficiency are lost by the three year assimilation period.

    (eh… I wanted twenty and I got there. 🙂 )

    TACTICS

    My favorite negotiating Tactics:

    —————————–

    1) Most unreasonable man. (Kissinger)

    2) Pursue A, and discount or ignore B when it’s B that you really want. (Distraction)

    3) Hint at money then lose interest, and let them come to you. (Seed of Greed)

    4) Plant a seed. Wait for ‘their bad day’. (Seed of Savior)

    5) Leak information at three degrees of separation. (Inception)

    6) Get them to spend the money in their heads. After that you have loss aversion on your side and they will lose every time.

    THE GOOD, THE BAD AND CONTEXT

    Now you’ve got to remember that I’ve built a lot of my career using little or no cash to buy small and distressed businesses, rolling them up, bringing in operations, talent and sales, and then selling the business. So I’ve actually bought a couple of hundred companies. (Really.) Although most are in the sub 10M range and no more than the 25M range. If they get bigger than that they have lots of useless management overhead that you can’t do much with.

    BAD STUFF: I did a deal in my twenties where I bought a business at an incredible rate, invested less than 1/4M in it and turned it into a cash machine. The owner got about 1/4M for the business, and we were making that in net about every quarter. He died after six months. And He died of sadness. I might be an Aspie but that f__king bothered me, and it still does – although I really didn’t know better at the time. I was, maybe 24 or 25 years old. A decent person doesn’t want that kind of shit in his head. And I care a lot about it. If you don’t care, then, honestly, I hope someone does the same to you some day because the world is better off without you. Really.

    UNCOMFORTABLE STUFF: I did a deal in the past ten years where I misjudged the ability of the owner and that person really wasn’t able to make a go of it as part of our organization. And would have been fine keeping the small business. That person didn’t make anywhere near the net he should have. I view this as my mistake because I should know better.

    FRUSTRATING STUFF: I did a deal, a big one, about 40M changing hands and like six law firms, and I trusted the investor, and the guy fucked me, fucked the company I bought, and fucked Microsoft. I never give up control any more. Ever.

    OK STUFF: I did a deal where guys make a couple of million each, but could have made more. The reason was that they did damage on the way out. I don’t feel bad about them.

    GOOD STUFF: It’s pretty easy to turn around weak companies actually. The issue is usually that the management consumes too much of the revenue and underinvests in sales. We invest in sales. The other is that unless you’re a certain size you can’t hire top talent. We fixe that most of the time. But the fact is that people still blame me for rescuing their business even if it didn’t end up rosy for them. Those people I think are silly. Fact is that most small business are small because that is the limit of the capacity of the owner’s ability.

    FUNNY: I think that most people assume I play the “Most unreasonable man” card a little too frequently. But it tends to cut through the bullshit and force real issues out onto the table. I have absolutely no problem with hostile argument. ‘Cause I’m an aspie and I generally don’t feel anything other than frustration with the other side’s illogical or deceptive arguments. So over time, I probably have used it too much.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-30 15:50:00 UTC