(text version) (important) (positive positioning) [It’s what we do. Own it.] Let me stay on message: As a philosopher, I manufacture intellectual weaponry in the war against lies. And I strive to speak truthfully about the causes of the decline of western civilization, and how to repair them permanently. An effort that requires I surface and expose many of the competing enlightenment fallacies, liars, ad lies, that we, from each cultural tradition, hold dear. And this falsification, I admit, I perform prosecutorially, because I believe this is a war not just for western civilization, but for the vast benefits that western civilization has delivered to mankind – often over most of mankind’s passionate objections. But make no mistake that I remain an Aristocratic Egalitarian, a Classical Liberal, and therefore a Libertarian, an ‘Operationalist’ or ‘strict constructionist’ and a universal Nationalist. Where Aristocratic Egalitarian means the natural aristocracy struggles to prevent rule by anyone other than the natural, common, judge-discovered law. Classical Liberal Dissenter means the use of houses of government to construct a market for exchanges in pursuit of mutually beneficial competitive commons, and that we need not agree for groups to construct a commons, only fail to find lawful reason to prevent it. Libertarian means rule of law, using natural, judge-discovered, common law, and voluntary association, disassociation, voluntary cooperation, non-cooperation, via voluntary exchange. Operationalist means that all contract, regulation, legislation, and judge discovered law, must be written in strictly constructed, operational language, operationally articulated from first principles of non-imposition of costs. Universal Nationalist means that I acknowledge that the traditions, institutions, laws, norms, family structures, and policies, required by different tribal groups differ to the extent that we are all better off, happier, and in less conflict, if our governments create commons for the needs of our tribes, rather than to attempt to justify a common good that can only, in the end, seek to make everyone equally unsatisfied. At some point in the past, scale was of such military importance, and the investment necessary to raise people out of illiteracy and poverty, that the benefits of large states were greater than the disadvantages of them. But in the current era, where men with small arms, and a small number of nuclear weapons makes conquest of neighboring states all but impossible, and the cost of corruption in large governments, and the dissatisfaction of increasingly different peoples, whose desires have been let loose by adoption of consumer capitalism, and who struggle to achieve them are constrained by large social and political orders, designed to assist in the transition to modernity, not produce local excellences for local differences. Let a thousand nations with a thousand variations bloom. We are not equal. And our attempts to obtain equality merely convert our potential market compatibility into certain political conflict. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute
Form: Mini Essay
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Do We Choose Our Rulers?
Actually, it depends on the organization’s SIZE, and method of adapting. – For very large organizations, it’s that no one wills change of leader sufficiently, because of the cost of change. – For medium organizations, people choose the leader possible for the group to preserve its power. – For small organizations, it’s absolutely true that people choose leaders. Choice of leadership is a game: it’s the best one we can get among those that enough people want, not the leader we want. Leadership is necessary if for no other reason than to maintain group solidarity while providing decidability, although consensus building is why we prefer to use them. leaders prevent defection. I could go on about this, but leaders exist because we need them to. We choose the ones we CAN choose, and we change or resist change dependent upon the cost of doing so. In markets we need only negative leaders (judges), but it is very hard to defect and survive. In the production of commons we need positive leaders (deciders), but it is very hard to defect and survive. In commercial organizations we need both judges and deciders, but we have the opportunity to defect, and we are constantly aware of the choices. This is then, the same reason we are compensated, not for production, but for our value in the ORGANIZATION of production. As far as I know, this well researched, well understood, and effectively a law of organization. Economics in everything. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute (ps: any moral argument is suspect. if the argument is not reduced to costs, someone is likely trying to fool you.)
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Do We Choose Our Rulers?
Actually, it depends on the organization’s SIZE, and method of adapting. – For very large organizations, it’s that no one wills change of leader sufficiently, because of the cost of change. – For medium organizations, people choose the leader possible for the group to preserve its power. – For small organizations, it’s absolutely true that people choose leaders. Choice of leadership is a game: it’s the best one we can get among those that enough people want, not the leader we want. Leadership is necessary if for no other reason than to maintain group solidarity while providing decidability, although consensus building is why we prefer to use them. leaders prevent defection. I could go on about this, but leaders exist because we need them to. We choose the ones we CAN choose, and we change or resist change dependent upon the cost of doing so. In markets we need only negative leaders (judges), but it is very hard to defect and survive. In the production of commons we need positive leaders (deciders), but it is very hard to defect and survive. In commercial organizations we need both judges and deciders, but we have the opportunity to defect, and we are constantly aware of the choices. This is then, the same reason we are compensated, not for production, but for our value in the ORGANIZATION of production. As far as I know, this well researched, well understood, and effectively a law of organization. Economics in everything. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute (ps: any moral argument is suspect. if the argument is not reduced to costs, someone is likely trying to fool you.)
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A Nation? Nationalism? Vs Statism?
A State, and bureaucracy, provide fertile ground for parasitism, for the sole reason that a majority of men do not demand Rule of Law, under Natural Law, using Judge Discovered Law, and accumulating in the Common Law. A nation is quite good at preventing alternative ‘tax farms’, brought into being by conquest using war, religion, immigration, trade. And arguably, as an extension of the tribe, the nation is best at it. Those that could not form sedentary societies were destroyed by those that could. Since a sedentary society is productive, not parasitic. Jews, Gypsies, underclass immigration, and we ‘migratory occidental craftsmen’, vary in value from catastrophically harmful, to a net loss, to of some limited economic value by providing expertise – we are a questionable exception, not a definite rule. All of us live under the political orders that survive competition, not those we choose to have were that competition were absent. Man was not in the past, nor is he today, good. He is rational. He chooses predation when it is rational, parasitism when rational, production when it is rational, and trade when it is rational. We create institutions to deny him the rational choice of predation or parasitism, and thereby force all people into either production or trade. From that thing we call ‘rule’, by rule of law, we can possibly eliminate all discretion but judicial discretion, and judicial discretion only within the limits of that law. But in no case can we eliminate organized production of commons and survive competition. The west advanced faster than the rest, because we created the most difficult commons for any people to produce: truth, property, jury, and natural, common, judge-discovered law. In other words: social science. It’s our invention of social science, (law) that we applied to other fields. And that law is insured, and enforced, by the organized application of violence by ‘the peers’ – those men who demand rule of law. Those who cannot pay for war, cannot as a consequence, pay for staving off war by others. Wishing for liberty does not make liberty so. Violence alone does. We fight for liberty under natural law, judge-discovered common law, with universal standing and rule of law (universal application), or we shall not have it. For we will fail to rais the price of rule to some other means of decidability, organization of property. And our only sincere permanent allies in such a long term war are our kin. Ergo. Nationalism: kin under natural law, with a market for reproduction, a market for production and consumption, and a market for commons. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
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A Nation? Nationalism? Vs Statism?
A State, and bureaucracy, provide fertile ground for parasitism, for the sole reason that a majority of men do not demand Rule of Law, under Natural Law, using Judge Discovered Law, and accumulating in the Common Law. A nation is quite good at preventing alternative ‘tax farms’, brought into being by conquest using war, religion, immigration, trade. And arguably, as an extension of the tribe, the nation is best at it. Those that could not form sedentary societies were destroyed by those that could. Since a sedentary society is productive, not parasitic. Jews, Gypsies, underclass immigration, and we ‘migratory occidental craftsmen’, vary in value from catastrophically harmful, to a net loss, to of some limited economic value by providing expertise – we are a questionable exception, not a definite rule. All of us live under the political orders that survive competition, not those we choose to have were that competition were absent. Man was not in the past, nor is he today, good. He is rational. He chooses predation when it is rational, parasitism when rational, production when it is rational, and trade when it is rational. We create institutions to deny him the rational choice of predation or parasitism, and thereby force all people into either production or trade. From that thing we call ‘rule’, by rule of law, we can possibly eliminate all discretion but judicial discretion, and judicial discretion only within the limits of that law. But in no case can we eliminate organized production of commons and survive competition. The west advanced faster than the rest, because we created the most difficult commons for any people to produce: truth, property, jury, and natural, common, judge-discovered law. In other words: social science. It’s our invention of social science, (law) that we applied to other fields. And that law is insured, and enforced, by the organized application of violence by ‘the peers’ – those men who demand rule of law. Those who cannot pay for war, cannot as a consequence, pay for staving off war by others. Wishing for liberty does not make liberty so. Violence alone does. We fight for liberty under natural law, judge-discovered common law, with universal standing and rule of law (universal application), or we shall not have it. For we will fail to rais the price of rule to some other means of decidability, organization of property. And our only sincere permanent allies in such a long term war are our kin. Ergo. Nationalism: kin under natural law, with a market for reproduction, a market for production and consumption, and a market for commons. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
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Philosophy(choice) vs Logic(decidability)
—“CURT, YOUR CRITICISM OF PHILOSOPHY IS AN INTERESTING PHILOSOPHY”— Irony appreciated. Even if it’s just a play on words. The question is not whether it’s a personal philosophy (means of PREFERENTIAL or UTILITARIAN choice) but whether its a method of universal DECIDABILITY independent of preferences and utility. (truth). In other words, is it a “Law” of nature, as in a “Natural Law”. Propositions need only be reciprocally decidable . If they are decidable, then the question is why one would attempt to demonstrate that they are not? As in law, which is the origin of western philosophy, not until late conflated with religion, decidability is provided by (a) deception and (b) involuntary transfer. As far as I can tell, this is the purpose of most UNDECIDABLE philosophy, like religious law before it: fraud. Which is not what I expected when I started working on these issues. The philosophers are often circumventing costs, and transfers, and claiming that they’re pursuing truth. What I find, is that they are all too often, engaged in fraud. So instead of testing for truth, I first test for theft. This is the difference between the philosophical search for AGREEMENT and the legal search for theft. Ergo, It is law that is our western philosophy(prohibition, decidability, criticism) and everything else is religion (aspiration, negotiation, justification). The west didn’t conflate truth, law, politics, and religion. We have always preserved competition as means of ongoing calculation, and thereby avoided stagnation. But Egyptian-Judeo-Christian-Muslim totalitarianism did the opposite. They created authority (monopoly) by conflating different disciplines with different purposes. This is why Egypt froze, jews contributed nothing until they were forced by Europeans into the enlightenment, Muslims appear to have taken credit but not developed anything, and certainly, as soon as the common people adopted it, were insulated, and why the west stagnated for a thousand years, albeit under constant onslaught of the commercial Mediterranean by Muslim pirates and war. Seek first fraud, not agreement. Our civic cult is law. We are prosecutors. Curt Doolittle The Cult of Non-Submission The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute
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Philosophy(choice) vs Logic(decidability)
—“CURT, YOUR CRITICISM OF PHILOSOPHY IS AN INTERESTING PHILOSOPHY”— Irony appreciated. Even if it’s just a play on words. The question is not whether it’s a personal philosophy (means of PREFERENTIAL or UTILITARIAN choice) but whether its a method of universal DECIDABILITY independent of preferences and utility. (truth). In other words, is it a “Law” of nature, as in a “Natural Law”. Propositions need only be reciprocally decidable . If they are decidable, then the question is why one would attempt to demonstrate that they are not? As in law, which is the origin of western philosophy, not until late conflated with religion, decidability is provided by (a) deception and (b) involuntary transfer. As far as I can tell, this is the purpose of most UNDECIDABLE philosophy, like religious law before it: fraud. Which is not what I expected when I started working on these issues. The philosophers are often circumventing costs, and transfers, and claiming that they’re pursuing truth. What I find, is that they are all too often, engaged in fraud. So instead of testing for truth, I first test for theft. This is the difference between the philosophical search for AGREEMENT and the legal search for theft. Ergo, It is law that is our western philosophy(prohibition, decidability, criticism) and everything else is religion (aspiration, negotiation, justification). The west didn’t conflate truth, law, politics, and religion. We have always preserved competition as means of ongoing calculation, and thereby avoided stagnation. But Egyptian-Judeo-Christian-Muslim totalitarianism did the opposite. They created authority (monopoly) by conflating different disciplines with different purposes. This is why Egypt froze, jews contributed nothing until they were forced by Europeans into the enlightenment, Muslims appear to have taken credit but not developed anything, and certainly, as soon as the common people adopted it, were insulated, and why the west stagnated for a thousand years, albeit under constant onslaught of the commercial Mediterranean by Muslim pirates and war. Seek first fraud, not agreement. Our civic cult is law. We are prosecutors. Curt Doolittle The Cult of Non-Submission The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute
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The Languages of Fraud
When you defend your use of philosophical rationalism, your presupposition is the disproportionate value of the communication of meaning(learning), under which we obtain explanatory power and opportunity for persuasion and negotiation; whereas you discount or ignore the equal value of prosecution(prevention), under which we eliminate error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overloading, pseudoscience, and deceit. It would be all well and good to speak only with ‘good manners’ of positive language, if all men were of manners, ethics, morals, humility, study, achievement, and intelligence. But the central problem of our age – since the industrial revolution – has not been the communication of meaning within the limits of human perception, but the elimination of error, bias, wishful thinking, overloading, pseudoscience, and deceit, now that our action and our institutions can reach beyond the manners and prosecution of the ill-mannered, at human scale. So you may wish to hold to the language of the primitive technologies of reason and meaning, just as others may wish to hold to the primitive technologies of theology and mysticism. But theology consists of little other than parable (analogy) for the purpose of discourse within the limits of pre-existing authority. And Rationalism consists of little other than a subset of reason for the purpose of discourse under the assumption of good intention and good character, independent of cost, and evidence, in order to obscure the cunning and deceit used to impose one’s will upon others by the pretense of truthfulness which is little more than selection bias. In other words, if you wish to speak truthfully, you can communicate by analogy, if and only if you equally criticize by correspondence (truth), such that both the properties necessary for communication but untrue under criticism, and the persuasions necessary for stating preference, but untrue under criticism, and the error, bias, and deceit that we frail humans rely upon in lieu of truthful argument that are untrue under criticism, are laundered and exposed. Men do not seek to preserve religious, moral, rational, pseudoscientific, and deceitful argument because they possess good manners, good ethics, good morals, good actions, and because we have good institutions. Men seek to preserve religious, moral, rational, pseudoscientific, and deceitful argument for the simple reason that they want what they want, by whatever argumentative means is available, and by one cunning argumentative deception or another, they hope to escape blame for their acts of fraud, under pretense of mannered, ethical, moral, and knowing argument. If you cannot speak in operational language, categorically consistent, empirically consistent, morally consistent, with scope consistency, then either you do not know how to, do not want to pay the costs of speaking truthfully, or if you spoke truthfully your fraud would be obvious. Religion and Philosophy have been disproportionately the source of deception, conflict, and war. Whereas law and science have been disproportionately the source of truth. If you cannot speak in the language of law and science, we can almost without exception assume that you are speaking in the league of fraud. And it is only after we pay the high cost of translating you use of the languages of fraud into the languages of law and science that we can determine whether you engage in fraud or engage in error, or engage in linguistic habit because you simply know no better. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine.
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The Languages of Fraud
When you defend your use of philosophical rationalism, your presupposition is the disproportionate value of the communication of meaning(learning), under which we obtain explanatory power and opportunity for persuasion and negotiation; whereas you discount or ignore the equal value of prosecution(prevention), under which we eliminate error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overloading, pseudoscience, and deceit. It would be all well and good to speak only with ‘good manners’ of positive language, if all men were of manners, ethics, morals, humility, study, achievement, and intelligence. But the central problem of our age – since the industrial revolution – has not been the communication of meaning within the limits of human perception, but the elimination of error, bias, wishful thinking, overloading, pseudoscience, and deceit, now that our action and our institutions can reach beyond the manners and prosecution of the ill-mannered, at human scale. So you may wish to hold to the language of the primitive technologies of reason and meaning, just as others may wish to hold to the primitive technologies of theology and mysticism. But theology consists of little other than parable (analogy) for the purpose of discourse within the limits of pre-existing authority. And Rationalism consists of little other than a subset of reason for the purpose of discourse under the assumption of good intention and good character, independent of cost, and evidence, in order to obscure the cunning and deceit used to impose one’s will upon others by the pretense of truthfulness which is little more than selection bias. In other words, if you wish to speak truthfully, you can communicate by analogy, if and only if you equally criticize by correspondence (truth), such that both the properties necessary for communication but untrue under criticism, and the persuasions necessary for stating preference, but untrue under criticism, and the error, bias, and deceit that we frail humans rely upon in lieu of truthful argument that are untrue under criticism, are laundered and exposed. Men do not seek to preserve religious, moral, rational, pseudoscientific, and deceitful argument because they possess good manners, good ethics, good morals, good actions, and because we have good institutions. Men seek to preserve religious, moral, rational, pseudoscientific, and deceitful argument for the simple reason that they want what they want, by whatever argumentative means is available, and by one cunning argumentative deception or another, they hope to escape blame for their acts of fraud, under pretense of mannered, ethical, moral, and knowing argument. If you cannot speak in operational language, categorically consistent, empirically consistent, morally consistent, with scope consistency, then either you do not know how to, do not want to pay the costs of speaking truthfully, or if you spoke truthfully your fraud would be obvious. Religion and Philosophy have been disproportionately the source of deception, conflict, and war. Whereas law and science have been disproportionately the source of truth. If you cannot speak in the language of law and science, we can almost without exception assume that you are speaking in the league of fraud. And it is only after we pay the high cost of translating you use of the languages of fraud into the languages of law and science that we can determine whether you engage in fraud or engage in error, or engage in linguistic habit because you simply know no better. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine.
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State Incentives
By Eli Harman The allegation is often made (by libertarian anarchists) that what states do is fundamentally incalculable, but that it is always negative sum. In other words, we cannot know the absolute value of any state or state policy, but we can be certain about its sign. Voluntary trades in the marketplace – as the argument goes – are always mutually beneficial (else they wouldn‘t occur) and positive sum. State policies differ in requiring coercion. If they did not require coercion, they could occur in the marketplace. But if they do, then someone is losing out, so there is no way to be sure they represent a net gain. Without the mechanism of voluntary exchange, the information transmitted by prices in a marketplace are absent and no calculation is possible. In all likelihood they represent a net loss, certainly a loss relative to the opportunity cost of the purely voluntary marketplace foregone. But it doesn’t seem that states ever would have become ubiquitous or persistent if this were true. Empirically, state-ridden peoples have proven competitive against stateless ones. If error and parasitism were the whole story, they would not be. States, after all, are in constant conflict and competition with one another and with alternatives (or at least they were at one time.) However, the argument is incomplete and therefore incorrect. We can reasonably expect voluntary, fully-informed, exchanges – free of externality – to be Pareto improvements. (They make someone better off and no one worse off.) But in the first place, market transactions don’t always live up to this standard, because they are not necessarily fully informed nor free of externality. And in the second place, some of the things states do might; because they are of the nature of voluntary exchanges. An individual exchanges the sum total of costs a state imposes (on them) for the sum total of benefits it offers (to them) every time they voluntarily choose not to move to the jurisdiction of another state. (And these exchanges can be made more precisely calculable by reducing the exit costs and increasing the number and variety of states on offer.) Furthermore, all states require the voluntary consent of at least enough individuals and groups to successfully compel the submission of the remainder. And the coalition that arises to perform this function arises by a process of reciprocal exchange (You want such and such a boon to participate in our coalition? Well we want this concession and that from you in exchange.) In brokering these exchanges, a Monarchy offers several advantages over a democratically elected government. A democracy will be inherently and irreparably susceptible to negative-sum corruption because of the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. A policy which benefits 1,000 people $10,000 each may be politically profitable even if it costs a million people $100 each. The concentrated interest will be relatively less hampered by information costs and coordination problems. So it will be able to muster more votes and resources in defense of the policy than those harmed will be able to muster against it, though the harm be much greater. Nothing would stop anyone from proposing such a policy to a king. And a king could get away with implementing it. But a king, who owns his realm and title, as well as its capital value, would not benefit from doing so. The future revenue he could expect to derive from his realm and subjects would decline as a result. And so his incentive would be to veto such proposals. Furthermore, in a majority democracy, if your ruling coalition encompasses more than 51 percent of voters, it’s leaving rents on the table. If you’re getting, say, 70 percent of the vote, that simply means you’re delivering more value than you need to and failing to extract as much as you could. You could take a little more and give a little less without losing the election. So in a democracy, we can expect the ruling coalition at any given time to consist of about 51% of voters (and those the worst 51%) and that does indeed seem to be what we see. But conflict and compulsion, though inevitable and irresolvable under democracy, are costly and actually largely unnecessary. So we can expect a wise monarch to start building his coalition of supporters with the best and keep working his way down the list until the only people that remain in need of compulsion are those who have nothing to offer which is worth what they demand in exchange for voluntary cooperation: in short, people who probably should be coerced.