Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • Intellectual Property (IP) In Propertarianism

    [H]ere is where I end up. And it hasn’t changed much in two years.

    1) Trademarking.
    Yes. It’s a weight and measure. And it’s testable. Violating trademarks is fraudulent.

    2) Copyrighting.
    Possibly – but only if under the model of the creative commons. Meaning free for non commercial use. I don’t care about patents anywhere near as much as I care about ending copyrights on user copyable media. It is very, very, hard to argue that pop music, film and literature are a public good – and I think the evidence is the opposite.  Artists and writers will do their work regardless of compensation, and without compensation those who lack are will be dis-incentivized from producing it.

    The difference between my position on copyrighting and the rothbardian, is that since high trust is necessary for the rational voluntary formation of even a moderately anarchic polity, then the criteria for moral action necessary for a high trust society will be: “Truthfully stated, fully informed, warrantied, productive, voluntary exchange, free of negative externality” – and those criteria are violated by commercially profiting from the creative works of another.

    While it is hard to say that one should be cast as a criminal for duplicating a non-scarce good, it is another to say that one has the right to profit from it instead of its creator. It would violate the requirement that we all contribute to production rather than act parasitically in order for cooperation to be inter-temporally rational. (ie: Non-retaliatory.)

    I can’t agree that a publisher can make money selling a book without a commission to the author. But I can agree that an author cannot prevent the copying of a book. Same for film, music, and art. And I take this position not because I like it but because I cannot logically find an alternative to it. Humans will retaliate against parasitism, and that is what defines property-en-toto.

    3) Patents.
    Possibly in rare circumstances, but only for very, very, specific public (Citizen-Shareholder) investments that would not be served by the market otherwise. It is arguable that such criteria is not in fact meaningfully similar enough to a patent to call it patenting. But the idea of funding off-book research and development at private expense in hope of public reward is difficult to morally argue against – particularly in medicine and physical science. If we wanted to put a ten billion dollar bounty on the invention of a fusion reactor that met X criteria it is hard to say that wouldn’t be a good investment.

    Again, I am not sure that this qualifies as a ‘patent’, but to prohibit a voluntarily organized polity from offering a market bounty for the off book production of a high risk good is hard to find argument against.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • HERE IS WHERE I END UP ON IP in PROPERTARIANISM. And it hasn’t changed much in t

    HERE IS WHERE I END UP ON IP in PROPERTARIANISM.

    And it hasn’t changed much in two years.

    1) Trademarking.

    Yes. It’s a weight and measure. And it’s testable. Violating trademarks is fraudulent.

    2) Copyrighting.

    Possibly – but only if under the model of the creative commons. Meaning free for non commercial use. I don’t care about patents anywhere near as much as I care about ending copyrights on user copyable media. It is very, very, hard to argue that pop music, film and literature is a public good – and I think the evidence is the opposite.

    The difference between my position on copyrighting and the rothbardian, is that since high trust is necessary for the voluntary formation of even a moderately anarchic polity, then the criteria for moral action necessary for a high trust society will be: “Truthfully stated, fully informed, warrantied, productive, voluntary exchange, free of negative externality” is violated by commercially profiting from the creative works of another. While it is hard to say that one should be cast as a criminal for duplicating a non-scarce good, it is another to say that one has the right to profit from it instead of its creator. It would violate the requirement that we all contribute to production rather than act parasitically in order for cooperation to be inter-temporally rational. (ie: Non-retaliatory) I can’t agree that a publisher can make money selling a book without a commission to the author. But I can agree that an author cannot prevent the copying of a book. Same for film, music, and art. And I take this position not because I like it but because I cannot logically find an alternative to it. Humans will retaliate against parasitism, and that is what defines property-en-toto.

    3) Patents.

    Possibly in rare circumstances, but only for very, very, specific public (Citizen-Shareholder) investments that would not be served by the market otherwise. It is arguable that such criteria is not in fact meaningfully similar enough to a patent. But the idea of funding off book research and development at private expense in hope of public reward is difficult to morally argue against – particularly medicine and physical science. If we wanted to put a ten billion dollar bounty on the invention of a fusion reactor that met X criteria it is hard to say that wouldn’t be a good investment.

    Again, I am not sure that this qualifies as a ‘patent’, but to prohibit a voluntarily organized polity from offering a market bounty for the off book production of a high risk good is hard to find argument against.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-17 15:13:00 UTC

  • WAS THE REVOLUTION COOPTED BY NAZIS? (OMG – Americans are stupid.) –“Taking you

    WAS THE REVOLUTION COOPTED BY NAZIS? (OMG – Americans are stupid.)

    –“Taking you at your word that you are living in Kiev, let me take this opportunity to ask: What do say to the charges that the revolution was instigated by the U.S.? Could it have happened without U. S. support? Was it in fact co-opted by nazis, neo or otherwise?”—

    From Curt Doolittle:

    Well, you can search for me on Google or Facebook, I’m pretty prolific, and I’m readily visible here in Kiev. 🙂

    The people here BEGGED for support from the states and got almost NOTHING. A few of us hammered the news media. But we got nothing. You can’t say that schoolgirls spending lunch money on bandages and trucking in in the cold to tend the young men on the front lines, or housewives and clerical workers showing up by the millions is somehow a CIA plot. (Which if you knew anything about the intelligence community would seem absurd.)

    And it’s absolutely insulting to locals to insinuate that they’re ignorant pawns of some global intrigue rather than artificially and desperately poor for no reason other than leftover Russian (soviet) bureaucrats in one of the most politically corrupt nations on earth. There is no rule of law here. None. Courts and police are bought. Last may I think I paid something on the order of 3K in bribes just to get people to do their jobs – not for any special treatment.

    Most people here look across the border into Poland and see what they COULD have. Most people look to Russia and see murderers who came in the middle of the night to kill relatives and families after Stalin killed millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor: the Ukrainian Holocaust.

    The only difference between Canadians and Ukrainians’ which neighbor they have. Similar sizes and populations and similar (gentle) temperaments.

    I love these people and there is nothing on earth that justifies letting people who wish to be free come under Russian corruption ever again.

    Americans are ignorant, stupid and benevolent sheriffs yes. They fail to grasp what it means to live in a low trust society. The do not grasp that the lower the trust in a society the more necessary authoritarian rule is. That only generations of commercialism will change a low trust polity in to a moderate trust polity – even so corrupt and politically volatile as the Italians and the Romanians. Just as Russians fail to grasp that Americans actually believe they are acting in the moral interest of less advanced peoples. Americans foolishly believe that they yearn for liberty and prosperity, and merely need to be given the opportunity for self government. And look at the damage we have done. Russians cannot believe we do this with american idealism rather than russian pragamatism. That is because our idealism is as foreign to them as it would be to space aliens.

    Yet here in Ukraine we have a white, christian people (many of whom go to church, and yes, that’s important at this stage of development), who have very similar ethics, work habits, history, education, literature and mythology.

    And they want to be free.

    Yet in the coal mines of the east, in the decaying factories of the soviet era, in the desperate partly Russified slums, the idea of getting checks however small from the government from oil revenues is worth living under the rule of gangsters.

    Most of Ukraine would have been happy to divorce and set them free. But Ukrainian’s are unified now, and their view is ‘if we do not stop the enemy in Donbas, then he will be first in kiev and then in L’viv and we will be under the boots of gangsters and tyrants and murderers yet again.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-17 14:36:00 UTC

  • An Alternative Biological Theory, to Sowell’s of The Vision of The Anointed

    [T]he progressive pre-cognitive need for false consensus bias confuses them into thinking that everyone else is likewise as susceptible to false consensus bias. But that is a female genetic ‘defect’ – an adaptation necessary for primitive survival, and one that evolved in concert with ‘gossip’, which is meant to appeal to (take advantage of) false consensus bias. Secondly, need for consensus (feeling part) that drives false consensus bias, and the impulse to use gossip as an exertion of power, are amplified by the status signaling that we obtain from achievement of that power (and negative that we get from seeing our efforts frustrated).


    I think this is a superior, simpler theory of causation over Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed. It is one thing (and he is right) to describe their point of view. But it is another to describe why they should be so constantly drawn that point of view.


    In case my meaning is not clear: I am on message. We humans can make use of voluntary exchange as our information system, and we cannot aggregate our preferences by any other means that corresponds to material reality – in particular we cannot claim rational political or moral opinion except as demonstrations of our individual genetic biases.


    We are far less rational than we think. Democracy cannot work as other than despotism of the underclasses leading to tyranny of an elite. The only possible moral government is one that is analogous to the market, in which both collect information and conduct exchanges. And the groups that must conduct those exchanges are those who have common interests in the production of commons: genders, classes and tribes.


    We were mistaken. We confused the fact that while laws must be made for the individual actor, but commons must be made for the family regardless of class. But when the family is the minority, and individuals express genetic interests not inside the family, but by voting, we ended the ability of the democratic government to conduct exchanges between families of different wealth (class), and set loose our genetic interests in a ‘brawl’ that is played out in words, over very long periods. But it is nothing but a genetic brawl. It is a slow cascade of violence not cooperative exchange.

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev Ukraine


  • An Alternative Biological Theory, to Sowell’s of The Vision of The Anointed

    [T]he progressive pre-cognitive need for false consensus bias confuses them into thinking that everyone else is likewise as susceptible to false consensus bias. But that is a female genetic ‘defect’ – an adaptation necessary for primitive survival, and one that evolved in concert with ‘gossip’, which is meant to appeal to (take advantage of) false consensus bias. Secondly, need for consensus (feeling part) that drives false consensus bias, and the impulse to use gossip as an exertion of power, are amplified by the status signaling that we obtain from achievement of that power (and negative that we get from seeing our efforts frustrated).


    I think this is a superior, simpler theory of causation over Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed. It is one thing (and he is right) to describe their point of view. But it is another to describe why they should be so constantly drawn that point of view.


    In case my meaning is not clear: I am on message. We humans can make use of voluntary exchange as our information system, and we cannot aggregate our preferences by any other means that corresponds to material reality – in particular we cannot claim rational political or moral opinion except as demonstrations of our individual genetic biases.


    We are far less rational than we think. Democracy cannot work as other than despotism of the underclasses leading to tyranny of an elite. The only possible moral government is one that is analogous to the market, in which both collect information and conduct exchanges. And the groups that must conduct those exchanges are those who have common interests in the production of commons: genders, classes and tribes.


    We were mistaken. We confused the fact that while laws must be made for the individual actor, but commons must be made for the family regardless of class. But when the family is the minority, and individuals express genetic interests not inside the family, but by voting, we ended the ability of the democratic government to conduct exchanges between families of different wealth (class), and set loose our genetic interests in a ‘brawl’ that is played out in words, over very long periods. But it is nothing but a genetic brawl. It is a slow cascade of violence not cooperative exchange.

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev Ukraine


  • AUTHORS INTENTIONS AND WORDS ARE A CONVENIENT DECEPTION. It really doesn’t matte

    AUTHORS INTENTIONS AND WORDS ARE A CONVENIENT DECEPTION.

    It really doesn’t matter what an author says or intends. What matters is whether its true or not- and I do not mean internally consistent, I mean externally correspondent. In the sense that logical conclusions can be and must be drawn from any set of statements. and that the author’s ‘way of thinking’ is either correspondent with reality or not. Most of the time, it’s not. That’s what separates pseudoscience, rationalism, mysticism from truth telling (science).

    When we roll a bag of conceptual marbles down the hill, we do not control them – reality does. When we roll our sentences into the public it does not matter what we say or how we say it but whether what we say is true and truthful.

    Nothing marx, freud and rothbard say for example, is truthfully expressed. So we cannot judge an author by his own terms, but on whether his arguments are operationally possible in reality, regardless of what he means, intends, or portends.

    Meaning is a great way to lie. Which is useful in myths and religious dogma. It was useful in pseudosciences. It was useful in the fallacy of psychologizing. It was useful by the postmoderns. It is useful in all public speech. But it is just a perfect vehicle for lying.

    I run into this all the time, when criticizing certain authors. My favorite is still the typical economist’s reply that ‘we don’t concern ourselves with that’.

    Which makes me crazy because they do affect that which they claim to ignore, without admitting that it is precisely what they ignore that allows them to justify their work.

    Marx is better though. Best. Liar.Ever.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-17 08:00:00 UTC

  • AN ALTERNATIVE TO SOWELL’S THEORY OF THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED The progressive

    AN ALTERNATIVE TO SOWELL’S THEORY OF THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED

    The progressive pre-cognitive need for false consensus bias confuses them into thinking that everyone else is likewise as susceptible to false consensus bias. But that is a female genetic ‘defect’ – an adaptation necessary for primitive survival, and one that evolved in concert with ‘gossip’, which is meant to appeal to (take advantage of) false consensus bias. Secondly, need for consensus (feeling part) that drives false consensus bias, and the impulse to use gossip as an exertion of power, are amplified by the status signaling that we obtain from achievement of that power (and negative that we get from seeing our efforts frustrated).

    I think this is a superior, simpler theory of causation over Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed. It is one thing (and he is right) to describe their point of view. But it is another to describe why they should be so constantly drawn that point of view.

    In case my meaning is not clear: I am on message. We humans can make use of voluntary exchange as our information system, and we cannot aggregate our preferences by any other means that corresponds to material reality – in particular we cannot claim rational political or moral opinion except as demonstrations of our individual genetic biases.

    We are far less rational than we think. Democracy cannot work as other than despotism of the underclasses leading to tyranny of an elite. The only possible moral government is one that is analogous to the market, in which both collect information and conduct exchanges. And the groups that must conduct those exchanges are those who have common interests in the production of commons: genders, classes and tribes.

    We were mistaken. We confused the fact that while laws must be made for the individual actor, but commons must be made for the family regardless of class. But when the family is the minority, and individuals express genetic interests not inside the family, but by voting, we ended the ability of the democratic government to conduct exchanges between families of different wealth (class), and set loose our genetic interests in a ‘brawl’ that is played out in words, over very long periods. But it is nothing but a genetic brawl. It is a slow cascade of violence not cooperative exchange.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-17 04:46:00 UTC

  • MERE POINTS OF VIEW What is the difference between Trust, Property Rights and Li

    MERE POINTS OF VIEW

    What is the difference between Trust, Property Rights and Liberty?

    Well, trust is the name for the experience of low risk, and low risk is the name for low transaction costs. Now, an economists whose theoretical basis evolved during the era of mass production, or the generations that followed him, would perhaps also include information and monetary and political costs, but those in my generation would also include costs of investigating the reliability of any other individual as a trading partner. But in practical terms trust-en-toto is the name we use for the warranty of property rights, rather than trust in an individual to warranty his own actions.

    Property Right is the term we use to positively label our normative warranty granting one another reciprocal insurance against free riding, and for providing the institutional means of resolving insurance claims for violations of the prohibition on free riding.

    Liberty is the term we use for the experience of our normative warranty granting one another reciprocal insurance against free riding by members of the government which we have chartered with the special duty of preventing free riding. Liberty is the term then for the experience of living in conditions where peers use violence to prevent the violation of property rights by the conspiratorial monopoly of the state.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-16 04:17:00 UTC

  • TAXES FOR THE COMMONS I have no problem paying for commons – when they’re in fac

    TAXES FOR THE COMMONS

    I have no problem paying for commons – when they’re in fact commons. I have a big problem with paying extortionary rents. And I have an even larger problem with paying for damage to the commons that we have built over millennia. People have no problem paying taxes that they agree with and many problems paying for taxes that they don’t agree with. The solution of course is to let people pay for what they agree with and not for what they don’t agree with. Representatives are for sale. Remove the agent from the principle agent problem. (Conversely I have an equally large problem with free riders on the commons.)

    I think I’m going to put together a web application with a budget model of the US Government and your extant taxes, and we’ll see how people would vote their money.

    That is a wonderful social science experiment. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 07:05:00 UTC

  • Economy: Family Business and State Are Just Matters of Scale

    (h/t Andy Curzon )(edited and revised)

    [I]f we look at Austrian business cycle theory as merely an instance of the cycle of ‘flocking and schooling’ that follows any kind of change in knowledge that as a consequence produces an opportunity, then the century of pseudoscience was just another business process by which to exploit a market opportunity, and it played out as a series of eddies and pools, which are currently in the process of maximum exploitation and collapse.

    And so governments are just temporary corporations exploiting business opportunities. And management(government), employees(bureaucracy), customers(consumers), and investors(citizens) all compete for the maximum returns.

    This matches all political theory throughout history that suggests that people seek opportunities until it is possible to seek rents, and rents expand until the civilization collapses. It also matches the data that without private(shareholder) public(corporation) alliance no city state became economically competitive.

    I disagree with Diamond for example, since I am pretty sure the reason for these collapses is a breakdown of incentives : the information system that allows for the organization of production. I would say that civilizations collapse either due to extreme efficiency followed by shocks (1200 BC), or the equivalent of cancer: damage to the information system that eliminates the relationship between production and consumption.

    But since humans flock and school, then break off in smaller schools, to exploit opportunities, we are pretty good at a sort of fractal exploitation of every possible opportunity until it’s been exhausted.

    I suspect either an expansion of statism in order to extend the status quo, or an upcoming era of increased statist tyranny in the name of order. If not I suspect collapse of the western control of commerce and trade, and an expansive war or system of wars, to fill the vacuum; and an acceleration of civil wars to take advantage of change at home.

    It is better to study businesses than states, because the model is sufficient and the data is better.