Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • What Are Bleeding Heart Libertarians? How Do They Differ From Libertarians?

    The BHL’s rely on the classical liberal Psychological Arguments as justification for the moral sentiments of care-taking, and grab ideas from everyone else. Good marketing but no arguments as yet other than psychological (moral).

    The Cato Institute group relies more on a mix of historical, moral and legal arguments. But we can also classify them as a mix of Psychological school. Their blog tends to the Continental, even if their publications and policy recommendations remain Psychological.

    The Austrian leaning libertarians at George Mason University rely on economic arguments. There arguments tend to mix Empirical and Psychological. Their error is that they keep trying to find an optimum morality for a polity to believe in. Which is irrational for an economist in particular.

    The Misesians at Ludwig Von Mises Institute use the rationalism from continental jewish cosmopolitan arguments derived from the ethics of the ghetto during the jewish enlightenment. Unfortunately for liberty, their use of the internet was brilliant, and so the three other think tanks above (I’ll have to include myself in that group) are trying to restore liberty to the anglo empirical tradition, or the anglo psychological tradition. The reason being that Ghetto Ethics may be useful between states, but they are insufficient for the formation of a high trust polity. Unfortunately, the wealth of literature they produced sounds all well and good to some of us, but to conservatives (aristocratic egalitarians) they sound completely immoral. And people like Walter Block constantly advocating the morality of things like blackmail, or the right of extortion, simply make the case for liberty worse.

    So I’ll argue that Vijay Krishnan’s positioning is OK in the sense that it’s true but insufficient to help the curious mind understand the moral content of these different philosophical traditions and the method in which they’re argumentatively structured. The better answer would be that these groups use parts of this spectrum of arguments:
    1. Sentimental (emotional intuition)
    2. Mythical (metaphor)
    3. Historical (analogy)
    4. Psychological (moral arguments = classical liberals)
    5. Rational ( continentals, ghetto cosompolitans, leftists of all stripes)
    6. Empirical (scientific and economic arguments – anglos)

    These groups rely on some combination of arguments, with only the last three combined as something bordering on scientific.

    Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Hoppe tried to reconcile their continental backgrounds with anglo-analytic arguments and economics. But they did not rely on science. Instead argued against science. But they didn’t have the evidence we have today.

    https://www.quora.com/What-are-Bleeding-Heart-Libertarians-How-do-they-differ-from-Libertarians

  • EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY IN PROPERTARIANISM We may be unequally valuable to one a

    EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY IN PROPERTARIANISM

    We may be unequally valuable to one another in the marketplace. That’s just an empirically obvious fact.

    We may be unequally capable of mastering and applying skills, interpreting current events, planning successfully for the future, and adhering to those plans.

    We may be unequally desirable as family members, friends, mates and associates. That too is an obvious fact.

    But we are EQUALLY VALUABLE and EQUALLY DESIRABLE as universal suppressors of free riding, rent seeking, fraud and crime.

    Moral theory does not separate our productive, reproductive, associative, and institutional values that each of us brings. Property rights theory does not separate our different values either, because when these ideas were developed we were economically indifferent except in our willingness to work hard and discipline ourselves.

    Economic reward in our civilization is based almost entirely upon our economic performance. But increasingly, we are unequal in our economic performance – and because labor is, and always has been, of little value, this inequality will only continue to increase.

    However, we are rewarded unequally for our unequal economic contribution. But that economic contribution, in our society, is predicated on the persistence of the high trust society, whereby we participate in the absolute nuclear family structure, and we are each responsible for the restraint from, prohibition upon, and policing of crime, free riding, rent seeking, corruption and conquest, in all walks of life.

    As such, it seems irrational that people pay the high cost of not engaging in criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial and conquest behaviors, yet are not rewarded for them.

    The libertarian argument suggests that respect for these criminal, ethical, moral and political rules merely grants one access to society and market. But that is a hard argument to make. The productive could not produce without the efforts of the unproductive in maintaining the prohibitions.

    SO why not pay them for it, and not pay them when they fail?

    This is the basic argument that the Left Libertarians (bleeding heart libertarians) fail to make.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-09 11:47:00 UTC

  • THE CULTURAL DIFFERENCE: CULTURE. In a pub. Underground. Brick walls. Wooden tab

    THE CULTURAL DIFFERENCE: CULTURE.

    In a pub. Underground. Brick walls. Wooden tables.

    Faux Irish decor, much cleaner and better lit than the real thing.

    A television over the bar. The opening olympic ceremony.

    A digital jukebox. Silent. Slightly gaudy and out of place.

    Friday at 6:30pm – waves of friends meeting after work.

    Patiently. Calmly. Confidently. Humbly. One after another.

    With long coats buttoned against the cold – still style conscious.

    Scarves. Heels. Black shoes. No suits. Perfect hair.

    All the women are beautiful, even if they are not.

    No sense of urgency. Or of destination. Of nervousness.

    Animated cheerful conversation everywhere.

    No one bearing the burdened face of American isolation:

    That conflict between a desperate wish for attention and total fear of it at the same time.

    That fear: that our illusory self images, carefully tended in our private warrens, fragile as wisps of blown glass, might crumble at the first hint of rejection.

    American culture, if we can call it that, died with the state’s intervention in civic affairs.

    America is the fulfillment of the Smithian vision: a society predicated upon the moral action produced by commerce.

    But these are loaded words. Full of as much self deception as our self images but nowhere near as fragile.

    There is no culture. There is no american culture. None.

    Culture requires a community of common interest.

    Culture just means treating everyone as ‘family members that I just don’t know well”

    These fools killed the family. The black family. Now the white family.

    But they killed our communal sense of family as well.

    The state is a predator.

    It eats everything it can touch and kills everything else it can’t.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-07 12:11:00 UTC

  • I LOVE THESE PEOPLE: UKRAINIANS AND RUSSIANS They make such sense to me. Yes, th

    I LOVE THESE PEOPLE: UKRAINIANS AND RUSSIANS

    They make such sense to me. Yes, the government is so corrupt that only gangland Chicago comes even close. And that’s not even close enough. Yes, you cannot trust those that you don’t know (much). But you can trust the people close to you with your life. There is nothing like this feeling.

    In America, you cannot trust your business partners, and you cannot trust the state, you can no longer trust the law, you can no longer trust the police, you can no longer trust your neighbor. Morality has evaporate from moral, cultural and legal discourse in a money-grabbing attempt at ‘equality’ on one hand and ‘escaping the predatory state’ on the other.

    I just wish the combination of revolution, my “alien” status, the fear of the collapsing local economy, and an unwarranted unjust attack by my own government hadn’t made me feel constantly insecure here. I mean I love it here but it is a desperately poor country.

    I don’t, as most ‘illegals’ do, feel I have any particular right to be here. And those people in america who claim such rights make me incredibly angry.

    You are responsible for your government. For toppling that government if it does not serve you. And certainly to topple it and kill all of its members if it oppresses you. And to build a new one.

    Ukrainians are what I wish Americans were. They are what we used to be. What we used to be before the well meaning fools destroyed the family, the civic society, and the moral and ethical basis of our culture.

    If anything made me want to kill every living soul in the American government, and every well meaning fool in the media, it’s looking at these wonderful people and realizing what we’ve lost.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-07 12:00:00 UTC

  • ANGLO VS CONTINENTAL THOUGHT: TRADERS VS FARMERS (cross posted for archiving) Co

    ANGLO VS CONTINENTAL THOUGHT: TRADERS VS FARMERS

    (cross posted for archiving)

    Continental thought is heavily loaded with moral assumptions necessary for a diverse set of polities to cooperate on a shared land mass – and the philosophy is loaded at the metaphysical level.

    Anglo thought is predicated on individual sovereignty and the Smithian moral proposition that voluntary exchange PRODUCES moral behavior independently of any intentional, abstract or metaphysically invisible moral commitment. This is a rule based system independent of moral sentiments. Because traders do not share moral sentiments with their customers. They reduce morality to incentives and the satisfaction of them.

    The continentals desperately try to preserve moral authority as group identity. Anglo thought is the metaphysics of an extended family of island traders. Just as the French philosophers have always criticized Anglos for not being part of Europe because they are traders and craftsmen not farmers.

    Obverse: Trade=Navy=England = Athens = Analytic.

    Reverse: Farming=Army=Germany = Sparta = Continental.

    Karl Popper frustrates me because while he is often making statements about science in the anglo analytical and empirical sense, he is also retaining the continental religio-moral argumentative framework and the silly metaphysical nonsense prevalent on the continent that desperately attempts to retain commonality of moral experience, rather than relying upon action independent of experience to produce moral outcomes regardless of moral sentiment.

    So we can look at this spectrum with something like Smith on one end of the spectrum, Popper in the middle bridging the traditions, and say, Heidegger on the extreme european end, really trying to recreate christianity in the same manner as Kant.

    The continental idea in both napoleonic law, and in continental philosophy, suggests that we must have sentimental moral consensus prior to action. The anglo idea both in the common law and anglo philosophy, is that if we have simple rules, we will produce moral outcomes, regardless of our abstract moral commitments…

    So simple really.

    (So now my criticism of Crusoe ethics is complete.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-07 03:11:00 UTC

  • ARISTOCRACY – WE HAD IT RIGHT ALL ALONG What other scientific evidence of good d

    ARISTOCRACY – WE HAD IT RIGHT ALL ALONG

    What other scientific evidence of good discipline, good judgement, good parenting, is there than three successive generations of family success?

    When one has wealth and status then what achievements can one reach for? Culture. Arts. Civics.

    We had it right for most of our history. In an effort to steal control from a reluctant aristocracy dependent upon the productivity of land, we invented a number of lies: equality the most damaging of them.

    Had membership in our house of aristocracy depended entirely upon demonstrated economic merit for three generations rather than the loyalty of titled heredity, we could have survived the transition from the productivity of land to the productivity of manufacturing, finance and trade.

    Had we created a house of proletarians rather than surrendering the house of common land owners to the mass of rent-seekers, so that the natural division of the classes could cooperate via exchange between those houses, we could have survived their introduction into both the economy and the polity.

    Women, who in every walk of life prefer to exercise care taking, would control the house of the proletarians. Men the house of commons and lords. And the competition provided by the church would have been replaced by the lowest house as a means of resistance against exploitation.

    Instead we adopted simple majority rule, thereby destroying thousands of years of the principle difference between the west and the rest: the balance of powers and the necessity for forcing a compromise between different interests in the absence of authority, given the assumption of individual sovereignty as the common good, versus an abstract unknowable concept of the common good involuntarily prosecuted upon the public.

    That was our mistake. We had everything else right.

    It may be too late to correct it. But the first step in fixing a problem is understanding the cause of it.

    We had it right all along.

    We did it. And only we did it. No other civilizations managed it.

    Property = Sovereignty = Balance of Powers.

    I have no problem being ruled by the best of each class.

    I do have a problem being ruled by the worst of each class.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-06 06:07:00 UTC

  • STATE OF THE ART (personal fears) I feel really comfortable with jumping off whe

    STATE OF THE ART

    (personal fears)

    I feel really comfortable with jumping off where Penelope Maddy left off with her Second Philosopher’s AREALISM, and transforming her basic arguments into realism via operational language. That’s not hard. That solves the problem of communicating the death of platonism.

    As for contemporary philosophy, it looks like there are only two active philosophers worth following. Which is kind of scary if you think about it. The most heralded philosophers are largely the continentals now. A fact which I find terrifying. Because it’s just elaborate christian mysticism trying to justify socialism. (It’s creepy. It’s the mental equivalent of working on weaponizing the bird flu virus into an unstoppable plague. But since we’ve had a number of conceptual plagues – most of them by jewish authors for some reason or other, which I can’t comprehend: zoroaster, abraham, jesus, peter and paul, muhammed, rousseau, kant, marx, freud, cantor, heidegger – I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the effort to formulate a new religion continues unabated. )

    There are two good and active philosophers: Searle and Dennett. Otherwise contemporary philosophy is a desert. I am not brave enough to think I”m in that class of minds. I’m not. I just stumbled on the right answers like the poor fellows who discovered Lexan. But I have definitely solved the following problems so far as ethics, politics and political economy are concerned:

    1) Mathematical Realism. (I seem to be the only one to do this.)

    2) Ethical Realism. (I seem to be the only one to do this)

    3) The unification of philosophical disciplines

    4) The formal logic of cooperation.

    5) The institutions of morally heterogeneous polities. And given that I don’t think I’ve really stated anything terribly novel in the institutional solutions department, all I have done is provide an explanation of why a particular set of solutions are scientific, rational, ethical, moral and just. Rather than some arbitrary moralistic Hail Mary play. (see Rawls.)

    I understand Kripke’s innovation pretty clearly I think. But I still think that the solution to internally consistent logic is replaced by the logic of cooperation. I just don’t know if I can really take that line of thought any further into a critique of formal logic. So I don’t know the impact that operational language would have on formal logic. So far as I can tell, the problem is no longer one of language and statements but the reducibility of statements to human action. If you grok that one change alone, then you sort of understand all you need to.

    I can sort of reconcile this with Kripke. Although I have to go back and re-read Naming and Necessity again with my current understanding and see if my previous understanding holds up.

    BUT THE PROBLEM WILL BE READABILITY

    I still think it’s going to be hard without the help of a patient editor to capture these ideas as a coherent whole. I can make a philosophy that you can study once you understand it’s value. But I don’t think I can sell someone on that philosophy through easy of comprehension. I have reduced most of the central arguments to pretty simple concepts. But holding the reader’s hand through the journey is a lot harder than simply stating the definitions and methods. I just don’t think I can do it. I don’t think so because I understand the problem of the limit that one can hold in short term memory. And my crutch to get around that problem is to use the text as the short term memory that I don’t have, but that most great authors do have. So far my only solution has been to just keep trying until I can reduce it. But at this point I’m not sure that I’m making further progress at reduction.

    ie: I’m afraid to put finger to keyboard. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot easier to let months pass improving on minor points than it is to tackle the equivalent of Elinor Ostrom’s grammar. I know full well that I’ve completed the ethics, the philosophy, the institutions and the applications. But I’m afraid to confront my inadequacy as a writer. So afraid that it’s hindering me.

    Not sure what to do other than power through it in a snowy chalet somewhere… Not afraid of much really. Not afraid of dying even. But I’m afraid to fail at this for sure…..

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-05 16:39:00 UTC

  • THE VALUE OF ARGUING WITH THE TINFOIL HAT CROWD It is ABSOLUTELY valuable to arg

    THE VALUE OF ARGUING WITH THE TINFOIL HAT CROWD

    It is ABSOLUTELY valuable to argue with the Tinfoil Hat crowd, so that you can master the common rhetorical fallacies without relying on normative assumptions for defense. Normative assumptions are just another paradigmatic frame.

    As you move into more and more intellectual and academic debate, you realize that the only difference between the Yahoo-news-group idiots, the postmodern social science idiots, the scientistic idiots, and the public intellectual idiots is the density of the tinfoil. The nature of the individuals assumptions simply mature from:

    a) schizophrenic bias, to

    b) confirmation bias, to

    c) nihilistic bias, to

    d) pseudoscientific bias, to

    e) methodological bias, to

    f) paradigmatic bias.

    Almost no one gets to skeptical empiricism in the Popperian, and certainly not in the Poincaré models. You can end up like Paul Krugman and ignore the fact that what you’re deducing from your measurements about monetary policy is merely noise, when the military expansion of anglo rules of trade is the signal.

    You can end up like John Ralws and Sam Harris and confuse analogy with causality, then compounding your confusion by making the error of aggregation.

    The best defense I have made against these errors is to focus on defining and reconciling spectrums – the golden mean. You can make an assumptive line between two ideal types pretty easily – the least work path. But it’s much harder to make errors if you define the different spectrums and see how they intersect with one another. It is much harder to reconcile sets of definitions in ordered spectra with each other.

    And it is much easier with a rich language than an allegorical language. It is even easier in operational language.

    Or at least. As easy as it can be.

    WHICH IS WHY I”M ALWAYS WRITING LISTS (ordered sets).

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 04:39:00 UTC

  • IF LABOR IS NO LONGER VALUABLE THEN WHAT DO THE LOWER CLASSES HAVE TO TRADE? SUP

    IF LABOR IS NO LONGER VALUABLE THEN WHAT DO THE LOWER CLASSES HAVE TO TRADE? SUPPRESSION OF FREE RIDING: PROPERTY RIGHTS.

    (a couple of profound ideas here)

    If labor is no longer valuable – at all, then what do the underclasses have to trade?

    Nothing? Well, that’s making a lot of assumptions about the structure of society as if it’s governed by some equivalent of the law of gravity. 😉 So, rather than

    They have suppression of all free riding to trade: obedience to norms; manners, ethics, morals and laws: respect for property rights, and voting to reduce the state, and their utility as consumers to trade.

    But how do we capture those things into something tangible?

    With tokens, so that they exchange their consumption for the production of others. We dont need to distribute money through the financial system any longer. There isnt any need for it. We can directly distribute liquidity to consumers, and bypass the financial system. We can give consumers fiat money or digital currency, and pretty much keep them out of the credit system. This number would need to be a percentage of some revenues such that the citizens possess equal interest in the efficiency of the government, and the need to expand productivity in the economy. Otherwise we create malincentive. But at this point, minimum wage labor is preference not a necessity, and we need not interfere with prices for labor.

    The distribution to citizens is their payment for suppressing free riding in all its forms. If they agree to suppress free riding in all its forms, then they have earned that distribution. If they fail to suppress free riding in all its forms, then they do not earn that payment. This is sufficient incentive both positive and negative to prevent crimes not of passion. And as an incentive, the threat of losing one’s means of sustenance is pretty hard to improve upon. It is better than physical punishment.

    The accumulation of profits is payment for contributing to productivity – for organizing production – now that we know labor is of no value in production, even if problem solving is of value.

    This system of compensating people for their actions is simply transforming the moral code for non-anonymous members engaged in equal production and consumption, into a calculable system for anonymous members engaged in equal suppression of free riding, but unequal organization of production.

    And to do otherwise is to attempt to obtain property rights for free.

    You can’t every achieve equality by any means, but you can certainly pay people from what they earn without cheating them of payment for it. If all of us are producers then we have our production to exchange and equal interest in respect for the necessary properties of production. But if only a few of us are productive (and that is the current state of affairs) why should those people respect the rules of production if they aren’t compensated for it? That’s purely irrational.

    THE OPEN PROBLEM

    Now, the only problem we face is bearing a child that you cannot support is free riding on the backs of others. Immigration is free riding unless you bring your skills with you. The problem of the female obsession with free riding must be solved. And we must have the moral courage to solve it through aggressive punishment of women who bear children that they cannot support, to the same degree we punish males who resort to violence for the purpose of obtaining what they want. A woman who bears a child that she cannot support is, under all conditions, without exception, is blackmail: the choice between an paying a woman for her immoral action, or the harm that will come to an innocent child.

    If we can agree that bearing a child you cannot support is blackmail, or at least a new crime of the same sort. Then it is possible to unite all people in a country with the same interests. Because large scale democratic government simply creates a vehicle for systematic generation of internal conflict given the dissimilarity of ability and interest.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 03:13:00 UTC

  • “HOMO MORALICUS” – ETHICAL AND MORAL STATUS MACHINES Did you ever notice that we

    “HOMO MORALICUS” – ETHICAL AND MORAL STATUS MACHINES

    Did you ever notice that we human beings don’t need formal logic, mathematics, special tools and equipment, to determine if we think that something is unethical or immoral?

    Did you every notice that we don’t need logic, science, tools, equipment or sophisticated devices to perceive changes in our status relative to one another? We are masters of the must subtle change.

    Unlike the social world, we need a lot of tools to be able to grasp the real world, and to reduce it’s complexity to some analogy to experience. But we don’t need any such tools to perceive vastly complex status cues and cheating or contribution to the social commons.

    Man is a moral animal. We evolved to sense moral and immoral behavior as contributing to or extractive from, our ability to reproduce. And it was an evolutionary necessity that we develop these moral and social intuitions – otherwise we could not distinguish parasitic from cooperative actions. And we would not survive.

    Can we sense the economy? No. We have invented the most amazing tool EVER- prices. Prices allow us to sense what we need to do to sustain ourselves by serving others.

    We will willingly pay very high costs to stop others from cheating. We will willingly pay very high costs to preserve our status – even resorting to committing suicide rather than experience that loss.

    We place higher priority on these things than we do on economics.

    Why?

    Because it’s reproductively more important that we do.

    Man is a moral creature BEFORE he is an economic creature.

    And anyone who states otherwise is very likely trying to cover for or justify, some criminal, immoral or unethical action.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-02 10:17:00 UTC