Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • FUTURE OF EUROPE IS GERMANY AND RUSSIA – OR IRRELEVANCE. The catholic countries

    http://www.social-europe.eu/2013/03/germany-has-created-an-accidental-empire/THE FUTURE OF EUROPE IS GERMANY AND RUSSIA – OR IRRELEVANCE.

    The catholic countries are dead weights.

    As a political economist, I will have to say, in technical terms, this article is utter nonsense.

    Strategically the best scenario, long term, for Europe, is a strong Germany allied with a strong Russia. Catholic Europe is a basket case and will remain so, because the family is the economic unit and the moral boundary, and corruption is pervasive for this reason. Germanic countries treat the individual as the economic unit, and the entire society as the moral boundary, with the family responsible for manufacturing good citizens. This is why these cultures are so much less corrupt that the catholic cultures.

    An ongoing ‘euro’ project that allows political rather than economic dependency of the southern states will leave a weak Germany, and an expansionist russia.

    Why the past, whose economics are completely irrelevant today, should be what europeans fear, rather than a future wehre the USA is no longer economically able to police world trade and therefore grant Europe client state privileges. The only solution for Europe is integration of european labor with Russian resources and russian militarism.

    I’m happy to argue this with any economist in the world., But the fact of the matter is, that any economist in the world able to argue it, will probably agree with me.

    The catholic countries are irrelevant. Absolutely irrelevant. The problem is natural resources, economic interdependence with Russia, and the slow conversion of the catholic and byzantine states to credible commercial economies, dependent upon the alliance of the two countries capable of producing competitive goods and services.

    http://www.social-europe.eu/2013/03/germany-has-created-an-accidental-empire

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-21 13:56:00 UTC

  • Did Machiavelli Write The Prince As A Satire?

    The Prince is the first example of the scientific study of politics.  While science starts with Aristotle, practical political science starts with Machiavelli.  To the point where, were it not for the illiterate we would probably call political scientists ‘Machiavellians’ – and some historians and philosophers have done so (Burnham for example.)

    Machiavelli wrote when trade was moving from the Mediterranean to the north atlantic. And Italy, which had been the center of trade for at least 1500 years was flung into internecine warfare in the struggles for power. The upheavals this caused were catastrophic and remain with Italy to this day.
     
    Machiavelli gave practical advice to leaders about how to govern by rational rather than ideological grounds. Our concept of morality today originated with the enlightenment. In Machiavelli’s time, morality was more closely connected with the church and the Prince is Machiavelli’s attempt to suggest to political leaders that practical morality in the interest of citizens is superior to ideological morality which may lead to worse consequences for citizens.  In this sense, Machiavelli starts the west’s long rise toward the enlightenment.

    As an administrator in the city service, he had been in charge of the city defenses, and had knowledge of the local government and war. But his work was also based on other works, most importantly Livy, and we usually recommend that people interested in the Machiavelli read the Discourses On Livy as well as The Prince in order to understand Machiavelli’s attempt to compare the past with the present and draw conclusions about what actions we must take.

    https://www.quora.com/Did-Machiavelli-write-The-Prince-as-a-satire

  • OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the so

    http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.e/ECONOMICS OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION

    QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the south?”

    Well, of course I don’t like to say the impolitic truth and then have to fend off the ignorant. Quora is peopled by the demographic that does not rely on data. We know this because almost all questions there can be answered easily with available data. But since all data of meaning requires knowledge of economics and statistics, and ignorance of economics and statistics is pervasive, this prohibits access to comprehension of that data, and prohibits resolution of questions of popular opinion and political doctrine.

    As such, it’s tedious to answer impolitic questions here. That is why few people do it.

    That said, I will do my best:

    FAMILY STRUCTURE

    1) Family structure and family economic structures determine poverty. The nuclear family is highly efficient economic structure. The two income nuclear family is the most efficient economic structure. For a male it is the smallest tribe he can be alpha in, and maintain access to a female as he declines in desirability For a woman she is the alpha female in her tribe of one, and has a monopoly claim on his production for the duration of her childrearing, despite her declining ‘desirability’ during this time. The nuclear family also places asset demands on the male, and therefore delays marriage and mating, both of which increase the skill level, work experience of the members.

    2) Redistribution undermines the family and increases poverty, partly because men in the lower classes are less desirable (and able) than women in the lower classes, because men are more widely distributed in feature and ability than are women, with more men at the very top (nobel prize winners) and more men at the bottom (persistently impulsive criminality). Our Y chromosome is where nature experiements, and our wider male distribution affects mating under monogamy, and less so under polygyny, because under polygyny, a smaller number of more desirable males can be shared amongst a larger number of marginally more desirable females.

    3) Racial groups are more or less ‘desirable’ as mates worldwide, not just in the states. This has largely to do, as best as any of us can tell, with a mating preference for females with thinner skin in contrast to mates with thicker skin as a signal that is different from the thicker skin of males. Since the only uniform scale of beauty across all cultures, other than symmetry, is quality of female skin clarity, this is the only selection preference necessary to explain racial preferences, other than the rate at which we appear to have exited Africa and begun the process of near-speciation (racial diversification), and the problem of access to vitamin D in the northern climes. This research is impolitic and the people who pursue it are ostracized from academia so it has moved to being conducted under a different guise, or now to china where such things are considered only logical. But the research is available. And it shows that fairer, thinner skin on females with finer features, is more desirable regardless of racial group.

    4) People mate almost entirely within race (<15%) and prefer to associate, work, and live within racial groups. With the consumer marketplace for goods the only shared environment. Extremes can run counter to this fact with crossing occurring at the lower and higher ends of desirability where each individual has better options in mates and often better access to social class by crossing racial boundaries.

    5) Even where racial admixture occurs, it places downward pressure on extra-group status and opportunity (desirability). In other words, racially mixed children maintain the lower of their racial preferences. Altough in black and hispanic communities and families children are still ranked in preference by skin color because it grants access to status both mating and social.

    ECONOMICS

    6) Impulsivity (the ability to resist impulses) varies between the races, with the east asians the least impulsive distribution, and the subsaharan african population the most impulsive. Impulsivity is a positive reproductive strategy unless external (climate) pressures punish survival. Impulsivity places a high penalty on learning ability which favors long periods of ‘frustration’ and concentration.

    7) Impulsivity affects both trustworthiness and creditworthiness. Nuclear families have higher more stable incomes, and are more creditworthy, as well as more economically efficient. As such high densities of nuclear families will produce higher wealth. Higher wealth will generate greater opportunity. Greater opportunity within a geography will increase demand for housing in that geography. Housing in that geography will increase in price. People who live in more impulsive, less efficient groups will of course, be unable to gain access to that geography and its opportunities.

    8) For these reasons (Which I assume I should use graphs to illustrate) the reason that poverty and single motherhood are so prevalent in the south is that 74% of black mothers, and a high percentage of hispanic mothers are unmarried. And they live in close communities reliant on support from extended family members, with populations too high to integrate into more successful communities. White single motherhood is on the increase in the lower classes, and teh USA, Ireland and New Zealand, where the postmodernist and feminist movements have been most successful, have the highest rates of single motherhood among whites, and the countries of southern europe who remain familially integral the lowest: Italy, Greece, Spain and Luxembourg.

    TRUST AND OPPORTUNITY

    All humans are faced with opportunities for both cooperation and conflict at all times. We must choose how to apply our limited time effort and resources to a limited number of opportunities.

    All opportunities other than exchanges of commodities purely on price, consist of a network of cost and benefit tradeoffs. All cost and benefit tradeoff’s are simple.

    We trade (cooperate) on all sorts of terms, but economic status, social status, values, language, culture(mythology, habits) are significant terms. Every variation in every property that is not identical in interest is a negative.

    Status signals (status and reputation) have higher value in-group than across groups. Therefore status pressure to encourage each of us to adhere to agreements is of higher value in-group.

    Therefore we trust and cooperate in-group at lower cost and risk than across group.

    This is why people break into racial, cultural, socioeconomic, educational, generational, occupational groups. Because it’s the lowest risk pool of people with the lowest cost of cooperation, even if it’s less productive it may also be the only pool available to you where you can find someone willing to pay the higher cost of cooperating with you across groups.

    Political discourse assumes we want to help each other and we do. The problem is the logic of that statement -it’s meaningless when we CAN help everyone, we must still choose the best return on our help. And we do. And that is how it is. Anything else is irrational.

    SOUTHERN RELIGIOSITY

    Race is the reason for ‘everything’ in the south, including religiosity. Although southern religiosity we must understand is a rebellion against the state, after the north conquered the south. Race is the reason for everything in america. People are born, live, reproduce, associate, work with, and speak to, people within their racial groups except where they participate in the marketplace together.

    RATES OF POVERTY BY RACE

    http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.e…

    RATES OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD BY RACE

    LINK: http://datacenter.kidscount.org/…

    There is no end of data on this subject.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-12 03:28:00 UTC

  • ECONOMIC FALLACY #3 : CORRELATION VS CAUSATION Correlation does not mean causati

    ECONOMIC FALLACY #3 : CORRELATION VS CAUSATION

    Correlation does not mean causation.

    I hesitate to include this one on the list because the phrase has become overused in some circles. It can be very easy to accuse someone of this and then not have to deal with their argument, even though there is good reason to believe causation exists. Inappropriately accusing people of this fallacy is especially easy when discussing economics. Economics is like a science in which you can’t account for all of the variables. Politicians can take credit, or blame others, for things without knowing the real cause.

    One example of this fallacy is David Johnston’s assessment of the Bush tax cuts. I have no problem when he says the Bush tax cuts didn’t lead to the prosperity Bush promised, although I don’t blame Bush for that, and nearly every politician exaggerates when they are trying to sell something. The main problem I have is when he says “the data show overwhelmingly that the Republican-sponsored tax cuts damaged our nation.” This is a case of the fallacy because most of his evidence that the nation has been damaged is a decrease in average income (his case that less revenue was collected is legitimate). It very well could be the case that the tax cuts made the average income higher than what it would have been.

    The average income could have decreased for reasons other than the Bush’s tax cuts. I lean toward that conclusion because there is no conceivable way that tax cuts can cause a decrease in average income. I would be more than happy to retract my statement if someone could please tell me how this happens.

    I first became aware of this fallacy while I was in college. I was discussing minimum wage with a sociology professor. There are better arguments for raising the minimum wage, but the one she was giving me was that raising it often decreased the unemployment rate. I was baffled that someone could say this because, again, there is no conceivable way that increasing minimum wage could cause a decrease in unemployment. She pointed to certain years when minimum wage increased, and unemployment decreased. It escaped her that minimum wage could have destroyed jobs in one place while a new business may have started up in another, showing a net increase in employment.

    With both the professor and Johnston, they claim that they are just looking at the facts, and those of us with even a little understanding of what causes what in economics are blindly following an ideology with no connection to reality. All this tells me is that they have no interest in how economics actually works. They have a political position they want to advance and they hope they can find “facts” to support it, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-11 03:16:00 UTC

  • ECONOMIC FALLACY #2 : HIDDEN COSTS Not Accounting For Hidden Costs or HIdden Tra

    ECONOMIC FALLACY #2 : HIDDEN COSTS

    Not Accounting For Hidden Costs or HIdden Transfers.

    This is somewhat similar to “the broken window fallacy” introduced by Frédéric Bastiat. Bastiat tells a parable where a shopkeeper’s son breaks a window in the shop. As a condolence people say that at least the son has fueled a job for the man who will repair the window. While the son did circulate money, and boost one industry, the shopkeeper would have used his money to employ other labor if the window had not been broken.

    When the government spends money on something, part of the cost is not only the dollars spent, but the things that the money would have been spent on otherwise. Amazingly what the money would have been spent on otherwise is very often the same thing the government is trying to create. So politicians may have done nothing at all when all is said and done, we may even be worse off, but they can take credit for what was created.

    The current best example of this is the stimulus. Supporters of the stimulus can say that it created jobs, but because we can only speculate on what might have happened without the stimulus, the true costs remain hidden.

    Lawrence Lindsey argues convincingly that it was simply a waste of money. One of his best lines is “Since the beginning of the recession, the number of unemployed has increased by more than 8 million people. For $800 billion, we could have handed every one of these people a check for $100,000.” Not only is the cost over $800 billion, but it may very well be the case that more jobs would have been created if that money remained in the hands of the private sector. For those of us who think government is by nature horribly inefficient, that is a reasonable conclusion.

    Spending money for policies like the stimulus is usually a beneficial political move (although when you get up to $800 billion your chances get a lot worse). First and foremost, you can say you “did something about it.” That always counts for a lot in politics (this is another point made by Sowell). You don’t want to be caught sitting on your hands, not wasting money. Second, you can say that it would have been far worse if you didn’t do something, since all we can do is speculate about the alternative. Third, you can point to a concrete example of progress you have made. You were part of the effort that created hundreds of thousands of jobs. It doesn’t matter if its cost was so high, that it may have also erased hundreds of thousands of jobs.

    Generally speaking the government is so inefficient that when it says it created something, most likely it destroyed far more in order to create it.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-11 03:08:00 UTC

  • ECONOMIC FALLACY #1 : THE FALLACY OF MEASUREMENT Fallacy Of Measurement The firs

    ECONOMIC FALLACY #1 : THE FALLACY OF MEASUREMENT

    Fallacy Of Measurement

    The first fact to understand about statistics surrounding economics is the different ways people can skew the results. People use whatever twisted statistics they think make their political point. If you want the economy to look bad then use household income rather than personal income. This is a convenient way to lie about the economy.

    This is a point Thomas Sowell makes: “household or family income can remain virtually unchanged for decades while per capita income is going up by very large amounts. The number of people per household and per family is declining.”

    Another tool for someone trying to make the situation look bad is to talk about the income gap. Saying that the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing makes it seem like the rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer, or that the rich are taking from the poor. While that gap is increasing, it is mainly because it is so much easier for the wealthy to increase their incomes by large amounts. Yes, the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer as well.

    This point is made brilliantly by Michael Medved in his book “The 5 Big Lies About American Business.” To paraphrase Medved, if one citizen who makes $200,000 per year shows an increase of 10 percent, he now makes $220,000. If another citizen who makes $20,000 per year has an increase of 20 percent he now makes $24,000 per year. The second person saw an increase twice as large as the first person yet the gap increased from $180,000 to $196,000. “The gap” is how you make a situation which was good for everyone look bad. There are more accurate ways to illustrate how the poor are doing.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-11 03:07:00 UTC

  • WHY CONSERVATIVES RETAIN POWER? Liberals (the political wing of the Postmodernis

    WHY CONSERVATIVES RETAIN POWER?

    Liberals (the political wing of the Postmodernist Religion) rely on counter-factual IMMORAL arguments, while conservatives rely on counter-factual MORAL arguments. Everyone knows everyone’s arguments are counter-factual. The difference is that they vote for morality. Since liberal arguments are immorally counterfactual, the public rejects them.

    The only reason democratic candidates win is the single female, single mother vote, because it is an rent-seeking demographic. Females are rent seekers. It is their reproductive strategy. They can rent seek against husbands, rent seek against tribes, and rent seek against the state. It is far easier to rent seek against the state than rent seek against a husband, because the number of alpha husbands is increasingly limited under commercial capitalism.

    If not for the single mother, single woman vote, we would never have a liberal anything in this country.

    This is the outcome of the feminist revolution and the attack on men and the nuclear family. As a response, the conservatives and libertarians (my side) hired the capitalists (on their own side) against the state – by giving them free reign to undermine the expansionist liberal movement, and the democratic socialist state. It has largely worked. Except that immigration has ruined the demographics anyway. So the liberal strategy has also won. That is why we are at a stalemate until one of these sides conquers the other.

    And demographically, at least on the coasts, white people with the moral code of the nuclear family with high transaction costs in rural areas are going to lose the battle against rent seekers with low transaction costs in the urban centers.

    I suspect the outcome isn’t going to be the idyllic star-trek future we envisioned. I could argue pretty effectively that the only solution is to break up the country into some permutation of the ‘nine nations of north america’, or at least the center vs, the coasts. This would create enormous opportunity, and eradicate the US debt structure.

    But I suspect that such a rational outcome isn’t likely.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-07 08:55:00 UTC

  • THE LOGICAL CONTRADICTION IN THE POSTMODERN RELIGION The modern histories of rel

    THE LOGICAL CONTRADICTION IN THE POSTMODERN RELIGION

    The modern histories of religion and socialism exhibit striking parallels in development.

    1) Both religion and socialism started with a comprehensive vision that they believed to be true but not based on reason (various prophets; Rousseau)

    2) Both visions were then challenged by visions based on rational epistemologies (early naturalist critics of religion; early liberal critics of socialism).

    3) Both religion and socialism responded by saying that they could satisfy the criteria of reason (natural theology; scientific socialism).

    4) Both religion and socialism then ran into serious problems of logic and evidence (Hume’s attacks on natural theology; Mises’s and Hayek’s attacks on socialist calculation).

    5) Both then responded in turn by attacking reality and reason (Kant and Kierkegaard; postmodernists).

    6) The prevailing skeptical and irrationalist epistemologies in academic philosophy thus provided the Left with a new strategy for responding to its crisis. Any attack on socialism in any form could be brushed aside, and the desire to believe in it reaffirmed.

    7) [P]ostmodernism is a symptom of the far Left’s crisis of faith. Postmodernism is a result of using skeptical epistemology to justify the personal leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism.

    If one is interested in truth, then one’s rational response to a failing theory is as follows:

    1) One breaks the theory down to its constituent premises.

    2) One questions its premises vigorously and checks the logic that integrates them.

    3) One seeks out alternatives to the most questionable premises.

    4) One accepts moral responsibility for any bad consequences of putting the false theory into practice.

    This is not what we find in postmodern reflections on contemporary politics. Truth and rationality are subjected to attack, and the prevailing attitude about moral responsibility is again best stated by Rorty: “I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn’t care much about our past sins.”

    One could, after doing some philosophy, come to be a true believer in subjectivism and relativism. Accordingly, one could come to believe that reason is derivative, that will and desire rule, that society is a battle of competing wills, that words are merely tools in the power struggle for dominance, and that all is fair in love and war. That is the position the Sophists argued 2400 years ago.

    The only difference, then, between the Sophists and the postmodernists is whose side they are on. [The Sophists, marshalled] subjectivist and relativistic arguments in support of the political claim that justice is the interest of the stronger. The postmodernists—coming after two millennia of Christianity and two centuries of socialist theory—simply reverse that claim: Subjectivism and relativism are true, except that the postmodernists are on the side of the weaker and historically-oppressed groups. Justice – is the interest of the weaker.

    – Hicks, Stephen R. C. (2010-10-19). Explaining Postmodernism

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-07 03:44:00 UTC

  • THE POSTMODERN RELIGION, AND ITS POLITICAL WING: LIBERALISM The left is a klepto

    THE POSTMODERN RELIGION, AND ITS POLITICAL WING: LIBERALISM

    The left is a kleptocracy, and its religion is postmodernism.

    “In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims.

    1) On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.

    2) On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.

    3) Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil.

    4) Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.

    5) Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.

    There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next. Postmodernists are well aware of the contradictions—especially since their opponents relish pointing them out at every opportunity.

    Consider three more examples, this time of clashes between postmodernist theory and historical fact.

    1) Postmodernists say that the West is deeply racist, but they know very well that the West ended slavery for the first time ever, and that it is only in places where Western ideas have made inroads that racist ideas are on the defensive.

    2) They say that the West is deeply sexist, but they know very well that Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without.

    3) They say that Western capitalist countries are cruel to their poorer members, subjugating them and getting rich off them, but they know very well that the poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.

    In the modern world, Left-wing thought has been one of the major breeding grounds for destruction and nihilism. From the Reign of Terror to Lenin and Stalin, to Mao and Pol Pot, to the up-surge of terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s, the far Left has exhibited repeatedly a willingness to use violence to achieve political ends and exhibited extreme frustration and rage when it has failed.”

    – Excerpted from Hicks, Stephen R. C. Explaining Postmodernism, chapter six.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-07 03:10:00 UTC

  • ON RELIGION I don’t attack religions for being religions, or being predicated on

    ON RELIGION

    I don’t attack religions for being religions, or being predicated on whatever causal relations, for whatever reason. This is because I understand that ARATIONAL thinking is useful as a defense against reason that we disagree with. It allows us to exit the rational conversation and continue to pursue our preferences, albiet with arational, rather than rational thought.

    What I care about are the consequences of any line of thought. And in particular, that any line of thought produces negative economic consequences, because negative economic consequences reduce ALL choices for ALL people and positive economic consequences improve ALL choices for ALL people.

    If I argue in favor of the morality of PROPERTY, this allows people to adopt whatever religion that they want to, and to form in to whatever groups they want to. I have no greater concern if people gather into groups based upon religion, historical reference, or preference for a particular artist’s music, or any other reason that they want to group together.

    That is the whole point of market and property. Market and property allow us to compete on means in the market, even if we have completely opposite ends.

    The reason that we can’t all live peacefully together is that governments are monopolies, which define a monopoly of property rights, and as such we compete to gain power over government so that we can implement our version of property rights, rather than, government is a set of institutions administers the market, using PRIVATE property rights, so that groups may create whatever COMMON Property Rights among themselves that they prefer to.

    Capitalism is the only form of tolerance. The market doesn’t care about your color, or creed. Everyone is the color ‘gold’.

    Postmodernism is a religion that promote socialism, and socialism is harmful, and removes choices, and destroys the market. As such, I object to the argument that postmodernism, and its political wing ‘liberalism’, do not claim to be a religion that seeks power. I object to the argument that Islam is a religion of peace rather than a religion of tyranny and poverty. And I object to the fact that both Postmodernism and Islam will of necessity destroy economic productivity, and freedom.

    And In both cases, most likely, my race.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-07 02:47:00 UTC