Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • LIBERTY IS NOT A PACIFIST PURSUIT I’m not sure but I suspect that the disconnect

    LIBERTY IS NOT A PACIFIST PURSUIT

    I’m not sure but I suspect that the disconnect between liberty and violence was initiated FIRST by the enlightenment need to justify the taking of power from the landed nobility, and SECOND, by the need for women to justify obtaining the right to vote.

    (Reposted from another comment that I’ve posted elsewhere:)

    Liberty isnt’ ‘inherent’. Liberty is created by force and held by force. And no people without an armed militia to obtain and hold liberty by violence has even had liberty.

    Property is ‘inherent’ in the sense that it’s necessary for complex economic production, and it’s ‘inherent’ in that the mind is organized to make use of it.

    But liberty, which is defined as the universal prohibition on the involuntary transfer of property, is a construct made by and held by the will to use violence. Just as every other form of property is made by and held by the will to use violence.

    Liberty, as in, private property, is unnatural to man. That’s why it doesn’t exist outside of a few cases in western history. Those who are unproductive will always make claims against the productive by claiming that their resources or their labors are a commons.

    Liberty has nothing to do with pacifism. Liberty produces peace because conflict must be resolved in the market, rather than by fraud or violence.

    Pacifist libertarianism is not only illogical, and counter to the evidence, but it’s suicidal.

    Don’t buy into the christian nonsense in libertarian theory. Or rothbard’s jewish nonsense. Both are appeals by the week to a non-existant divinity.

    Liberty is created by man. Liberty is a product of the application of violence. It always has been and it always will be.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-20 11:38:00 UTC

  • ROTHBARDIAN GHETTO ETHICS : THE WALL AND THE OCEAN We libertarians must realize

    ROTHBARDIAN GHETTO ETHICS : THE WALL AND THE OCEAN

    We libertarians must realize the numerous logical errors in the ideological arguments that we use to support our ethics, if we are to include enough of the classical liberals with their aristocratic egalitarian ethics into our movement that we may represent anything more than an irrelevant minority.

    The most common error in libertarian thought is the ghetto ethics of Rothbard. Rothbard could not solve the problem of institutions. So he invented contrivances (and weak ones) to give the appearance of legitimacy to his ethical system. Hoppe succeeded where Rothbard failed. But Rothbard’s arguments persist.

    a) Rothbard’s Ghetto Ethics work only because where there is a ghetto within an existing political system, and no means by which members of the ghetto can replace the exterior political order. It’s all well and good to advocate ghetto ethics in the ghetto. It’s not good, or even rational, to suggest that those ethics could persist without the political exterior to the ghetto. The ghetto is anarchic. Sure. But it’s anarchic because the exterior power will not let a formal monopoly of property rights develop in the ghetto, and the anarch of the ghetto is perceived as a form of punishment for its inhabitants.

    b) Rothbard’s Crusoe Ethics are an example of ghetto ethics. Crusoe ethics sound “all sweet and libertarian” – until you realize that the ocean that surrounds the island provides the violence that separates the island from other humans: instead of the ghetto wall, we have the ocean deeps.

    The only rational model for political systems, that isn’t bent on such a logically faulty contrivance, is quite the opposite: that we are all standing on a continent shared with many other tribes, where each tribe uses slightly different measures of communal and private property. And you, alone, in your tribe, figure out that if you can institute private property, that your tribe will out-compete every other tribe. The question is, how do you create the institution of private property?

    That answer is quite telling: you buy it in a voluntary exchange. That is the only answer that is consistent with the non aggression principle. If you cannot buy it, then you must use violence to implement it. And you must, of certainty, use violence to protect it once you’ve instituted it.

    c) For human beings, instinctively, all property is communal, and privatization is the source of scarcity. It turns out that instinct is wrong, because it prevents the division of knowledge and labor. But we still ‘feel’ that instinct. And for the lower classes, it’s to their advantage to express, and act upon those feelings.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-30 13:14:00 UTC

  • ON INSPIRATIONS VERSUS SOLUTIONS : THE STRUCTURE OF PROPERTARIAN ARGUMENTS I gue

    ON INSPIRATIONS VERSUS SOLUTIONS : THE STRUCTURE OF PROPERTARIAN ARGUMENTS

    I guess, one of the things that I am struck by, is the inspirational content – what I view as religious content – in philosophy.

    Now, I understand why it’s there.

    Essayists. Philosophers. Orators. We all make appeals to restructure the current order of things. The causal relations in our minds. The priority of those relations. The priority of our goals. The institutions formal and informal. The laws that enforce informal institutions.

    All oration, all philosophy, is political. It may be internally political like buddhism, or yoga – which avoid the problem of politics entirely, by providing a means of achieving happiness expressly by ignoring it. It may be overtly political like greek rationalism, economic philosophy, or legal philosophy. But all argumentation is political. Because ‘political’ means “the process of discovery or invention, and consensus upon rules of cooperation for the purpose of concentrating capital on mutually desirable ends.”

    The Argumentation Ethic tells us this. But argumentation is insufficient on its own.

    But, you see, the entire premise of philosophical discourse then, is consent on the use of property.

    And, so, what do we do when consent is impossible because of the irresolvable conflict in preferences and priorities? Such as when the reproductive strategy of one group is in conflict with the reproductive strategy of another?

    Our political systems were developed for homogenous communities. Homogenous agrarian communities. Extended families. Interrelated tribes. Majority rule is a means of obtaining consent on priorities, not on oppositions. At present they are merely the means by which one group attempts to dominate the other groups.

    Conversely, the market is the means by which all of us concentrate capital as we wish toward our desired, but often conflicting ends. We cooperate on means, anonymously and daily, despite our different ends. We help each other achieve our different ends, despite our disagreement upon them.

    The majority rule state cannot solve this problem for us. In fact, it is in polar opposition to the state of world affairs – and in particular the mobile work force and the heterogeneous society where both genders, all classes and multiple tribes, cultures and ethics may share the same system of property rights and the same system of laws and credit.

    The absurdity is evident in the assumption that if we have a bigger economy, why it must be put to narrower ends? Why should the majority be allowed to concentrate what has become extraordinary plenty of capital? IN fact, it certainly looks like the bigger a state is the more credit it can generate, but the less wisely it can make use of it without creating conflict by doing so.

    Why is homogeneity of capital concentration a ‘good’? Why, if this means the assault on one groups preferences by another?

    While we libertarians almost universally deplore the concentration of capital in the state, and we see the state only as a means of providing a resolution of conflict, not the provision of services, that does not mean that market is capable of resolving all conflicts. Of concentrating capital behind all desirable ends.

    Yet, there are reasons that we must have the ability to develop contracts together using an institution similar to the state – government. This reason is not because of some illusory ‘market failure’ (which by definition can’t exist). It exists because the market and competition are ‘sanctioned cheating’. Despite the fact that competition within a group is universally considered ‘cheating’ by human beings, we have trained one another to sanction this one form of ‘cheating’ because it results in higher productivity and lower prices at the cost of having to constantly innovate in response to others who care constantly innovating.

    All humans detest involuntary transfer and will punish it. And unfortunately, the male and female, upper and lower classes require property definitions that are in conflict, if not for preferences, but only for reproductive reasons.

    And what government must do, is create contracts where ‘cheating’ – involuntary transfer whether direct or indirect – is not tolerated.

    Or conversely, it is to sanction, and even enforce, other forms of cheating in order to create redistribution. And people hate this. They hate it twice as much as they like the goods that come from our ability to cooperate in government where cheating is not a sanctioned or preferential good. Unfortunately, for progressives (females) who see the universe as a common, and males, who see the universe as private property, (at least when it isn’t to their advantage with females or power to consider it otherwise), no matter what the other side does, it ‘feels’ like cheating.

    SO our problem is not to determine an optimum means of concentrating capital as the majority prefers – which is always at the conquest of another group. It is to concentrate capital behind the preferences of all, while cooperating upon means if not ends. This is what the market does. It is why the market gives us peace prosperity and cooperation.

    I can’t, in propertarianism, advocate a particular preference. The purpose of propertarian reasoning is not to advocate a preference, its to facilitate the pursuit of preferences in order to avoid conflict. And this is the current problem of politics. The current problem of politics is providing for permanently and irreconcilable heterogeneous goals and preferences. That would allow groups to cooperate on means, if not ends, for the purpose of pursuing different and conflicting ends.

    So, this is why my arguments are not inspirationally structured like Continental, or religious, or even classical liberal, or progressive arguments. It’s because I’m not advocating for one-ness. I’m advocating for diversity of the concentration of capital in pursuit of the preferences of all.

    And Im doing that by offering institutions that would assist us in doing so, rather than a ‘way of thinking’ that I hope will become the dominant means of inspiring people to voluntarily accumulate their effort toward a shared objective.

    That’s ideology. What I do is institutional.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-27 16:41:00 UTC

  • BANKING: CREDIT UNIONS ARE GOOD. BIG BANKS ARE BAD. AND WHY Banking is a means o

    BANKING: CREDIT UNIONS ARE GOOD. BIG BANKS ARE BAD. AND WHY

    Banking is a means of allowing people with disparate knowledge, means, goals to cooperate by concentrating their capital and cross-insuring each other. Banking is a GOOD BUSINESS for society and society as we understand it is not possible without banking.

    Now, when you get service charges, this is just charging you for the costs you put onto the bank. THis is a GOOD IDEA because otherwise people who do a lot of bank work force people who don’t to pay all oft of costs. That would be an involuntary transfer. That’s bad. It’s stealing.

    The problem occurrs when the state starts putting funny money into banks and creating a ‘hazard’ by doing so. They allow banks to make risky loans. and those risky loans increase consumption at the expense of creating a fragile economy.

    The argument that Keynesians make, is that we get more good out of that fragility than we do bad.

    And that’s not a truth. It’s a matter of preference.

    And the people who would prefer not to have booms and busts that are caused by the government, because they take risks because the cost of money is cheap, and the pricing information that they see around them is distorted. Then the rug is pulled under them by the fragility and it all comes crashing down into a recession and depression.

    Credit unions are good things.

    Use them.

    Big banks are for conducting war. That’s why we have them. thats where they came from. that’s what they do.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 07:56:00 UTC

  • BANKING: DEATH BY COMPUTER : RESURRECTION BY CREDIT UNION My family has been in

    BANKING: DEATH BY COMPUTER : RESURRECTION BY CREDIT UNION

    My family has been in banking for generations. It is a very good business. For most of history, you could talk to a banker. A banker was like your accountant, lawyer, or priest: he gave you advice and counsel and worked with you. They were reasonably educated people with decision making authority.

    The advent of computers made it possible, and competitive to centralize banking, turn to statistics that measured and compared statistics about what you did WITHOUT the advice and help of a banker to learn about money, interest and credit, instead of PROVIDING you with the advice about what to do with money, interest and credit.

    This created a lot of asymmetry of knowledge in the population. People got more ignorant and became statistical objects rather than members of a portfolio of relationships that banks built.

    Starting in the 1970’s when the USA instituted the petro-dollar, or using the US Dollar as the world currency for buying oil, the USA has been issuing cheap credit both home and abroad.

    The impact on banking has been that the government is essentially insuring increasingly ignorant consumers with cheap credit, who increasingly get unconsciously into debt, and increasingly into default, rather than building knowledgeable consumers of credit and producers of interest.

    community banks, and in particular, credit unions, are more than just a ‘nice thing’ for consumers. They can rebuild our society by removing the asymmetry of knowledge that lets banks prey upon ignorant consumers and sell them into predatory debt.

    Community credit unions are how all consumer credit should be done, even if we have to legislate it. Because big banks are just part of the government. They are part of the century long credit scam that has made us all slaves.

    Why are we slaves? How do you become a US Citizen? You get a driver’s license, a credit card, a loan for a car, and a loan for a house, and now you are controlled by credit, not by moral code, not by cultural norms, not by laws, but by credit. You are a credit slave. And that might not be bad if it works. But for an absurd number of people, they fail at the card, or the car or the house and become indentured servants. SO it is not so much that those of us who succeed do. It’s that we are advocates for a system that creates a permanent and dependent underclass.

    Credit is citizenship and the lack of it makes you a serf.

    And only community banks can provide advice and counsel. We force people into schools so that they don’t become ‘scoundrels’ that we must support through charity. Why is it that we use credit to create a lower class of people ostracized from the system purely out of ignorance? Why is it that we put almost ten percent of our people into prison for minor drug charges, and therefore guarantee they are dependent upon the rest of us to support them, and if not, lead lives of dependence and crime?

    Now I understand that very few ordinary people can tell whether what I’m explaining here is more or less true than any other explanation that they’ve heard. And all I can do is hope that it makes more sense than some conspiracy theory does.

    We may have the best of intentions. But the road to poverty is very often paved with the best intentions. And the road to social fragmentation has been, with certainty, paved with good, but foolish intentions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-21 12:29:00 UTC

  • LIBERTARIANISM IN THE MARTIAL CLASS My family has been in the martial class for

    LIBERTARIANISM IN THE MARTIAL CLASS

    My family has been in the martial class for all of recorded history. There is little if any mention of the family without military rank.

    The source of liberty – the Aristocratic Egalitarian Ethic – is a martial ethic. A martial ethic of meritocratic enfranchisement that expanded into the middle class during manorialism, and the middle class into aristocratic status during the late middle ages, and into the enlightenment.

    The source of liberty, and therefore the source of private property, is violence.

    We pay for the institution of private property by forgoing opportunities for violence.

    We institute a monopolistic definition of property as private property by the application of violence.

    That is our monopoly. That is what any portfolio of property rights is: a monopoly on the definition of property within a geography. We refer to this set of property rights as ‘culture’ and we may institutionalize that portfolio as ‘law’ and administer it by ‘government’. But it is a monopoly on property rights and obligations.

    The source of private property is violence. It must be violence. It may be, for limited time periods, bribery: that we purchase private property rights from those who prefer communal property portfolios, by granting them access to the market where they can obtain what they could not otherwise, in exchange for profiting ourselves from that market by their participation.

    But any argument that private property was the not product of the application of violence, or any argument that suggests that we can maintain private property without the application of violence is either an error, an act of ignorance, an act of foolishness, or an elaborate deception.

    Private property is the desire of the minority. It was, and is, instituted and maintained by the application of violence, just as any monopolistic definition of property rights is instituted.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-21 11:26:00 UTC

  • IGNORANCE AND REPRODUCTION IN POLITICAL AGREEMENTS ON IGNORANCE The problems wit

    IGNORANCE AND REPRODUCTION IN POLITICAL AGREEMENTS

    ON IGNORANCE

    The problems with erasing ignorance are, in stages, a) Having knowledge of your own ignorance on a topic b) Having sufficient knowledge to discount what passes for popular knowledge of the topic. c) Having sufficient knowledge of a topic that you do not rely upon the opinions of others for your own. d) Sufficient knowledge of a topic to know the current limit of understanding in the topic. e) sufficient knowledge of a topic to extend the limit of understanding

    In other words, ignorance is a spectrum, and at each point in that spectrum listed above,

    The only reason to claim knowledge is to act or to coerce. To act risks only your time, effort and money. To coerce by argument is to take from others time, effort and money from that which they plan to achieve to something you prefer to achieve.

    We can never say we have certain knowledge. Only that we have erased all possible ignorance, and have embarked upon the process of invention.

    We can only say we have the knowledge required to take action, and the self awareness of our ignorance to know the current stage of the uselessness of our opinons.

    Since politics is not a process of debate for agreement on true statements but at best, agreement on consensual statements, or at worst, under majority rule, agreement by one group to oppress another — and since political debates must be made in a state of necessary ignorance about the nature and future of man, if not the resources available at the moment, they are, in fact, arguments made in ignorance.

    And since political decisions are made in ignorance, they must be made according to some method or other.

    Demonstrably, human beings make political decisions on moral instinct. And the interesting thing, is that by and large, moral instinct reflects their reproductive strategy.

    And with this understanding we see how simple all of this nonsense we call politics really is. A complex device for conducting evolution of ourselves and our allies by the proxy violence of government rather than the direct violence of the human body.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-21 10:13:00 UTC

  • ON WRITING SKILLS About two years ago I began to realize that my writing, and po

    ON WRITING SKILLS

    About two years ago I began to realize that my writing, and possibly my mind, had been dramatically impacted by the time I had spent with software.

    SOFTWARE AND THE MIND

    When you write software, the computer has perfect memory. You don’t have to drag the computer along with you using constant reminders. 🙂 You don’t have to draw connections, if they’re logically dependent. And you don’t have to appeal to sentiments – the machine doesn’t have any. 🙂

    So if you write human language the way that you write software it is absurdly dense. It must be studied not read. And any reader who does not have mastery of the subject will certainly not grasp your argument – since most of it is not directly stated but implied.

    This violates Spinoza’s advice. Advice that I took to heart a long time ago in my spoken words: “…endeavor to speak in a manner comprehensible to the common people.”

    Writing software is writing logic. Writing database software is writing logic that corresponds to the real world. Both of these forms of logic are very precise, intolerant and much of their content is IMPLIED. It is exceptional training for the mind. And it is exceptional training for life: programming teaches you that the human mind is fragile, imprecise and prone to error. It teaches you that consensus and opinion are rarely right. It teaches you about the fragility of complex systems. It teaches you about human hubris. The singular difference between progressives and conservatives is this judgement about the nature of man. And programming confirms the conservative vision, while literature tends to confirm the progressive illusion.

    Which is why programmers wax libertarian and conservative.

    For about three months I was very troubled by this realization. What I am trying to write about – Propertarian Philosophy as the solution to the problem of politics, needs to be reduced to something that is accessible in order to be successful. It mustn’t be accessible to the common man. But it must be accessible to someone with a university education in a technically difficult discipline.

    I am daily aware that Hoppe, from whom I literally learned almost everything of value about politics, is all but ignored despite the fact that he has solved one of the most important parts of the 2500 year old problem of political institutions. But because he based it on Rothbard and argumentation ethics, he is descriptively correct, but not causally correct. Or perhaps, he does not address causation. Which is why it’s complicated to convey to others. Hoppe is inaccessible. All language is an allegory to experience. And all communication must be delivered as an allegory to experience. Argumentation is an improvement on Rothbard’s natural law. But it is still incomplete without a cause.

    And I wanted to be accessible. What good is it if I repair Praxeology, Rothbardian property, and extend Hoppe’s institutional solutions to address heterogenous populations, if it’s incomprehensible to other humans?

    So I set out trying to write sentimentally again. To try to move from proofs and programs to narratives. And I feel that of late I’m beginning to get there.

    The problem now, is that I’ve sketched out the entire book and argument and I must now go back and rewrite fifty pages of definitions, finish writing the conservative (Aristocratic Egalitarianism) history of philosophy, and flesh out the institutional solution that I’ve worked on.

    So I have so much work to do. I never feel I am intellectually capable of taking on task as comprehensive as this. I never feel I have the time for it. And I feel that I will fail – if only because I started late in life on this problem, and it has taken me over a decade of hard work to get to this point. And I see years worth of work ahead of me.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-20 10:54:00 UTC

  • ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIANISM : WESTERN PHILOSOPHY : INCOMPATIBILITY What is wrong

    ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIANISM : WESTERN PHILOSOPHY : INCOMPATIBILITY

    What is wrong with conservatives who adhere to the Aristocratic Egalitarian ethic? It’s premise is that you earn your rights, you are not born with them.

    You can’t enfranchise everyone by birth, as if they were possessed of original sin.

    You can’t enfranchise everyone into aristocracy if aristocratic values are learned.

    You can’t enfranchise everyone into into an aristocratic model of society if they have no desire, and not biological incentive to be aristocratic.

    The aristocratic egalitarian model is a strategy for a superior minority to defend itself from the communalism of an inferior minority. It is the only successful model for controlling alphas, while creating alphas.

    Universalism of the church and of progressive whites, is incompatible with aristocratic egalitarianism.

    And liberty is *only* compatible with aristocratic egalitarianism.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-19 13:34:00 UTC

  • THE ILLUSION OF PRODUCTION One psychological trick of moral deception that left

    THE ILLUSION OF PRODUCTION

    One psychological trick of moral deception that left leaning economists rely upon is the implication that the term “production” is merely a process of execution.

    This process of execution is contrasted with the process of “research and development”, with the implication that there is no risk to production and high risk in research and development.

    Furthermore, that the economy consist entirely of processes of production, and that research and development is largely unnecessary and a luxury of those few who find their entertainment in it.

    As such, a process of production is a form of exploitation of labor, and the process of research and development is an unnecessary device for the purpose of signaling status.

    But this is all an illusion. An error at best, and a deception at worst.

    All production in a competitive market at all times under all circumstances is an act of “research and development” at high risk.

    Two private sector factors reduce that risk: superior knowledge of consumer wants, and superior knowledge of how to service them, more cheaply than someone else.

    Two factors further reduce that risk: grant of privilege by the state that conveys a limited monopoly. And access to credit markets at lower rates.

    The human bias in favor of the illusion of competence pervades the left and is its source of confidence. This bias is further reinforced by the false consensus bias, which confirms their illusion of competence.

    Their participation in a discipline in which they hold the unique academic privilege of not being held accountable for their errors further reinforces both the false consensus and illusion if competence biases.

    All economic action is risk taking.

    The state grants privileges in the form of limited monopoly powers to certain industries in order to increase employment and taxes. It creates expansive credit to empower both industry and consumer to take risks.

    If production were execution rather than risk taking, then credit and privilege would not be necessary.

    But production is an illusion. The market consists entirely of research and development.

    And the absurdly high turnover in organizations is but one proof of it.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-18 15:27:00 UTC