Source: Facebook

Hoppe starts with the assumption of the rationality of cooperation. He achieves this by four arguments:

1) Isolation: Crusoe’s Island, rather than competing populations.

2) Scarcity of Goods (rather than scarcity of cooperation)

3) Argumentation and Non Contradiction (rather than incentives)

4) the rationality of cooperation or avoidance, vs the rationality of predation, parasitism, boycott, or cooperation.

However, this isn’t ‘true’ in any sense of the word. It’s half true. Like most cosmopolitanisms it is a half truth relying upon suggestion for completion of the imaginary construct. Its appealing to your altrusim. To your ‘libertarian instincts” rather than your reason. What is unseen (unstated) is more important than what is stated.

Instead, I start with:

1) Competition: The Pontic steppe populated with competing groups across the european plain, and the difficulty in constructing property under those conditions.

2) Cooperation: ensuring cooperation is rational: why would I not just kill you and take your stuff? Because this is the starting point of negotiations.

3) The Scarcity of Cooperation: the only substantial scarcity is cooperation. It is cooperation that makes goods and services not scarce.

4) The Scarcity of Time: Cooperation reduces the time cost of goods, so that we make everything cheaper.

5) The incremental suppression of parasitism. To maintain incentives to cooperate under increasingly complex cooperation we must incrementally suppress every innovation in parasitism.

6) The expansion of suppression (colonization) of less parasitic cultures.

This is the difference between Hoppe’s rational justification, and my scientific explanation.

Curt Doolittle