Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • **CONSERVATISM IS NOT A LONGING FOR THE PAST – IT’S A CAPITALIZATION STRATEGY.**

    **CONSERVATISM IS NOT A LONGING FOR THE PAST – IT’S A CAPITALIZATION STRATEGY.**

    April 19th, 2010

    Being a conservative simply means taking a gradual approach to social change and particularly with respect to the financial, family and military traditions that affect status and political power, which they are skeptical of. Conservatism means being skeptical that our visions of the future will come true, and looking at the world as what people ACTUALLY DO not what we WISH they would do. In that sense, conservatism is historically scientific even if linguistically archaic. Conversely, while liberalism is linguistically modern, it is utopian, idealistic, contra-observation, contra-history, and therefore anything but scientific. The differences between these two philosophies are vast and numerous, but the one that is most important, is the difference between the reliance abstractions from experience in conservatism, and the reliance on abstracting experiences in liberalism. This may seem a complex idea, but liberals try to extrapolate the daily experience into the extended order of human cooperation. THis is called ‘induction’. Conservatives synthesize the actual experience of aggregate human activity from history. This is called ‘deduction’. Induction is a process that we are not sure, despite the vast effort of philosophers, exists. In other words liberalism if faulty on scientific grounds. It is a religion.

    This language problem has always been an issue for conservatives. Liberal dictums may sound scientifically sound if one induces from experience. Conservative (dictums) are sensible when one deduces from abstractions of history. And everyone must use these shortcuts, because too few of us possess the knowledge to make rational judgements and therefore must rely upon basic principles when making decisions. In fact, rational thought is applied to the vast minority of choices. Most decisions are made by habit. The rest according to shortcuts.

    For the vast majority of people from either conservative or liberal, neither induction or deduction is a rational process of choice, but instead, a process of identifying analogistic sentiments: it’s the act of pattern recognition rather than reason. Pareto called this process of pattern recognition “residues and derivations”, others called them “Metaphysical Judgements” or “Sentiments”. Contemporary thinkers and public intellectuals call them “beliefs” or “biases”, or “science or religion”. And our language incorporates these different sentiments. Our arguments do as well. Our narratives, myths, popular fiction, entertainment, status aspirations do. But so do your political rhetoric, which, because reason would be a technique unavailable to the masses, rely entirely on a complex web of constantly warring sentiments wherein the citizenry seeks confirmation bias, rather than a simple argument consisting of reason, where the citizenry seeks both consensus and falsification of their biases. In other words, where people are skeptical – conservative and rational.

    Utopianism is a technology that people use during periods of prosperity. Because we have been artificially prosperous due to the discovery and exploitation of a continent, we as a nation are notorious for predicting an optimistic future that cannot or has not occurred. The public dialog over the causes of our prosperity is often inaccurate and self-congratualtory rather than factual. We have transformed our culture of evangelical christianity into one of evangelical democratic secular humanism.

    Conservatives are skeptics. They may speak in antiquated language, because antiquity is their source of their language. They may fail to articulate their position effectively in contemporary terms because of that language, but regardless of the source of their language, the content of their language is strategic, intelligible and rational. And it is not just a language, but a methodology that represents their strategy for social order. They ACT conservatively, think conservatively, and treat the world conservatively.

    This conservative strategy and conservative activities are why conservatives are, in general, more prosperous – and frankly, happy. And the sacrifices that they make in order to be prosperous are material to them. They remember them. And therefore they resent those sacrifices being ’spent’ by others who do not make the same sacrifices.

    Monetarists and capitalists are not conservatives. They may hide under conservatism. But they are not conservatives. The conservative class is a military, middle and craftsman class and it always has been and always will be. It is the ‘residue’ of the european fraternal order of soldiers at the bottom, and at the top, it’s a ‘residue’ of the middle class movement that revised and adopted civic republicanism during the enlightenment as a way of transferring power from the kings and church to the middle class. it is an alliance of the military and middle class.

    Liberalism (socialism, communism) is a ‘residue’ of a union of the priestly cast and the peasantry. Academia is simply an outgrowth of the church. The peasantry has always allied with the church, and the church has always had power because of it’s support by the peasantry.

    And that said, we do not have a separation of church and state. Our state religion is now democratic secular humanism. We are now a state-run-religion using the myth of division of church and state to oppress (or reform) religions so that we can have a state sponsored church.

    That’s it. That’s the articulated conservative position.

    The republican party collects conservative coalitions. The republican party is not a conservative party. conservatives join the republicans because they have no choice. They see the party as corrupt.

    People are complex and only join parties because of limited choice mandated by our ‘winner takes all’ form of government, which fosters class warfare.

    In fact, all political decisions exist on a spectrum or bell curve. There are a myriad of political decisions to be made. There are a myriad of people with different abilities to understand each political opinion. Each person is interested in a myriad of decisions. Parties are collections of people with opinions. Very skilled people tend to be highly unsatisfied with party choices. Very unskilled people tend to simply support their party of nearest interest. Parties therefore pick platforms that make enough people happy that they can get into power.

    Arguing that conservatives want to keep things asa they are, is a silly argument. The objection is simply illogical. The question instead, is whether liberals propose a solution that conservatives can live with, and wether conservatives can propose a solution that liberals can live with.

    The difference between social classes are differences in Time Preferences (between “consume” or “capitalize”, or gratification now versus gratification later). Longer (lower) time preferences are only possible if you have the ability to comprehend long term time preferences. This is another reason why social classes are organized by intelligence, and why a market economy tends to organize us into economic classes according to our application of intelligence to the satisfaction of OTHER PEOPLES WANTS, instead of our own. Time preference affects not only a dimension covering an individual’s perception of gratification. It’s a second dimension that describes whether his gratification now or later is served by providing solutions to himself or to others. This is the moral lesson of Adam Smith – that capitalism creates a virtuous cycle.

    If we had listened to the liberals in the last century we would have ended up like either Russia or China. If we had listened to conservatives we would not have had our progressive social changes, but we would not have corrupted our financial system using Kenesnian inflation. It’s the competition of ideas that gives us the choice as a body politic.

    It is the combination of LIBERAL OBJECTIVES and CONSERVATIVE METHODS that provides the means of achieving shared goals.

    Lets say that again. Liberal objectives are moral desires. Conservatives methods are moral means. It requires both these tools to achieve moral ends. The problem is, conservative methods take time because they require the learning and adaptation of people to calculative processes. These processes have nothing to do with religion. Christianity is largely a religion of the poor. Protestantism is perhaps the most important religion for generating wealth in the west as it is a class religion. Secular humanism is a feminine religion just as Aryanism (expansionist civic republican tradition of the initiatic fraternal order of city-defending soldiers) is a masculine religion. We do not need all to believe one thing, share one goal, work according to the same rules. If we did, we’d break the principle of the division of knowledge, labor, time, and intelligence.

    WHat people really want when they seek universal agreement is to concentrate labor, knowledge, time and intelligence on their goals at the expense of other people’s goals. Since people are unequal in their ability, in their class goals, in their cultural goals, in their age and experience, in their knowledge and in their intelligence, then we must divide up our actions into bits and pieces which we cooperate with each other to achieve.

    Democracy as we have implemented it is a winner-take-all political order. It foments class warfare. It does not foment class cooperation.

    We need a government that is a return to the division of labor and division of classes and time preferences.

    Democracy is a failure as we have implemented it. Because we confuse the value of the transformation of power inherent in democracy with the universal aspiration of classes, cultures, ages, generations, and abilities.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:23:00 UTC

  • **A FALSE DICHOTOMY OF WEALTH FLIGHT: THERE IS A THIRD CHOICE** From April 28th,

    **A FALSE DICHOTOMY OF WEALTH FLIGHT: THERE IS A THIRD CHOICE**

    From April 28th, 2009

    The rhetoric on the flight of the wealthy is pretty thick right now. But I thought that I would correct the false dichotomy of submission to taxes or flight from taxes.

    When the minority of people pay all the taxes, they form a bloc of similar interests. If those interests are similar enough, those interests become their primary interest. And it becomes more attractive for the wealthy to pay a minority of the people to side with them in producing social change, even revolutionary social change.

    Revolutions are not created by the high crimes of a few. They are created by the accumulation of rudeness, administrative burden, legal propagation, and petty abuses of power by the bureaucrats who annoy the citizenry to the point of intolerance. I am not afraid of a proletariat revolution, despite my belief that we will see riots at some time in the near future. I am not afraid of a revolution by the wealthy. I am afraid of a minority proletariat revolution funded by the wealthy. And I am rapidly approaching the point at which I am both an advocate and willing to fund it. The state is attempting to pit us against each other when, in fact, it is the people who should simply be done with the abuses of the state. Fixing the centralization of wealth is not a problem. Providing social services is not a problem. Stopping the state from pitting us against each other is the issue we must face. I don’t know any wealthy person who objects to the payment of taxes. We object to the use of the tax revenue to pit different social classes against each other, rather than to help us work together toward shared goals and objectives. In this conflict, the state is actually the problem.

    We must understand that there is a difference between personal wealth and political wealth. Personal wealth means that one has made enough money that he can lend it to the following generation, who will then allow him leisure in exchange for the use of his money now, so that they can live a better life more immediately, and higher cost over time. Political wealth is the possession of money at such volume that it is possible to put it to political use, and therefore subvert the market process that requires that we serve our fellow man’s needs in order to gain reward. Typically, and this is just an oversimplified way of looking at it, personal wealth requires between 10 and 50, but no more than 100 times the median annual income. Political wealth requires at least 100, but more effectively around 1000 times the median annual income.

    If we simply used a tax that was HIGHLY progressive and on the balance sheet, rather than on annual income, so that the middle class of merchants and small business people could accumulate wealth and gain financial independence in exchange for their extreme personal financial risk, and where the tax rate started where the net worth was 10 times the median income, then increased rapidly at 100 times median income, there would be no use for the Republican Party. The party exists entirely on that one pillar. Without that divide we could form a middle ground, work toward common goals, and marginalize both the left and right extremes.

    If we required bankers to hold 20% of all originated loans, and required that they be permanently tied to the lending “individual,” we would fix the corrupting behavior of lending that built up since deregulation. If we further stopped providing general liquidity and instead offered only targeted liquidity from the Fed, then we would put more of a halt on bubbles.

    If we kept the interest on state credit money with the state, then we would both have a replacement source of revenue and would force the state to think in terms of advancing national competition rather than giving away our competitiveness. We would also be able to see who performed what good for the country and who did what harm.

    The choice for the wealthy is not just between submission to taxes and flight. It’s between submission to taxes, flight, and revolution.

    I’m one of the people who is rapidly beginning to call for “the Third Choice.” Because if we took the money wasted on government in this country and used it for medical and infrastructure improvements, as well as basic research, we would rapidly regain our competitive position in this world and, in doing so, drastically change the position of our working class.

    I am an unrelenting advocate of noblesse oblige: If we are lucky enough to become wealthy, then we must use our wealth to the betterment of our fellow men. But only we can know what that betterment is, because only we have demonstrated by our accumulation of wealth that we know how best to serve our fellow man. Servitude to a state that pits its citizens against each other, exports jobs, makes our state uncompetitive by policy and taxation, and under-educates our people is not service to our fellow man. It is, instead, a crime against them.

    I’m not there yet. But I’m getting close to thinking we need to pull out some rope and learn how to tie knots.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:17:00 UTC

  • **THEME: “REPRESENTATION WITHOUT TAXATION”** May 6th, 2009 I’ve been looking for

    **THEME: “REPRESENTATION WITHOUT TAXATION”**

    May 6th, 2009

    I’ve been looking for a simple theme and I found it today on Kling’s blog:

    “Our last revolution was fueled by taxation without representation — the coming revolution is being fueled by representation without taxation.”

    Followed by a few choice others:

    “As the population size goes to infinity the political significance of any individual goes to zero. In small populations, democracy is a way to make decisions. In a large population, it gives the state the ability to signal it is providing liberty and freedom when in fact it is doing just the opposite.”

    “… they did originally limit the vote to property owners, which takes care of the everybody-votes-themselves-a-share-of-my-stuff problem (an instance of tyranny of the majority). Then we got rid of that restriction (and a lot of worse ones, granted). Now we’re vulnerable to the flaw Tocqueville identified: The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

    “Democracy in all its forms sows the seeds of its own destruction. Regardless of how you attempt to limit it, the majority will always eventually enslave the population, including its own members, by the use of popular vote.”

    “Democracy is just incremental communism.”

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:16:00 UTC

  • **GALBRAITH AND REGULATION: HE’S GOT IT WRONG AGAIN** May 6th, 2009 On Angry Bea

    **GALBRAITH AND REGULATION: HE’S GOT IT WRONG AGAIN**

    May 6th, 2009

    On Angry Bear, there is a posting referring to a statement by Galbraith by the Texas Observer. It’s entitled “James Galbraith remarks“.

    Texas Observer carries commentary that is revealing.

    Editor’s note: These remarks were delivered to a meeting of the Texas Lyceum in Austin on April 3, at a debate between University of Texas professor James Galbraith, an Observer contributing writer, and former Majority Leader Richard Armey, chief instigator of the recent Astroturf “tea party” protests. Armey had begun his remarks by noting that his rule in life was “never trust anyone from Austin or Boston,” and proceeded to declare his allegiance to the “Austrian School” of economics, a libertarian view that regards public intervention in private markets as socialism.

    It is of course a pleasure to be with you today. I was born in Boston, and I am proud of it. And I have lived 24 years in Austin—and I’m proud of that.

    Leader Armey spoke to you of his admiration for Austrian economics. I can’t resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school—including von Hayek and von Haberler—returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, “would not have been possible without the contribution of these men.” They nodded—briefly—until it dawned on them what he meant. They’d all left the country in the 1930s.

    My own economics is American: genus Institutionalist; species: Galbraithian.

    This is a panel on the crisis. Mr. Moderator, you ask what is the root cause? My reply is in three parts. (below the fold)

    First, an idea. The idea that capitalism, for all its considerable virtues, is inherently self-stabilizing, that government and private business are adversaries rather than partners; the idea that freedom without responsibility is a viable business principle; the idea that regulation, in financial matters especially, can be dispensed with. We tried it, and we see the result.

    Second, a person. It would not be right to blame any single person for these events, but if I had to choose one to name it would be a Texan, our own distinguished former Senator Phil Gramm. I’d cite specifically the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act—the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act—in 1999, after which it took less than a decade to reproduce all the pathologies that Glass-Steagall had been enacted to deal with in 1933. I’d also cite the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, slipped into an 11,000-page appropriations bill in December 2000 as Congress was adjourning following Bush v. Gore. This measure deregulated energy futures trading, enabling Enron and legitimating credit-default swaps, and creating a massive vector for the transmission of financial risk throughout the global system. When the Washington Post caught up with me at an airport in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a year ago to ask for a comment on Gramm’s role, I said very quickly that he was “the sorcerer’s apprentice of financial instability and disaster.” They put that on the front page. I do have to give Gramm some credit: When the Post called him up and read that to him, he said, “I deny it.”

    Third, a policy. This was the abandonment of state responsibility for financial regulation: the regulation of mortgage originations, of underwriting, and of securitization. This abandonment was not subtle: The first head of the Office of Thrift Supervision in the George W. Bush administration came to a press conference on one occasion with a stack of copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw. A chainsaw. The message was clear. And it led to the explosion of liars’ loans, neutron loans (which destroy people but leave buildings intact), and toxic waste. That these were terms of art in finance tells you what you need to know.

    This is another case in which I wish economists were better philosophers and philosophers were better economists.

    It was the Austrians who said this quantitative nonsense wouldn’t work. So I don’t understand his arguments against Austrians. Secondly, none of us are against regulation so much as against the idea that regulators possess wisdom. If we simply forced originators to hold 20% of each of their loans (and to separate on the balance sheet public and private investment, and to take losses accordingly), then most of this regulatory problem would go away. Libertarianism is not a vehicle for promoting wild west theft by deception. It’s just that we acknowledge that regulators are an expensive, ignorant, and often political problem because they cannot possess the knowledge required to do the assigned job. Property in itself is regulation. So Austrians are not against regulation. They’re against a system of policing that requires a man to possess knowledge that he cannot have, and against empowering the state.

    We just learned a lot about banking and the fact that collateral isn’t collateral any longer. That reliance on collateral is not a very useful means of risk measurement in a credit-money society. We just learned that a lot of actuarial information isn’t really what we thought it was. We just learned a lot about the mathematics of subsets and how they do not scale. We just learned a lot about the “dynamic stochastic equilibrium model,” in that the world is not equilibrial or efficient, but disequilibrial and innovatively equilibrating, as it consumes new opportunities, not as it efficiently produces desired effects. We learned that none of these devices is a substitute for individual human knowledge.

    There is little difference between “complex financial instruments” and “herbal remedies.” The consumer, and most of the time the manufacturer, think that these things actually work. There were volumes of literature saying that financial instruments would, and much less volume produced by Austrians saying that they not only wouldn’t, but couldn’t. So, this isn’t an issue of fraudulent behavior. Restitution is not possible for complex financial transactions. There is nothing left to repossess. This isn’t an Austrian problem, it’s a Knightian-Keynesian problem. Deregulation isn’t an Austrian problem. Knowledge is an Austrian problem. Property implies knowledge, and value expressed as numbers cannot represent that knowledge equally to different people, only experience tagged by reference numbers can.

    So if you want to say that in the constant political warfare between the socialist-statists and the capitalist-libertarians, each who uses the policy of, and conflict between, the quantitative school (mainstream) and the psychological school (Austrian), and that by virtue of that conflict we created a perfect storm, which allowed deregulation while implementing formulae and financial instruments, then that is true. But it’s true because we did not replace regulation with responsibility by requiring retention of risk when using public-financed credit money. In other words, we violated the principle of property, because property requires knowledge. If you don’t know what it is, then it can’t be property. If it isn’t property, then it’s snake oil. If it’s snake oil, it’s not libertarian, it’s just THEFT AND DECEPTION.

    Each of these systems of thought is an interdependent system. You cannot have it both ways. I suppose it is better that we argue over economic productivity and redistribution than that we argue over religion, or of what’s “just,” so perhaps that’s an advancement in human development. But in terms of regulation, it’s simply ridiculous to create a complex web of financial regulation and law to attempt to compensate for the fact that we want to absolve bankers from holding loans that they originate. In other words, the Austrian view is that the state created the problem and makes it worse with regulation.

    Property is a form of REGULATION. So Austrians CAN’T say that are against regulation. Regulation isn’t the problem. It is the kind of regulation that we do. We have created a catastrophe by not regulating violations of property. That violation is that property requires individual knowledge, or it’s NOT property, because it CAN’T be property. We only NEED property because we need to break the world up into little, perceptible bits that can be used to exchange with each other. If we could perceive everything, we wouldn’t NEED property. We can’t perceive everything, so we DO need property. And to have property you have to perceive it. If you exchange something with someone else, something that you don’t understand, you’re selling magic. Magic isn’t property, it’s deception. It’s deception even if it’s self-deception. It’s self deception because you cannot pass the test of personal knowledge.

    Fundamentally, when all is said and done, and when we solve what we loosely call the problem of induction and produce the next version of capitalism, the Austrians will have been the “most right.” Almost nothing we have done in Macro is of merit, except to prove Austrian insights and to fix Austrian errors (”stickiness”). Even the anarchic research program, which is not something we could ever practically implement, has taught us valuable lessons, and it has taught us how easily replaced are state functions. Just as the Marxian program has taught us valuable lessons. Mostly bad ones. But while we continue to evolve our knowledge of cooperating in larger and larger numbers, we need to keep in mind that there is no end of history. Only the practical policy of the moment. Management of an economy may “thrill the intellectual’s mind,” as Hayek said. Because it gives his fantasy a chance at reality. However it’s a fantasy. It always will be.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:03:00 UTC

  • **DON BOUDREAUX SWINGS AND MISSES THE ENTIRE POINT: SOVEREIGNTY** April 27th, 20

    **DON BOUDREAUX SWINGS AND MISSES THE ENTIRE POINT: SOVEREIGNTY**

    April 27th, 2010

    Over on Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux attacks Arizona’s policy, and in doing so, falls into the abyss of economic tyranny: the justification of economic outcome over freedom and sovereignty.

    By demonizing immigrants, these politicians exploit voters’ misinformation about the economic consequences of the alleged devils.

    My response was:

    Don,

    You’re confusing the priority of people’s perceptions of their economic consequences with the priority of people’s perception of their political and cultural sovereignty, as well as their perception of their associated status. These people [Arizonians] have been wronged. They have been wronged by a loss of sovereignty, and a reduction in cultural dominance, and wronged by an ongoing diminution of their status. And people will act far more passionately to defend their social position than they will to an abstract economic benefit. That was, and is, the entire reason behind nationalism. Or did you forget?

    When the use of economic outcomes becomes the primary criteria that one uses to determine all policy, then the economist makes a fundamental error because he ignores the most important of ‘animal spirits’: status and sovereignty. And then the methods of economics become either a religion, or the error of intellectual myopia, or of intellectual vanity.

    Otherwise, economic policies are the tools of tyranny, and the justification of tyranny.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:02:00 UTC

  • **ANOTHER ROUND ON PAPARAZZI** April 21st, 2010 to Peter Surda April 21, 2010 at

    **ANOTHER ROUND ON PAPARAZZI**

    April 21st, 2010

    to Peter Surda April 21, 2010 at 2:35 am

    However, it is still a person’s asset, regardless of price, because people ACT as if it is an asset, and that asset has material value to individuals, which we can determine by surveying the ACTIONS that people take, businesses take, regarding their reputation

    But this is valid with regard to anything, not only reputation. This does not help define property, it confuses. Any change has a negative effect on someone. Does that mean that any action whatsoever is a property right violation?

    This is one of the reasons why I reject the notion of immaterial trespass. Instead, I humbly propose that only those immaterial negative effects that are defined in contracts are to be prosecuted (i.e. contract violations).

    Furthermore…

    Property is a claim on an opportunity to make use of any object, material or abstract, upon which men can act.

    It is not necessary to own immaterial goods to make use of them, therefore from the existence of an opportunity you cannot imply ownership. As I said before, with immaterial goods, anything causally related is “making use of”.

    We can create representations of abstracts, can’t we? We’ve created plenty of them. I can stake a claim on land. I can form an abstract entity called a joint stock corporation, and then sell shares. I can marry someone and get a marriage certificate. I can get a receipt for a deposit. I can sign a contract. I can buy an option. I can wager a bet.

    Why can’t I stake a claim on a formulae? Or a brand or trademark? Or a design or patent? Simply because they require uniqueness against a broader pool of people, because are treated as first-come first-serve exclusivity, rather than an auction model, and because the market cannot expand to provide better and more accurate service than does the state.

    These registries try to prevent copying and bypassing investment (theft) rather than parallel innovation, which is in the market interest.

    Under the Hoppian property scheme land registries are maintained and protected by insurance companies and private firms instead of the state. But to limit the scope of property is to limit the competitive ability of groups to compete against other groups. The problem is that the government owns the registry and terms by which abstracts are registered, while denying the purpose for which we enact the registry: to encourage capital investment so that goods and services can be rapidly brought to market at lower risk rather than through direct subsidy. But in turn these devices can be used to prevent products and services from entering the market, and in particular, products and services that do not require capitalization, and that they too often endure long enough to create artificial monopolies. Book protections that persist beyond one generation of offspring of the author.

    Banks regulate their own ‘market’ of loans. Each stock market has regulations. Why can’t we have markets for other claims? Why can’t we auction off uses of a design, rather than simply deny competitors to the market. it’s the state monopoly that’s the problem.

    Material trespass and immaterial trespass are simply conventions driven by the ease of registry. In a man’s mind he can know his physical property, and know that any other object is not his physical property. If we could catalog ideas just as easily, would we not treat them as such? We do. We create ‘pointers’ to externally reference memories. They’re real world representations of abstractions.

    Is the purpose of the libertarian program to create a platform for cooperation and trade, to minimize the potential for government corruption, interference, theft, bureaucracy, waste, violence, class warfare, and exploitation using the evidence of how men actually act? Or is to create another silly religion that is contrary to the behavior of human beings, or is it just another absurd metaphysics like Marxism?

    A libertarian society must be one by consent – or we need to abandon the principle of non violence and implement it by force. And if it’s to be a society of consent, then it must reflect human behavior in order to gain consent. Human behavior, and the evolution of our knowledge, dictates that we leave the system for definition of property and the registry thereof open to innovation. Not closed, and limited to material constructs.

    The general body of arguments on this topic are reductio and illusory because of it. The real issue at hand is that in the division of labor, specialized knowledge is required to in order to innovate, and innovation in all but the black swan areas requires capital concentration, and markets are best served by their own division of labor in the act of policing fraud and theft, or even of registrations of claims against property. Government is not an innovative organ, and it is a corrupt and slow moving one.

    The issue instead, is to adopt a Hoppian division of labor and competition rather than a Rothbardian Luddite program, or a government-run monopoly program that by it’s very nature is expressly counter to the innovation, division of labor and specialization of knowledge needed to keep pace with our innovations, almost all of which, are currently ABSTRACTIONS. In this EXPANDING WORLD, the Hoppian model of privatization and risk management using insurance schemes rather than the monopoly of government is a superior answer than that of the Rothbardian Luddite model, which artificially Harrison-Bergeron’s” the civilization – to a man.

    If we can protect several property so that it can be invested in. We can protect abstract property so that it can be invested in. The institutional problem is registration and regulation. Not Rothbardian abstinence. And not to get a population to adhere to an absurd metaphysics. But to create institutions wherein real human beings can interact using real human innovations, almost all of which are abstractions, and most of which are now beyond individual comprehension. ( Property requires memory. Institutions are a form of social memory. Institutions educate indirectly. Memory becomes behavior. Behavior becomes normative.) Our problem is institutions, not beliefs. Actions not words.

    And any libertarian, and anarchic program that would simply force people to prefer to resort to violence to resolve differences, or which would impoverish the greater body of people by making them less competitive against other groups (which Rothbardian property would do) is simply to exchange the prosperity of the market for abstract registry of opportunities for the poverty of the bazaar society. It is regression. It is to limit man to the industrial age. It’s a Luddite philosophy.

    The anarchic research program’s undermining of the historic legitimacy of the state is separate from the use of non-state (insurance) institutions to maintain both real and abstract property.

    Focus on the right problem. Private, competitive, market institutions that divide knowledge and labor and provide service over government monopoly institutions that provide corruption, theft and incompetence.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:01:00 UTC

  • **WHAT PROBLEMS SHOULD AUSTRIANS SOLVE. DIFFERENT ONES APPARENTLY.** April 20th,

    **WHAT PROBLEMS SHOULD AUSTRIANS SOLVE. DIFFERENT ONES APPARENTLY.**

    April 20th, 2010

    Walter block sent out a survey to the Mises blog in support of some research he has been doing. In it, he asks, what problems should Austrians solve? I read the list, and, thought that almost none of the categories of interest were actually problems that needed solving.

    The problems that economists need to solve are not those which derive from the antiquated process of pooling, or aggregating quantities into categories. We know that aggregation of categories a failure as a strategy. We know that we must apply statistical methods across periods of differing utility and differing sentiments in order to find correlations from which we can deduce theories of causation. It is a loose set of tools for a complex world.

    The problem is to define institutions that would allow us to posses knowledge of human activities so that we can measure distortions of policy. The problem is institutions and data. It is not how to further plumb the depths of error – to divine nonsense from the nonsensical.

    The problem is our institutions.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:00:00 UTC

  • **IEA BLOG: UK LIB DEM’S AND ‘TEN YEARS OF SUBSTANTIAL UNEMPLOYMENT’** April 20t

    **IEA BLOG: UK LIB DEM’S AND ‘TEN YEARS OF SUBSTANTIAL UNEMPLOYMENT’**

    April 20th, 2010

    I love reading the UK press, because by and large, the quality of discourse is far beyond that of what occurs in the US. I posted on the IEA Blog, this response to the statement that, coarsely written and paraphrased here as ” Yes the Lib Dem’s may achieve power, but anything is better than ten years of substantial unemployment.” I’m a little cautious about sounding like a critic when I actually think that the IEA produces great thought. But it is far less work to criticize a good idea, than it is to refute an ocean of fantasy and ignorance. Hence I apologize if I come off a critic rather than an advocate.

    Unemployment results from the government’s confusion between consumption and production in that they assume that consumption is equal to production. Their policy of general liquidity that diverted capital from production to consumption and created both recursive asset inflation, and a reduction in competitiveness. This is the broken joint in Keynesian logic. It assumes that increasing liquidity can be put to increases in production. Production means that an activity increases output while decreasing man hours, and costs. The problem for any state is to put captial, not behind consumption, but behind increases in production that cannot be achieved by the private sector.

    … This concentration of capital will create new jobs, and ongoing competitiveness, from which redistributive capital can be siphoned. Private sector production increases will lead to some unemployment. Uncontrolled breeding and immigration will lead to unemployment, and particularly disadvantage second quintile workers. (A step above the bottom). So the state can divert this process by participating in funding international (export) competitiveness. The state must adopt a policy of investment, not liquidity or redistribution. Because only investment allows redistribution.

    (And the government, which consumes such a vast amount of GDP is simply a redistributive system.)

    A free market is a bounded market, because there are LIMITS to private investment. Since all borrowing is, under fiat money, borrowing from the middle and lower classes, and they (as we have just demonstrated) carry the risk of borrowing, then the reward for that investment should be returned to them. As such the state should borrow to create productivity increases (power, transportation, technical innovation, resource exploitation, and education) and return a portion of the profits to the citizenry as redistribution. Laissez faire both puts the citizenry at risk without reward, concntrates capital in the hands of a state sponsored class, and deprives the citizenry of opportunities.

    That is how to prevent ‘ten years of very substantial unemployment’. The party that accomplishes it is meaningless. THe party that ignores it is meaningless.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:00:00 UTC

  • **THE SENTIMENT OF THE BRITISH AND THEIR PSEUDO INTELLECTUAL HYPOCRISY** April 1

    **THE SENTIMENT OF THE BRITISH AND THEIR PSEUDO INTELLECTUAL HYPOCRISY**

    April 18th, 2010

    I read a number of the UK papers every day online. They are better than US papers for a variety of reasons.1

    US papers in general, formed to create homogeneity in the community. That community-centricity is why they’re going out of business in this post-community era. The web allows communities to have disparate voices (like normal people do) rather rather than having a self-centered referee edit, and dramatically bias their opinions toward the fantasy of democratic secular humanism. UK papers are more like the web: they represent factions.

    Our only ‘faction’ is the financial press. The rest, of the papers are almost universally are left-leaning along with our universities, that by and large, teach the religion of democratic secular humanism, as do our grade schools – a notion notion that has something to do with the fact that our children start to lose competitive ground in education about the time we start teaching them the religion of democratic secular humanism.

    If a religion has such a negative competitive impact can it be useful for any productive reason? Is not the measure of any philosophy the competitive standing of it’s practitioners? Of course, these ‘priests of democratic secular humanism’ attribute the a supposed american exeptionalism to their religion. But american exceptionalism is clearly false.

    Differences between US and european productivity are accounted for by differences in the number of working hours. While this productivity generates a lower cost of living in the united states, and while american government consumes less of the GDP than governments do in europe, and while americans live generally better lives, even if they live RISKIER lives, than do europeans, there is no exceptionalism to the culture that is caused by democratic secular humanism. American exceptionalism, which is almost entirely the product of selling off a continent, the military strength to do it, the system of private property rights that allows us to do it quickly and easily, and the use of those profits from selling off the continent being directed to the maintenance of the system of international money, defense and trade and the demand for our primary product: “dollars”, and the profits made by selling those dollars because of that militarily constructed system of money, trade, and soldiery. In other words, “property”, which is the prerequisite for trade, and the conversion of violent efforts at acquisition to peaceful efforts at production and trade, is created by vast military expenditure. The system is prolonged like any social system, by the promise of violence if it is broken. Unlike other systems, it is a system that increases production and makes the ‘pie bigger’ rather than decreases production by wealth transfer.

    Militarism for the purpose of ENFORCING PROPERTY RIGHTS is part of capitalism’s virtuous cycle of dividing labor, increasing granularity of property rights and types, increasing production and decreasing prices, instead of the use of violence to abuse the system of property rights. Militarism is, and can be, a good thing, depending upon how a culture defines it’s property rights. And the more granular the property rights and the better enforced, the more prosperity that people in a culture can generate by virtue of being ABLE to calculate USES of that property.

    People are not pacifist by nature. Humans are the most successful super predator that has ever occupied the planet. People are pacifist because they are weak.2 They are predatory by nature when they are strong. Only by maintaining violence over this system do we make the system one where participation in the game of the virtuous cycle is the only possible solution to the improvement of one’s life and resources. And membership requires two payments: respecting property and control of, and responsibility for, your breeding.

    So, in today’s Times Online there is another article about the desire of the Taliban to start peace talks with americans. The reason for these talks is that Pakistan is no longer allowing the taliban safe haven, and that they are perfectly willing to wait until the Americans leave to reassert their power over their society. By giving the americans a reason for virtuous exit they buy themselves time to regroup, rebuild their numbers, rebuld the poppy and heroin trade, rebuild tehir finances, and retake social positions in the gangster state of afghanistan.

    America took over the British Empire, it’s trade routes, naval bases, currency position, after the first world war. Americas policy difficulties stem almost ENTIRELY from british and french colonial history – the foolish organization of territory by other than tribal boundaries, in the foolish presumption that humans do not act, and prefer to at, according to tribal preferences.

    If America STOPPED maintaining that system, does anyone live under the illusion that there would not be VAST and VIOLENT attempts at filling the vacuum of power? It would be the greatest commercial land grab in human history. It would be bloody. It would be violent. It would involve massive wars, starvation, trade interruption, an the only choice for those that choose not to participate would be to participate or be doomed to poverty and ignorance.

    As an island nation lacking the resources to support itself, with a culture of feminized men so comfortable in their weakness that they have lost the Civic Republican Tradition of the Fraternal Order Of Soldiers (where the British ‘mates’ cultural concept comes from) how would the UK fare in this new world? It would collapse into either switzerland or return to it’s historical position as a backwater.

    Just as there are plenty of silly americans in daily press, there are an almost unlimited of silly, ignorant, self deluding brits commenting as well. And these comments are important because they express popular sentiment.

    One of the comments left on this article is by a nobody named Peter Codner who aside from being a barrister and apparently confusing analytical psychology for something other than another post-christian cult of absurd metaphysics, states that “The semblance to Vietnam which was an humiliating defeat for the americans is uncanny. the yanks will run away.”

    While I understand that short time preference is a result of social class – meaning that we can educate people to use advanced tools and logic but not if we do not extend their time preference so that they can think beyond their experience, and learn that their experience and ability to comprehend that experience is profoundly limited – I fail to understand how one can live in today’s society and not grasp the problem of extending time preference so that we see all actions and outcomes in both their short, medium and long term contexts.

    Running from an unnecessary battle for political reasons is very different from both running away from your history, and your own failure as a nation, and your responsibility as a nation for the problems you created.

    The Yanks won almost every battle in Vietnam. The loss was political, because of home political tensions not a military or economic defeat. And it still achieved it’s strategic ends. As did subverting the soviets in Afghanistan.

    Democracies lack the stomach for sustaining war. And they do so because of people like you. Of course, such sentiment comes comfortably to Brits, who lost their entire empire trying to stop Germany from taking it from them. Frankly the world would be better off if we had let them. Certainly Americans would be – we would not have to become an empire and live under a government-of-empire, if we did not have to take over the British empire when Britain collapsed, like reed. We would not have to protect a world trade and financial system that only served to inflate our entablements. We would not have to deal with the after effects of poor British (and French) judgement that left behind a post colonial Network of violence and poverty around the world.

    Brits are a silly, petty, pointless people who inhabit little more than an empty client state living off it’s heritage, and propping up it’s ridiculous system by immigrating it’s way into a temporary fictitious prosperity, by fomenting consumption at the expense of it’s heritage and culture, at the expense of producing increases in productivity, where the government consumes 50% of GDP, the military is only slightly less of a Potemkin village than is the laughable Canadian.

    I expect this kind of behavior of the french, who ceased being a world power when the effects of killing off their aristocracy and descending into Bonapartism ( democratically justified totalitarianism ) and are happy today to simply rest on past glory, consume their accumulated historical investment in a single century, and who because of it are simply obstructionists – obstruction is the only political power they have – so it is the political power that they exercise.

    Brits are happily self-congratulatory to live under the US common man’s soldierly umbrella of protection, and his society’s necessary militarism while criticizing him on a daily basis. 3 A “thank you” might be more appropriate than your petty slander. But then again, while no man is a hero to his debtors, a decent man does not slander his debtors. Only an indecent one. False wisdom is the last refuge of the weak whose current technique is to hid behind the cloak of intellectual and moral fraud.

    But then, isn’t that the purpose of all religions?

    In the current ‘intelligence system’ it’s recommended that americans read Al Jazeera, Pravda, China News Daily, BBC News as well as the NYT. All are biased but the important issue is to know how biased our own papers are.

    See Kagan in Power and Weakness, as well as Sorel in Reflections On Violence, as well as Keegan’s History Of Warfare.

    What will happen if the middle-american cultures who supply military talent ever figure out how much contempt that they are held in both by their coastal and international critics?

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:59:00 UTC

  • **IEA THINKS TAXIS ARE NOT A PUBLIC GOOD** April 17th, 2010 Over on the IEA Blog

    **IEA THINKS TAXIS ARE NOT A PUBLIC GOOD**

    April 17th, 2010

    Over on the IEA Blog, Eric Masaba asks the question: Why do black cabs cost more than Concorde?

    I couldn’t point out ALL the holes in this article, because the IEA blog limits the number of characters per comment. I find the argument for the virtue of brevity a ‘cute’ one because affirmations are the most brief of comments, while refutations are the longest.

    The state subsidizes the ‘Black Cabs’ of London.

    Hackney cab drivers inexplicably enjoy a rule stating that no one else can describe a taxi service as a “taxi” in their marketing, and the important restriction that no one else can pick up passengers on the street. These regulations have deep historical foundations, dating back to the days of Dick Turpin. In today’s world, they are anachronistic, anti-competitive and pointless.

    London cab drivers are a pleasure to deal with. They are an intrinsic part of the tourist trade. The Danes pay an entire social class to stay home so that the average clerk in a train station is educated, literate, well mannered, and a pleasure to deal with.

    When there are price comparison sites for insurance, airlines, hotels, holidays and office supplies, where we can buy the same product from a myriad of suppliers at different prices, how is it that there are very strict rules requiring that Hackney drivers receive a minimum wage for every mile driven yet private hire drivers do not?

    Because the market is an unlimited physical space and the streets of London are a limited physical space (and the tube is a monopolized space. And therefore Cabs require a very simple set of regulations in order to maintain quality.

    Why is it good for certain stripes of taxi driver to be able to oblige people in London to pay higher rates than the market would support if such a law was not in place?

    Why is it a good for the state to regulate any kind of competition?

    Why do the same drivers, who expect to be able to choose what clothes they wear (and how much they pay for them) and which airlines and car insurance firms they use, want to deny travellers in London the basic freedom to choose another vehicle service they can hail at the airport or on the street?

    They don’t. You can hire a car from the airport. You just can’t pick someone up on the street.

    If people want to pay for the superior knowledge that the Hackney drivers clearly possess, they will do so. If they do not care, they will find cheaper alternatives until the market has informed the black-cab community what customers really think and what price they are willing to pay.

    They are not paying for the knowledge. The state is using a knowledge criteria to create a hurdle for market entry. Just like they do for just about every kind of specialist.

    Many people are disgusted with the special treatment bankers received, but through the price controls and regulations on taxis in London, transport markets are being distorted to favour one type of vehicle provider.

    Bankers recieved special treatment because the state printed money without regulating it and forced banks either to compete for profits or to go out of business. This process of moral hazard created large banks that are pseudo governmental agencies, that were so responsible for subsidizing the national payroll and cash disribution and management system that if they were not rescued then the crash would have been worse. On the other hand, the state CREATED the moral hazard. But it did not have to. The problem has been that creating the ‘rules’ of the fair game in banking (defining the properties of property and it’s rules of transfer) has become extraordinarily complex because the object of definition has become exceedingly plastic. Derivatives and new financial instruments were a new form of property that many of us decried at the time, but that was unregulated because both the state and the purveyors of these new devices foolishly bought the argument that it was possible to insure that kind of risk, and secondly, because

    So, I have to disagree with the IEA’s position. Travel to NYC, Chicago, LA and ask yourself if the London policy is better or worse for everyone involved. And if we subsidize transportation like subways why cant we subsidize Cabs. If price is a concern, then If you want another choice, call a less expensive cab company on your cell phone. Prices aren’t everything. In fact, low prices and full competition in a market often accomplishes the lowest cost service at the lowest quality that is tolerable by consumers, and bars quality from availability within a geography. (Home Depot and Walmart in the US, and superstores versus butchers, bakers and the like in Europe). I am happy that superstores exist to provide additional choice, but only if there is a replacement ‘tax’ for using them by distancing them.

    From this simple analogy of taxis and tubes versus superstores and specialty stores, we can illustrate that reduced prices and a free market within geographic boundaries produce commodities, and thereby prevent societies from capitalizing long term values of aesthetics, choice, and the ’special’ environments we adore across all of europe in favor of a bland, disposable environment.

    We restrain competition in order to raise prices and therefore concentrate capital and we do it in many ways: political subsidy (money transfers like taxation, redistribution, and outright subsidy) constraining the market by qualification (lawyers, doctors and london cabbies), and constraining the market with monopolies (public transportation like Tubes and Buses).

    We unrestrain the market to reverse the concentration of capital and to reduce prices, and we do it in many ways: political subsidy of

    The natural order of man is to attempt to circumvent the market. The free market is a byproduct of the civic republican tradition’s advocacy of meritocratic equality. It is a rebellious movement against the control of markets and the expropriation of wealth by the state. Markets are a solution to corruption that asks us to create fair competition among equals and to maintain that set of ‘rules’ we call “competition in the market”.

    However, the natural behavior of man is to circumvent that market. The means by which he circumvents it are those tools we consider fair market competition: reducing prices, increasing choices, advertising and marketing. Not all cultures have taken this route. In fact, in history, the free market is an exception that concentrates wealth in hte hands of the monied, productive and creative minority. THis concentration benefits all by decreasing prices for nearly everyone. It limits the power of capitalists as long as there is enough money in circulation to create inexpensive competition.

    But since the culture or state determines the definitions of property (the means of calculating the use of opportunities to act) the rules for any ‘game’ are particular to that game. Rules are not universal to all games. They are plastic. And this comparison of Taxis to Tubes is perhaps one of the best ways to illustrate that these rules are inconsistent.

    But what may not be obvious is the DISTORTION that is created by the myth that rules must be equal for some things and unequal for others. Or, that lowest prices are the ultimate virtue to be sought by economsts and political economists.

    As a libertarian, I care that the choices available to me are not constrained by

    Concentrating capital attracts talent to the private sector where it is skimmed by private individuals, and those who lack talent to the public sector where it is skimmed by bureaucracy. Yet this is what most cultures seek to impose: expropriation by the bureaucracy.

    WE also constrain capitalists, and unconstrain capitalists. Capitalists can temporarily distort a market by applying capital that profits one company or anotther, requiring competitors to rely upon capital or depart. They can do this by simply extending debt, so that prices may be decreased in the anticipation of driving competition out of the market, and later increasing their share of the market as these competitors disappear. the problem with this technique is that talent accumulated in the industry is sometimes forced out. Niches are abandoned (the wall mart and home depot effect).

    The state acts like a disruptive capitalist creating temporary price decreases in return for decreased niche services, and in doing so makes it impossible to concentrate capital in niche excellences. It makes it impossible to subsidize a public good: choice of the more expensive, better, prettier.

    The purpose of the London cabbie is largely to create a public ‘good’. It enforces quality so that quality personnel can afford to work in the industry (rather than the horrid service, delivered by the filthy, ignorant and incompetent in US cities).

    Prices would drive down quality, and all that will happen is that you will need additional regulation to managed an impoverished and corrupt network of marginal businesses that deliver cheap but intolerable service that prevents quality competition from competing in the market.

    If you are willing to spend money on the tube. You have no argument against spending money to maintain a quality system of taxis. Just because market mechanics are POSSIBLE for taxis and IMPOSSIBLE for tubes, that doesn’t mean that taxis are not serving the same function as tubes.

    Lowest costs does not generally create a good. It creates a marginal enterprise.

    Aesthetics are forms of capital that are perhaps, the best investment that any civilization can make.

    For a country like the UK, whose history is an industry, you’d think that such a principle would be better understood. For a country that is creating demand through immigration, cash by selling off it’s assets, and the illusion of prosperity by dilution, inflation and redistribution, rather than by increases in productivity, it is understandable why a myth of exceptionalism would be a useful distraction from the fact that the UK is selling off its exceptionalism and it’s heritage, and would do even more so along with it’s taxi subsidies.

    Prices alone do not a world make. The purpose of the market is exploration. The purpose of unbridled market is prevent government exploitation. THe purpose of the regulated market is to capitalize SOMETHING for a social good. And not all social goods are consumables. Some social goods capitalize distortions to create beauty, which is a high return for a society, as all monuments, arts and architecture demonstrate.

    So, instead of universally pursuing consumption as an ultimate good. Instead of the keynesian virtue of spending. Perhaps we should balance our capitalist strategy with the art of saving. It took english civilization a very long time to create a culture of saving, and the institution of interest, so that the middle aged could save until they were old, and the old could lend to the young, in a virtuous cycle of investment that distributed the risk of long term calculation across a vast number of people, and wherein retirement security was an insurance scheme for the underclass rather than a mandate of the majority. This virtuous cycle was undermined. Perhaps we should return to it, and to other forms of capitalizing our civilization, so that we leave something behind for our heirs rather than the record of a visitation by locusts.

    Subsidizing quality is the entire point of aesthetics and the arts. And capitalizing everything from street signs, to cabbies to historic buildings to libraries and museums is an antidote to anti-historicism.

    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:57:00 UTC