Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • Why Shall We Ignore Any Human Law, State, King (president), Judge Or Lawgiver?

    Laws cannot be given, they can only be discovered.

    Lawgiving is logically impossible. One can issue commands. One can negotiate contractual provisions on your behalf. But one cannot create law, only command, legislation, regulation, and contractual provision.

    There is one natural law, that can be stated in the positive or negative, but must be stated as both positive and negative. (I’ve written too much on this today and don’t want to repeat myself, so I’m not going into detail.)

    • Obverse: – The silver rule (Natural Law – the negative ) do not do unto others… etc.
    • Reverse: – The golden rule (Natural Rights – the positive ) do unto others only what …. etc.

    There is only on moral law that these two rules are derived from:

    • Obverse: – negative: impose no unwanted costs upon that which others have acted to create, obtain, and inventory, whether life, kin, mate, relation, property, norm, or institution.
    • Reverse: – positive: limit your actions to productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, limited to externalities of the same criteria.

    In other words: “do no harm” is the one law of human cooperation. Because harm is what causes retaliation, breaks the peace, reduces trust, increases transaction and opportunity costs, and reduces the quality of life for everyone in the vicinity as a consequence.

    These laws are geographically, demographically, culturally, normatively, institutionally, traditionally, independent, and provide universal decidability in all matters of conflict, whether participants like it or not.

    What differs is the only the in-group contracts in the forms of property, laws, norms, traditions, institutions, territory and monuments. But within group this rule still applies.

    Ergo, you only listen to a command when its either in going to benefit you, or when ignoring or contradicting it will lead to your harm or punishment.

    Otherwise, there is no connection between commands and the only necessary laws: objective morality, natural law, and natural rights. Do no harm, seek no involuntary gain.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute

    https://www.quora.com/Why-shall-we-ignore-any-human-law-state-king-president-judge-or-lawgiver

  • What’s The Best Time To Email A Very Important Person?

    Send a small gift with a bit of polite humor inside, with nothing to do with your business or wants included.

    https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-time-to-email-a-very-important-person

  • Is There Objective Value To Life, Or Is All Value Subjective?

    Reproduction.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-there-objective-value-to-life-or-is-all-value-subjective

  • How Do I Obtain New Identity Documents?

    They are about 1–2K online. Good for non-border use. Call a local immigration lawyer, make an appointment, pay him, ask him how you get a driver’s license. That’s all you need. Once you have that you can order an online passport. As long as you don’t use them in airports or to cross borders it won’t matter. After living under a new identity long enough, with a bank account, go after a green card. zillions of illegals do it.

    https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-obtain-new-Identity-Documents

  • Why Do People In America Take Something That’s Innocent And Turn It Into Something That They Think Is Racist?

    To get status signals and attention in a country where everyone is desperately lonely, lives an an illusion of their own making created out of consumer goods, and lacks any kind of validation from others because everyone else is doing the same thing.

    Yes, that’s really the reason.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-in-America-take-something-thats-innocent-and-turn-it-into-something-that-they-think-is-racist

  • Q&A: –“Curt: What Are Your Thoughts on Taxation?”–

    Author’s note. I like this post because it shows how we can educate people on controversial issues. [G]reat question. I’m going to answer this set of questions in a different order from the one they were asked:

    –“Have you spent much time on taxation and it’s various forms? Perhaps you could do a post on your thoughts about how such a treasury would function and it’s relations to taxation. “–

    Of course. I think it’s a national preoccupation. I’m not alone.

    –“What is your position on taxation?”—

    Well, my position is that under rule of law there exists no discretion in the use funds. That’s the purpose of rule of law: the elimination of discretion. If there is no discretion involved we are not in fact ruled by men, but by law: we govern ourselves by contract. Once we eliminate discretion we eliminate what we call corruption and, assuming we require truthful speech in the commons – not only in advertising and marketing, and warranty, but in ethical, moral, and political speech – we eliminate almost all of what we consider politics. Now another property of rule of law, if we are to prevent discretion, is ‘calculability’ or what we tend to call ‘operationalism’ in science and ‘specific use, or use of funds’ in contract law. Meaning that any fund collected must go to the purpose it was intended, or be refunded. Rule Of Law = Contractualism. Period. Discretion != Rule of Law. However, we must understand, that Rule of Law = Meritocracy, and many people living cannot prosper, compete, or survive on their merits. There are a limited number of strategies for preserving liberty, rule of law, and meritocracy: (i)limit the size of the bottom classes through control of reproduction and culling; (ii) limit their damage by paying them not to reproduce, and (iii) make use of them through involuntary organization of production (maintenance of the commons). This is one of the reasons for taxation: paying for the cost of suppression of reproduction of those who cannot prosper, compete, or survive in meritocracy. Just as the problem external orders (military defense and constructive offense), and internal orders (the judiciary and police). If we negotiate such contracts between groups and classes, and there is no means under natural common judge-discovered law, by which we can object to those contracts, then we have created a market for the construction of commons, in addition to the market for the construction of goods and services. Those are not taxes but installment payments, and enforceable like any other contract. If those taxes are used to make the evolutionarily competitive results of liberty possible, and if it’s not possible otherwise, then taxes for this purpose are simply the market price for the production of a condition of liberty under which we can produce the results of liberty: necessary commons, competitive commons, and desirable private goods and services . The problem then is not taxation per se, but the use of taxes. If we are paying contractually agreed to prices for goods and services obtained through under rule of law, and free of discretion, refunded if paid for, then that is merely contractual payment. Now, there is no reason to argue against either for income or consumption ‘commissions’ (taxes), on the production of goods and services in the voluntary construction of production distribution and trade we call capitalism, since that order is itself a good that is bought and paid for by shareholders, with both personal, normative, and material costs. And furthermore, there is no reason to argue against progressive taxation (commissions) on income or price, either. The question is ownership: In ancient societies order was created by force at substantial risk and expense. And it is probably the most important service we create. In modern societies, almost everyone is enfranchised (a shareholder). And if the shareholders can determine the use of funds by economic voting (proportional voting by contribution), or if they can determine the use of funds by share voting (voting their share of the tax pool), then we preserve operational rule of law and eliminate discretion. The inverse question is whether it is possible to produce a condition of liberty, meritocracy, and prosperity, that has been so rewarding in the ancient and modern worlds. And the answer is that familial, local, social, economic, political, and military orders exist in competition for people(consumers), human capital(skills and knowledge), business and industry, wealth, and leadership (the advocacy for the organization of normative, economic, political, and military capital). So people flee to regions that produce wealth and flee from regions that don’t. Which is a significant problem if they’re imposing a long-term genetic cost on the absorbing market. And this is the problem we face with immigration of underclasses and the rate of underclass reproduction vs middle and upper-class reproduction. The answer to the problem of creating an order in people of diverse abilities is not to choose either a monopoly capitalist market(voluntary organization of labor) or a monopoly socialist market (involuntary organization of labor), but to make use of both markets: one for the production of innovative consumer goods, and one for the production of ‘simple’ common goods: cleanliness, order, construction of bulidings, parks, and monuments, roads, sidewalks, and in general, beauty.

    —“Let’s assume a treasury issues currency and that through the treasury citizens can borrow money interest-free for consumption. Now the treasury needs to be funded through taxation, whether voluntary or otherwise is superfluous for arguments sake.”—

    Well, first, let’s clarify: the treasury can be funded through the sale of assets (minerals, territory, etc), inflation, taxation, fees, profits(returns on investments not possible otherwise – the Panama and Suez canals for example. Some of the great dams. Many projects cannot be ‘insured’ by an insurer of last resort other than the shareholders themselves). And hopefully we would fund the treasury in the opposite order: 1) profit, 2) fees, 3) taxation, 4) inflation, 5) sale of assets. In practice, if it cannot be achieved through profit or fees, it would suggest a political failure. Taxation and inflation are debt instruments. And sale of assets is a form of liquidation. Members of Nations(extended relations) do not squabble about taxes the way oligarchies and empires do.

    —“through the treasury citizens can borrow money interest-free for consumption”—

    I think that this is the great economic question of our time: why should distributors (banks) earn interest on money borrowed from ourselves for the purchase of consumption, when the data says that they perform no function not equally provisible by purely statistical analysis of data produced in extraordinary quality by actuaries. There isn’t any reason. None. There is no reason that we do not borrow to some percentage of the maximum of our statistical repayment ability from the treasury, and then when the economy slows, that money is equally distributed to those same accounts facilitating further consumption. Other than under democracy people would vote to increase such distributions by various schemes untili we were again bankrupt. But the financial sector is disproportionately rewarding given that it’s basically trivial clerical work that privatizes wins and socializes losses. There is no reason we don’t treat lending the public monies just as we do licenses of Lawyer’s, CPA’s and Series 7 holders. These individuals could have public records, and must retain certain scores in order to maintain their licenses. In exchange they can obtain a small percentage of each customer’s accounts that they manage from the treasury. And they would have no protection against suits that is afforded to our bureaucrats. Now aside form the misappropriation of profits by the financial sector, why is it that we charge interest on consumption? That makes no sense at all really. Why do we charge interest on production? Because that’s the only way we can judge whether intertemporal lending as increased productivity by compression of time. So my recommendation is to professionalize lending from the treasury (regional offices of central banks), and interest on consumption entirely (imagine the effect it would have on housing if the maximum period of a home loan using any treasury funds was 15 years, and at zero interest?) And to issue liquidity directly to consumers, on regular (yearly) basis. And to constitutionally eliminate the state manipulation of these funds for any purpose (preserving rule of law by preserving the prohibition on discretion.) From what I can see ih the behavior of most countries, if yo have a small homogenous people they will be highly redistributive voluntarily, and heterogeneity radically decreases willingness to both redistribute or to contribute in any way to the commons. Just to stay on message, and continue to falsify libertinism: What separates libertarianism from libertinism is that libertarians want to do no harm to the commons, and libertines want to do no good to it. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute (I have no idea where I am right now) 🙂

  • Q&A: –“Curt: What Are Your Thoughts on Taxation?”–

    Author’s note. I like this post because it shows how we can educate people on controversial issues. [G]reat question. I’m going to answer this set of questions in a different order from the one they were asked:

    –“Have you spent much time on taxation and it’s various forms? Perhaps you could do a post on your thoughts about how such a treasury would function and it’s relations to taxation. “–

    Of course. I think it’s a national preoccupation. I’m not alone.

    –“What is your position on taxation?”—

    Well, my position is that under rule of law there exists no discretion in the use funds. That’s the purpose of rule of law: the elimination of discretion. If there is no discretion involved we are not in fact ruled by men, but by law: we govern ourselves by contract. Once we eliminate discretion we eliminate what we call corruption and, assuming we require truthful speech in the commons – not only in advertising and marketing, and warranty, but in ethical, moral, and political speech – we eliminate almost all of what we consider politics. Now another property of rule of law, if we are to prevent discretion, is ‘calculability’ or what we tend to call ‘operationalism’ in science and ‘specific use, or use of funds’ in contract law. Meaning that any fund collected must go to the purpose it was intended, or be refunded. Rule Of Law = Contractualism. Period. Discretion != Rule of Law. However, we must understand, that Rule of Law = Meritocracy, and many people living cannot prosper, compete, or survive on their merits. There are a limited number of strategies for preserving liberty, rule of law, and meritocracy: (i)limit the size of the bottom classes through control of reproduction and culling; (ii) limit their damage by paying them not to reproduce, and (iii) make use of them through involuntary organization of production (maintenance of the commons). This is one of the reasons for taxation: paying for the cost of suppression of reproduction of those who cannot prosper, compete, or survive in meritocracy. Just as the problem external orders (military defense and constructive offense), and internal orders (the judiciary and police). If we negotiate such contracts between groups and classes, and there is no means under natural common judge-discovered law, by which we can object to those contracts, then we have created a market for the construction of commons, in addition to the market for the construction of goods and services. Those are not taxes but installment payments, and enforceable like any other contract. If those taxes are used to make the evolutionarily competitive results of liberty possible, and if it’s not possible otherwise, then taxes for this purpose are simply the market price for the production of a condition of liberty under which we can produce the results of liberty: necessary commons, competitive commons, and desirable private goods and services . The problem then is not taxation per se, but the use of taxes. If we are paying contractually agreed to prices for goods and services obtained through under rule of law, and free of discretion, refunded if paid for, then that is merely contractual payment. Now, there is no reason to argue against either for income or consumption ‘commissions’ (taxes), on the production of goods and services in the voluntary construction of production distribution and trade we call capitalism, since that order is itself a good that is bought and paid for by shareholders, with both personal, normative, and material costs. And furthermore, there is no reason to argue against progressive taxation (commissions) on income or price, either. The question is ownership: In ancient societies order was created by force at substantial risk and expense. And it is probably the most important service we create. In modern societies, almost everyone is enfranchised (a shareholder). And if the shareholders can determine the use of funds by economic voting (proportional voting by contribution), or if they can determine the use of funds by share voting (voting their share of the tax pool), then we preserve operational rule of law and eliminate discretion. The inverse question is whether it is possible to produce a condition of liberty, meritocracy, and prosperity, that has been so rewarding in the ancient and modern worlds. And the answer is that familial, local, social, economic, political, and military orders exist in competition for people(consumers), human capital(skills and knowledge), business and industry, wealth, and leadership (the advocacy for the organization of normative, economic, political, and military capital). So people flee to regions that produce wealth and flee from regions that don’t. Which is a significant problem if they’re imposing a long-term genetic cost on the absorbing market. And this is the problem we face with immigration of underclasses and the rate of underclass reproduction vs middle and upper-class reproduction. The answer to the problem of creating an order in people of diverse abilities is not to choose either a monopoly capitalist market(voluntary organization of labor) or a monopoly socialist market (involuntary organization of labor), but to make use of both markets: one for the production of innovative consumer goods, and one for the production of ‘simple’ common goods: cleanliness, order, construction of bulidings, parks, and monuments, roads, sidewalks, and in general, beauty.

    —“Let’s assume a treasury issues currency and that through the treasury citizens can borrow money interest-free for consumption. Now the treasury needs to be funded through taxation, whether voluntary or otherwise is superfluous for arguments sake.”—

    Well, first, let’s clarify: the treasury can be funded through the sale of assets (minerals, territory, etc), inflation, taxation, fees, profits(returns on investments not possible otherwise – the Panama and Suez canals for example. Some of the great dams. Many projects cannot be ‘insured’ by an insurer of last resort other than the shareholders themselves). And hopefully we would fund the treasury in the opposite order: 1) profit, 2) fees, 3) taxation, 4) inflation, 5) sale of assets. In practice, if it cannot be achieved through profit or fees, it would suggest a political failure. Taxation and inflation are debt instruments. And sale of assets is a form of liquidation. Members of Nations(extended relations) do not squabble about taxes the way oligarchies and empires do.

    —“through the treasury citizens can borrow money interest-free for consumption”—

    I think that this is the great economic question of our time: why should distributors (banks) earn interest on money borrowed from ourselves for the purchase of consumption, when the data says that they perform no function not equally provisible by purely statistical analysis of data produced in extraordinary quality by actuaries. There isn’t any reason. None. There is no reason that we do not borrow to some percentage of the maximum of our statistical repayment ability from the treasury, and then when the economy slows, that money is equally distributed to those same accounts facilitating further consumption. Other than under democracy people would vote to increase such distributions by various schemes untili we were again bankrupt. But the financial sector is disproportionately rewarding given that it’s basically trivial clerical work that privatizes wins and socializes losses. There is no reason we don’t treat lending the public monies just as we do licenses of Lawyer’s, CPA’s and Series 7 holders. These individuals could have public records, and must retain certain scores in order to maintain their licenses. In exchange they can obtain a small percentage of each customer’s accounts that they manage from the treasury. And they would have no protection against suits that is afforded to our bureaucrats. Now aside form the misappropriation of profits by the financial sector, why is it that we charge interest on consumption? That makes no sense at all really. Why do we charge interest on production? Because that’s the only way we can judge whether intertemporal lending as increased productivity by compression of time. So my recommendation is to professionalize lending from the treasury (regional offices of central banks), and interest on consumption entirely (imagine the effect it would have on housing if the maximum period of a home loan using any treasury funds was 15 years, and at zero interest?) And to issue liquidity directly to consumers, on regular (yearly) basis. And to constitutionally eliminate the state manipulation of these funds for any purpose (preserving rule of law by preserving the prohibition on discretion.) From what I can see ih the behavior of most countries, if yo have a small homogenous people they will be highly redistributive voluntarily, and heterogeneity radically decreases willingness to both redistribute or to contribute in any way to the commons. Just to stay on message, and continue to falsify libertinism: What separates libertarianism from libertinism is that libertarians want to do no harm to the commons, and libertines want to do no good to it. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute (I have no idea where I am right now) 🙂

  • Q&A: —“Curt: Whats Your Position on Intellectual Property”—

    INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Forms of Intellectual Property:

      [T]rademarks and branding were developed as a weight and measure to both to prevent people from fraudulently representing work, and to provide traceability if the weight and measure was violated by substandard manufacture. There is no more conflict over trademarking than there is over any other standard weight, measure, or title registry. Copyrights might have been issued as a perk to authors from the crown, but they evolved into a standard practice, if for no other reason than humans in protestant societies object to profiting from the work products of others. Creative commons and Open Source licenses evolved out of copyright in order to allow non-commercial use and copying. Which solves the problem of profiting without contributing to the works of others, versus the ability to copy that which is easily copied. Creative commons solves the problem of allowing profiteering on the backs of others. Worse, the reason we have so much (undesirable) that’s published in every medium, is the rewards of selling these artificially licensed products. People who write will do so for very little return. Just as people who produce all arts will do so for very little return. Just as people who engage in research will usually do so for very little return. There is no reason provide support when the net result of that support is the conversion of ART FROM A CIVIC COMMONS TO PRIVATE ENTERPRISE. In fact, under that criteria, it is immoral to issue copyrights. But this is a decision for groups through their political processes. They must just be aware of the consequences that will occur as monumental works decline and experiential works increase. I suggest that we retain a registry (trademarks) and copyrights, so that people may engage in the reproduction of easily reproducible goods for personal, interpersonal, and civic use, while retaining the prohibition on unproductive profiting (reproduction for profit without compensating the copyright holder), and on fraud (profit through plagiarism). Patents have a long history both of existence in one form or another, and of attempts to end them. The problem has been in part that there are good reasons for some, and no point of demarcation (no ‘criteria of decidability’) has been discovered that limits its use. There is one benefit of patents in that it forces continuous creativity in some minor property of a process or admixture, and it is possible that without patents we would not see this creativity. However, it we could easily limit patents (grants of partial monopoly), to those at biological, chemical, or atomic level (basic research), and leave engineering (construction) and design (user interfaces) out of it, and then later extend into atomic, chemical, and biological levels at some point in the future when we have reduced those areas to engineering rather than basic research. Otherwise, if used as an incentive to conduct basic research (like universities and laboratories), or as an incentive to produce goods with unlikely markets (rare medicines and treatments), or in the future, genetic modifications, a patent can serve as a method of funding off-book subsidy of private research for the production of beneficial commons. For this purpose, it would be immoral to prohibit patents. It is difficult to imagine an equivalent of the creative commons or open source movements, for explicitly commercial goods, for personal or civic (non-profit) use. We do not do this today because we already implicitly permit it today. (Given the problem of “I Pencil” it’s almost impossible to create complex goods for personal use, but we encourage it and treat admire it.) So I would argue that we could clarify the right to do so, because this is the area where we get into problems of companies defending uses that they don’t want to because the courts will treat non-defense as license. In other words it is rational to separate market-for-profit-using-the-insights-of-others from ‘use’. Or put another way: you cannot prohibit someone from making something for self, family and society by a license to a MARKET monopoly on the SALE of a good. This is the difference that needs clarifying. You cannot tell someone he may not use information to transform something for use, but you can certainly prevent him from participating in the market because it is a COMMONS, by profiting from the innovations of others. Further Thoughts I suppose I could get into how we create opportunities through population density and the suppression of parasitism using the common law, by requiring PRODUCTIVE, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange between all parties; and then address how the PRODUCT of this collective norm (property) produces opportunities, and that it is these opportunities (a product of the commons) that we compete for, with the best competitor (inventor, investor, producer, distributor) winning the benefits of seizing that opportunity. But I think that the logic and economics of market opportunities is off topic for this discussion. Even though, in order to explain why we require PRODUCTIVE transfers from people rather than parasitic transfers, is the entire purpose of coming together in groups, and incrementally suppressing parasitism through the (negative) prohibition on involuntary unproductive uninformed transfers and negative externalities using rule of law, and the (positive) market reward for productive, informed, voluntary transfers and positive externalities. It’s this process of forcing man (like we have with plants and animals) to engage in productive market participation, in order to benefit from productive market participation of others. This possible a great deal to digest, and yet, I could go into far more detail as I’ve shown in the last paragraph. But this is a categorically consistent, logically consistent, morally consistent, empirically consistent,fully accounted,and fairly parsimonious argument that will be difficult to defeat. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy or Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute

    • Q&A: —“Curt: Whats Your Position on Intellectual Property”—

      INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Forms of Intellectual Property:

        [T]rademarks and branding were developed as a weight and measure to both to prevent people from fraudulently representing work, and to provide traceability if the weight and measure was violated by substandard manufacture. There is no more conflict over trademarking than there is over any other standard weight, measure, or title registry. Copyrights might have been issued as a perk to authors from the crown, but they evolved into a standard practice, if for no other reason than humans in protestant societies object to profiting from the work products of others. Creative commons and Open Source licenses evolved out of copyright in order to allow non-commercial use and copying. Which solves the problem of profiting without contributing to the works of others, versus the ability to copy that which is easily copied. Creative commons solves the problem of allowing profiteering on the backs of others. Worse, the reason we have so much (undesirable) that’s published in every medium, is the rewards of selling these artificially licensed products. People who write will do so for very little return. Just as people who produce all arts will do so for very little return. Just as people who engage in research will usually do so for very little return. There is no reason provide support when the net result of that support is the conversion of ART FROM A CIVIC COMMONS TO PRIVATE ENTERPRISE. In fact, under that criteria, it is immoral to issue copyrights. But this is a decision for groups through their political processes. They must just be aware of the consequences that will occur as monumental works decline and experiential works increase. I suggest that we retain a registry (trademarks) and copyrights, so that people may engage in the reproduction of easily reproducible goods for personal, interpersonal, and civic use, while retaining the prohibition on unproductive profiting (reproduction for profit without compensating the copyright holder), and on fraud (profit through plagiarism). Patents have a long history both of existence in one form or another, and of attempts to end them. The problem has been in part that there are good reasons for some, and no point of demarcation (no ‘criteria of decidability’) has been discovered that limits its use. There is one benefit of patents in that it forces continuous creativity in some minor property of a process or admixture, and it is possible that without patents we would not see this creativity. However, it we could easily limit patents (grants of partial monopoly), to those at biological, chemical, or atomic level (basic research), and leave engineering (construction) and design (user interfaces) out of it, and then later extend into atomic, chemical, and biological levels at some point in the future when we have reduced those areas to engineering rather than basic research. Otherwise, if used as an incentive to conduct basic research (like universities and laboratories), or as an incentive to produce goods with unlikely markets (rare medicines and treatments), or in the future, genetic modifications, a patent can serve as a method of funding off-book subsidy of private research for the production of beneficial commons. For this purpose, it would be immoral to prohibit patents. It is difficult to imagine an equivalent of the creative commons or open source movements, for explicitly commercial goods, for personal or civic (non-profit) use. We do not do this today because we already implicitly permit it today. (Given the problem of “I Pencil” it’s almost impossible to create complex goods for personal use, but we encourage it and treat admire it.) So I would argue that we could clarify the right to do so, because this is the area where we get into problems of companies defending uses that they don’t want to because the courts will treat non-defense as license. In other words it is rational to separate market-for-profit-using-the-insights-of-others from ‘use’. Or put another way: you cannot prohibit someone from making something for self, family and society by a license to a MARKET monopoly on the SALE of a good. This is the difference that needs clarifying. You cannot tell someone he may not use information to transform something for use, but you can certainly prevent him from participating in the market because it is a COMMONS, by profiting from the innovations of others. Further Thoughts I suppose I could get into how we create opportunities through population density and the suppression of parasitism using the common law, by requiring PRODUCTIVE, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange between all parties; and then address how the PRODUCT of this collective norm (property) produces opportunities, and that it is these opportunities (a product of the commons) that we compete for, with the best competitor (inventor, investor, producer, distributor) winning the benefits of seizing that opportunity. But I think that the logic and economics of market opportunities is off topic for this discussion. Even though, in order to explain why we require PRODUCTIVE transfers from people rather than parasitic transfers, is the entire purpose of coming together in groups, and incrementally suppressing parasitism through the (negative) prohibition on involuntary unproductive uninformed transfers and negative externalities using rule of law, and the (positive) market reward for productive, informed, voluntary transfers and positive externalities. It’s this process of forcing man (like we have with plants and animals) to engage in productive market participation, in order to benefit from productive market participation of others. This possible a great deal to digest, and yet, I could go into far more detail as I’ve shown in the last paragraph. But this is a categorically consistent, logically consistent, morally consistent, empirically consistent,fully accounted,and fairly parsimonious argument that will be difficult to defeat. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy or Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute

      • Q&A: —“Curt: Is There Any Morality Beyond Self Interest?”—

        —“Do you believe that morality beyond self-interest is entirely false as a result?”—

        [I] don’t believe in anything, because the term is archaic. I can state that it’s a strong truth candidate, because despite extremely exhaustive efforts by highly biased researchers, we cannot find a single instance of moral action that is not in itself selfish through kin selection.

        Now, when we use the word ‘moral’ we must grasp that there is an objective morality in natural (necessary, consistent, and decidable), and normative morality (local group contracts for different sets of behaviors that produce group benefits from which individuals largely benefit), and individual morality (those subsets of moral choices I choose to follow and not). We conflate these two terms, just as we conflate law (natural law), legislation (contract or command), and regulation (arbitrary edict). But objective and normative, and individual morality are equivalent to natural law (true), legislation (contractual), and regulation (arbitrary choice).

        When I write I use moral for objective morality of natural law, and norm for normative morality of local normative contract.

        We can extend this basic principle from not only sentient cooperative groups, but to non-sentient groups, to non sentient individuals, to plants, to bacteria, to the natural elements that make up the physical world, and to our emerging understanding of the physical world: that we must fight entropy if we wish to survive.

        So it is not only illogical to engage in self-destructive action, but it is physically impossible so to speak, as it would violate physical laws of the universe.

        Now some creatures appear to do sacrificial things, but this is sacrificial only from the (fallacious) human perspective as individual pleasure-seekers. But from evolution and the physical world’s standpoint, once we have exhausted a BENEFICIAL reproductive role we are no longer valuable to the organism (the algorithm) as a whole. Thankfully humans are almost always beneficial to one another when they are alive and not harming one another. Even then, those who harm, may be benefitting the organism (algorithm) “man”.

        Now when we say self-interest, selfishness that signals possible parasitism, or non-payment for commons is something all creatures that cooperate retaliate against. So there is a difference between COMPROMISE (rational self-interest) and ABSOLUTE (and therefore irrational) self-interest. What is rational for all of us is to preserve the incentive to cooperate, and to prevent providing incentive to retaliate, yet being defensive enough to discourage offense against us.

        So in this sense, it is always rational to compromise with those with whom you are compatible, because compromise with those with whom you are compatible is in your self-interest.

        There are no rules without limits. If we cannot state the limits of any general rule, we state a falsehood because we cannot state a truth. This is why the wise speak in teleological ethics (science/outcomes), the informed but inexperienced and deceitful speak in deontological ethics ( rationalism/rules ), the young, lacking knowlege and experience in virtues (analogy/imitations), and children in punishments and rewards (goods and bads).

        I hope this provided the answer you sought.

        Curt Doolittle
        The Philosophy or Aristocracy
        The Propertarian Institute