[W]e have overwhelming data, in all walks of life, that shows that ‘beta’ women and ‘beta’ males fear standards (other’s behavior) that they cannot themselves adhere to, and that are existential reminders of the inferiority of their social standing. The technique that they use to vent their self loathing is gossip. Or what we call “rallying and shaming”. There are three purposes to Rallying and Shaming. (a) To alter the public perception of what is admirable, (b) to deprive the exceptional person of status signals (c) to decrease the relative distance between the ‘beta’ and the ‘alpha’. We see this technique used pervasively in economics and politics under ‘inequality’, in the gender wars as ‘paternalism’, in the race wars as ‘privilege’, and in the arts as subjectivism. But in all cases, it is the same behavior: the less desirable, able, and articulate, polluting excellence so that it is not copied by others, by rallying and shaming against those who are objectively their superiors. By shaming what is objectively superior, they hope to prevent being ‘left behind’ as inferiors, and to maintain their relative social standing – at least in their own minds, and among their peers. This strategy is known as ‘keeping each other down.”
Source: Original Site Post
-
A Short Course in Propertarian Reasoning
(introduction to propertarianism)
Note: this is a sketch of propertarian reasoning I’ve put together to satisfy some of your requests. If you follow me you will recognize the technique as the application of the scientific method and amoral economic language to questions of social science.
[P]RINCIPLES
1) Everyone acts to acquire. Life is an expensive means of defeating entropy. Acting improves acquisition – at additional cost. Memory improves acquisition – at additional cost. reason improves acquisition – at additional cost. cooperation improves acquisition – at additional cost.2) We act in furtherance of our reproductive strategy.
3) Male and Female reproductive strategies are in conflict. The female seeks to breed impulsively where it benefits her lineage, and then force the cost of her offspring on the tribe, and to further her offspring regardless of merit. The male seeks to breed impulsively wherever it does not harm his lineage, and to create a tribe capable of resisting conquest by other males – and as such males act meritocratic-ally. Men are political and divided into kin and non-kin – the universe is male. For women, men are marginally indifferent herdsmen of women. Women live in a world of women, and both men and the universe are alien.
4) Humans compete for status because status provides discounts on opportunities to acquire – especially mates and allies in cooperation. We can identify at least three horizontal axis of class division: biological (reproductive desirability), social (status desirability), economic (wealth desirability) – as well as their undesirable opposites.
5) There exist only three means of coercing other humans to cooperate with on one means or end vs cooperate with others on different means or ends. These three means of coercion can be used to construct three vertical axis of class specialization: coercion by force(conservatism/masculine), coercion by gossip(progressivism/feminine), coercion by remuneration (libertarianism / neutral masculine). Human elites are formed by those who specialize in one or more of these means of coercion. (gossip: public intellectuals and priests. force: military and political. exchange: voluntary organizations, including the voluntary organization of production.
6) Language is purely justificationary negotiation in furtherance of our acquisition by these three means. ergo: All ‘belief’ is justification to the self and others in furtherance of acquisition. It is meaningless. Statements of justification only provide us with information necessary to deduce what it is that we wish to acquire.
7) Cooperation is a disproportionately more productive means of acquisition than individual production.
8) We seek discounts in our acquisitions. Some of these discounts are productive and moral and encourage cooperation, and some of them are unproductive and immoral, discourage cooperation, and invite retaliation.
9) The only moral acquisition is one in which one either homesteads something new, or obtains it by productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, where external transfers are limited to the same criteria.
10) Aristotle’s ‘golden mean’ is an inarticulate primitive expression of the supply-demand curve. All human acquisition takes place within the pressures of supply and demand. As such all explanations of human action must be produced using supply and demand curves: the golden mean.
11) All human considerations and consequent actions take place in high causal density, choices determined by means of opportunity costs, and any analysis requires we show the choices that an individual or group is considering. (Full Accounting).
12) We cooperate and coerce in large numbers, as classes with common reproductive interests to using narratives at every scale. Science and moral law are the only means of resolving conflicts between these narratives. Propertarian analysis provides means of amoral analysis, argument and decidability between these loaded, framed, and obscured arguments.
13) Groups evolve evolutionary strategies and supporting narratives. While none of these strategies by any given group is fully moral, it is still true that we can compare strategies as more and less objectively moral. We can measure the differences in objective morality by the degree of suppression of free riding in that given society.
14) In all political matters ultimate decidability is provided by a bias to suicidal, proletarian and dysgenic, or competitive, aristocratic and eugenic reproduction. The myth of equality (the christian mythos) was let loose by the middle class takeover of the aristocratic governments, and the eventual enfranchisement of women whose reproductive strategy under industrial production is dysgenic – reversing 7,000 years of indo european genetic pacification (eugenic evolution). This is a very unpleasant and impolitic topic. But it is where we find decidability.
[L]IST OF PROPERTY-EN-TOTO: THAT WHICH WE ACT TO AQUIRE (DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY)
http://www.propertarianism.com/demonstrated-property/[T]HE SIMPLE METHOD: INCENTIVES AS ACQUSITION
1) take any circumstance in which someone is attempting to persuade someone else.
2) identify the reproductive strategy of the speaker (largely by gender, class, and coercive technique.)
3) identify the property-en-toto that the speaker is attempting to acquire.
4) determine if his or her method is advocating a moral transfer(productive) or an immoral transfer (parasitism).
5) Determine which discounts (thefts) he or she is attempting to engage in, or which premiums (payments) he or she is offering in exchange.
6) State the user’s request in amoral propertarian terms free of loading, framing, or overloading. In other words, make a purely logical argument free of sentimental loading.[A]DVANCED: AN EXAMPLE OF EMPLOYING THE PROPERTARIAN METHOD ON ADVANCED CONCEPTS
http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-propertarian-methodol…/This example addresses the term ‘evil’ in propertarian terms, and provides an example of how highly loaded terms from antiquity can be converted into scientific (propertarian) terms.
TERMINOLOGY
Demonstrated Property / Property en Toto
Exchange / Transfer / Voluntary Transfer / Involuntary Transfer
Parasitism / Free Riding / Imposed Costs
Productive / Unproductive
Fully Informed / Asymmetric Information
Warrantied / Un-warrantied
Discount / Premium
Coercion / Influence
Voluntary Organization of Production
Incremental Suppression of free riding
Truth / Truthfulness / Honesty
Moral / Amoral / Immoral
Morality / Cooperation / Retaliation -
A Short Course in Propertarian Reasoning
(introduction to propertarianism)
Note: this is a sketch of propertarian reasoning I’ve put together to satisfy some of your requests. If you follow me you will recognize the technique as the application of the scientific method and amoral economic language to questions of social science.
[P]RINCIPLES
1) Everyone acts to acquire. Life is an expensive means of defeating entropy. Acting improves acquisition – at additional cost. Memory improves acquisition – at additional cost. reason improves acquisition – at additional cost. cooperation improves acquisition – at additional cost.2) We act in furtherance of our reproductive strategy.
3) Male and Female reproductive strategies are in conflict. The female seeks to breed impulsively where it benefits her lineage, and then force the cost of her offspring on the tribe, and to further her offspring regardless of merit. The male seeks to breed impulsively wherever it does not harm his lineage, and to create a tribe capable of resisting conquest by other males – and as such males act meritocratic-ally. Men are political and divided into kin and non-kin – the universe is male. For women, men are marginally indifferent herdsmen of women. Women live in a world of women, and both men and the universe are alien.
4) Humans compete for status because status provides discounts on opportunities to acquire – especially mates and allies in cooperation. We can identify at least three horizontal axis of class division: biological (reproductive desirability), social (status desirability), economic (wealth desirability) – as well as their undesirable opposites.
5) There exist only three means of coercing other humans to cooperate with on one means or end vs cooperate with others on different means or ends. These three means of coercion can be used to construct three vertical axis of class specialization: coercion by force(conservatism/masculine), coercion by gossip(progressivism/feminine), coercion by remuneration (libertarianism / neutral masculine). Human elites are formed by those who specialize in one or more of these means of coercion. (gossip: public intellectuals and priests. force: military and political. exchange: voluntary organizations, including the voluntary organization of production.
6) Language is purely justificationary negotiation in furtherance of our acquisition by these three means. ergo: All ‘belief’ is justification to the self and others in furtherance of acquisition. It is meaningless. Statements of justification only provide us with information necessary to deduce what it is that we wish to acquire.
7) Cooperation is a disproportionately more productive means of acquisition than individual production.
8) We seek discounts in our acquisitions. Some of these discounts are productive and moral and encourage cooperation, and some of them are unproductive and immoral, discourage cooperation, and invite retaliation.
9) The only moral acquisition is one in which one either homesteads something new, or obtains it by productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, where external transfers are limited to the same criteria.
10) Aristotle’s ‘golden mean’ is an inarticulate primitive expression of the supply-demand curve. All human acquisition takes place within the pressures of supply and demand. As such all explanations of human action must be produced using supply and demand curves: the golden mean.
11) All human considerations and consequent actions take place in high causal density, choices determined by means of opportunity costs, and any analysis requires we show the choices that an individual or group is considering. (Full Accounting).
12) We cooperate and coerce in large numbers, as classes with common reproductive interests to using narratives at every scale. Science and moral law are the only means of resolving conflicts between these narratives. Propertarian analysis provides means of amoral analysis, argument and decidability between these loaded, framed, and obscured arguments.
13) Groups evolve evolutionary strategies and supporting narratives. While none of these strategies by any given group is fully moral, it is still true that we can compare strategies as more and less objectively moral. We can measure the differences in objective morality by the degree of suppression of free riding in that given society.
14) In all political matters ultimate decidability is provided by a bias to suicidal, proletarian and dysgenic, or competitive, aristocratic and eugenic reproduction. The myth of equality (the christian mythos) was let loose by the middle class takeover of the aristocratic governments, and the eventual enfranchisement of women whose reproductive strategy under industrial production is dysgenic – reversing 7,000 years of indo european genetic pacification (eugenic evolution). This is a very unpleasant and impolitic topic. But it is where we find decidability.
[L]IST OF PROPERTY-EN-TOTO: THAT WHICH WE ACT TO AQUIRE (DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY)
http://www.propertarianism.com/demonstrated-property/[T]HE SIMPLE METHOD: INCENTIVES AS ACQUSITION
1) take any circumstance in which someone is attempting to persuade someone else.
2) identify the reproductive strategy of the speaker (largely by gender, class, and coercive technique.)
3) identify the property-en-toto that the speaker is attempting to acquire.
4) determine if his or her method is advocating a moral transfer(productive) or an immoral transfer (parasitism).
5) Determine which discounts (thefts) he or she is attempting to engage in, or which premiums (payments) he or she is offering in exchange.
6) State the user’s request in amoral propertarian terms free of loading, framing, or overloading. In other words, make a purely logical argument free of sentimental loading.[A]DVANCED: AN EXAMPLE OF EMPLOYING THE PROPERTARIAN METHOD ON ADVANCED CONCEPTS
http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-propertarian-methodol…/This example addresses the term ‘evil’ in propertarian terms, and provides an example of how highly loaded terms from antiquity can be converted into scientific (propertarian) terms.
TERMINOLOGY
Demonstrated Property / Property en Toto
Exchange / Transfer / Voluntary Transfer / Involuntary Transfer
Parasitism / Free Riding / Imposed Costs
Productive / Unproductive
Fully Informed / Asymmetric Information
Warrantied / Un-warrantied
Discount / Premium
Coercion / Influence
Voluntary Organization of Production
Incremental Suppression of free riding
Truth / Truthfulness / Honesty
Moral / Amoral / Immoral
Morality / Cooperation / Retaliation -
On NSA Interest in You or Me or Anyone.
[W]hy They Don’t Care About You.
1) Search engines are more effective than friends lists.
2) And you don’t write in Arabic.
3) And you aren’t writing across borders.
4) They have better things to do.I’ve been both a justice department employee, and on the C list in the past, and that hasn’t stopped the government from asking me for help.
RUSSIANS: The Russians work by buying influence with public intellectuals (people who write stuff). They play to egos. Russian ‘spies’ have the easiest job of all: find ‘useful idiots’. They are great at it.
CHINESE: The Chinese work by stealing info via blood relations in the states. They play to genetics, nationalism, racism, and the Chinese ‘chip on their shoulder’. They are very good at it.
MUSLIMS: The Muslims work by inciting violence with outcasts. They play to the contradiction between islam’s utopian promise and it’s evident contradiction in reality as the religion of the lower (lowest) classes. They are becoming reasonably good at it.
JEWS: The Jews work by using money to buy influence and by using their control of the media. They play of tribal common interest. They are very good at it.
AMERICANS: Americans work by gathering signal intelligence. They play off the distribution of american military, technical, financial, and commercial prowess to less developed countries, and discontent by the middle and upper middle classes in those countries.
Real ‘spies’ are very small in number. The simple ones are attache’s to embassies. The better are employees of foreign companies, or foreigners hired as employees of companies. Then there are just plain specialists who can be inserted into nearly any position as needed, and they developRELATIONSHIPS.
We all know how each group works. So we investigate each group by the means that group uses to organize.So unless you start threatening the president, or specifically inciting violence you’re just another annoying malcontent. And there are a lot of you. And you’re little more than evidence of the superiority of our legal system’s ability to tolerate intellectual dissent, while at the same time prohibiting physical violence.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine. -
On NSA Interest in You or Me or Anyone.
[W]hy They Don’t Care About You.
1) Search engines are more effective than friends lists.
2) And you don’t write in Arabic.
3) And you aren’t writing across borders.
4) They have better things to do.I’ve been both a justice department employee, and on the C list in the past, and that hasn’t stopped the government from asking me for help.
RUSSIANS: The Russians work by buying influence with public intellectuals (people who write stuff). They play to egos. Russian ‘spies’ have the easiest job of all: find ‘useful idiots’. They are great at it.
CHINESE: The Chinese work by stealing info via blood relations in the states. They play to genetics, nationalism, racism, and the Chinese ‘chip on their shoulder’. They are very good at it.
MUSLIMS: The Muslims work by inciting violence with outcasts. They play to the contradiction between islam’s utopian promise and it’s evident contradiction in reality as the religion of the lower (lowest) classes. They are becoming reasonably good at it.
JEWS: The Jews work by using money to buy influence and by using their control of the media. They play of tribal common interest. They are very good at it.
AMERICANS: Americans work by gathering signal intelligence. They play off the distribution of american military, technical, financial, and commercial prowess to less developed countries, and discontent by the middle and upper middle classes in those countries.
Real ‘spies’ are very small in number. The simple ones are attache’s to embassies. The better are employees of foreign companies, or foreigners hired as employees of companies. Then there are just plain specialists who can be inserted into nearly any position as needed, and they developRELATIONSHIPS.
We all know how each group works. So we investigate each group by the means that group uses to organize.So unless you start threatening the president, or specifically inciting violence you’re just another annoying malcontent. And there are a lot of you. And you’re little more than evidence of the superiority of our legal system’s ability to tolerate intellectual dissent, while at the same time prohibiting physical violence.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine. -
Opinion on Tucker? Missing the Boat.
(from elsewhere)
—“What’s your current opinion of Jeffrey Tucker?”—Johannesson
[T]ucker is a decent fellow seeking income by popularizing libertinism. As a writer he is articulate. As a marketer of ideas he is quite good. As an editor he is even better. As a theorist he is as weak as the rest. As an entrepreneur he conflates his advocacy of his over-investment in his passion with the demands of the market: something no libertarian should fail to recognize. Ideology must satisfy market demand just as any other product. Like the MI he failed to see the dramatic sea change from hopeful and rebellious classical liberals combined with a few social misfits, to alt-right classical liberals and many socially con-formative. And by missing that shift, and holding onto prior intellectual investments, he has missed his opportunity to generate revenue by continuing WITH the stream, rather than now struggling against it. The world has moved on. The Alt-right owns the momentum because it attacks the lies and pseudoscience of the postmoderns head-on, rather than continuing the won-battle against socialism. The Libertine generation is over. Libertines cannot hold territory against invaders wishing to impose alternative normative and institutional ambitions. No one gets a free ride on liberty. The only means of obtaining liberty is the violent suppression of those who would take it from us. Alt-right is the only possible form of liberty, and therefore the only direction of libertarian investment. It is what it is. Adapt or perish. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
-
Opinion on Tucker? Missing the Boat.
(from elsewhere)
—“What’s your current opinion of Jeffrey Tucker?”—Johannesson
[T]ucker is a decent fellow seeking income by popularizing libertinism. As a writer he is articulate. As a marketer of ideas he is quite good. As an editor he is even better. As a theorist he is as weak as the rest. As an entrepreneur he conflates his advocacy of his over-investment in his passion with the demands of the market: something no libertarian should fail to recognize. Ideology must satisfy market demand just as any other product. Like the MI he failed to see the dramatic sea change from hopeful and rebellious classical liberals combined with a few social misfits, to alt-right classical liberals and many socially con-formative. And by missing that shift, and holding onto prior intellectual investments, he has missed his opportunity to generate revenue by continuing WITH the stream, rather than now struggling against it. The world has moved on. The Alt-right owns the momentum because it attacks the lies and pseudoscience of the postmoderns head-on, rather than continuing the won-battle against socialism. The Libertine generation is over. Libertines cannot hold territory against invaders wishing to impose alternative normative and institutional ambitions. No one gets a free ride on liberty. The only means of obtaining liberty is the violent suppression of those who would take it from us. Alt-right is the only possible form of liberty, and therefore the only direction of libertarian investment. It is what it is. Adapt or perish. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
-
Mises Gets Credit – for both his insights and his failings.
—“Curt Doolittle and Chris Cathcart — I am not sure I get your point that [Mises] will never get credit … he already does!”—Peter Boettke
[W]ell, we all agree that he gets credit for stating that socialism was impossible. The question is whether he did so using justification from axiom, or by analysis of available information, available operations, and rational incentives. I don’t think anyone argues that his insight was correct. What I argue is that he, like Freud, Boaz, Cantor, Marx, (Mises), the Frankfurt School and Rothbard, demonstrated the pervasive Cosmopolitan error of creating an authoritarian pseudoscience in justification of his priors, rather than engaging in science for the specific purpose of eliminating error, bias and priors, wishful thinking and deceit from one’s theories. All knowledge is theoretical because outside of trivialities and tautologies, no premises are certain. Einstein demonstrated that if we cannot count on a concept such as length or time, that no premise is informationally complete enough to deduce necessary consequences. An axiom is a declarative construction – an analogy to reality, and is informationally complete. But no non trivial statement about reality is informationally complete. It cannot be. (hence critical rationalism and critical preference). Science is not justificationary, it is critical: we do not prove something is true, we see if it survives criticism. And the only test of existentially of any hypothesis is operational construction. As such praxeological analysis tests whether a statement CAN be true. So we cannot deduce all of economics from first premises (particularly the incomplete sentence “man acts”). We can observe (empirically) the unobservable, and then construct the observation out of rational actions to test if it is a truth candidate. But we cannot deduce all candidate operations from first principles – demonstrably so. As such correctly positioning Mises in intellectual history as the another failure of the 20th century thinkers to complete the evolution of the scientific method from moral and justificationary to objective and critical. This demonstrates that mises was, like Brouwer and Bridgman and Popper, attempting to eliminate the evolution of 19th and 20th century pseudoscience that Hayek warned us was the advent of a new form of mysticism. Unfortunately, Bridgman and Brouwer did not understand Popper, Hayek could’t put the fields together because he started with psychology rather than ‘calculability’ and ‘computability’. Mises correctly understood calculation but not computability, nor the relation between computably and subjective human incentives. Mises missed the boat by trying to create an pseudoscience or authoritarian logic to suppress pseudoscientific innumeracy in economics. What none of them realized – Popper included – is that the scientific method is a MORAL WARRANTY of due diligence in the elimination of error, bias, wishful thinking and deceit. And that what each of them had done was attempt to prevent the emergent pseudoscience of the Cosmopolitans and Postmodernists that for all intents and purposes functions as the second ‘christianization’ of Europe, this time, by pseudoscientific rather than mystical means. And that mises had incorrectly conflated logical necessity with adherence to the necessary morality of voluntary cooperation. This is a very profound insight into intellectual history. If I wanted to reform Mises I could. But that isn’t necessary. The world has moved on. Instead, the problem we face in our generation is not socialism, but postmodernism and lingering Cosmopolitan pseudoscience and innumeracy in the social sciences. We face pervasive mysticism, pseudoscience, innumeracy, propagandizing, and outright lying in politics and daily life after more than a century of diluting our education in grammar, rhetoric, logic, history and morality. Undermining Rothbardian fallacies is just as important as undermining socialist, postmodern, democratic secular humanist, and neo-conservatism. And unfortunately to undermine Rothbardian fallacies requires we undermine the fallacies that Rothbard depends upon in his arguments. And to some degree that means doing greater criticism of Mises than we might like. A philosopher’s followers can ruin his legacy. His did. There is Precious little Austrian in Mises to start with. He is from Lviv Ukraine, and a Cosmopolitan author in genetics, culture, and method of argument. He is not a scientist. He is attempting to write scriptural law. And he makes consistent errors of conflating law, hermeneutic interpretation in the construction of his insight: it’s not moral or true if it’s not constructible out of rational human actions, and it’s not calculable, moral, and true for human beings to attempt rational planning in the face of state-manufactured deceit. There is very little difference between postmodern propagandism and monetary manipulation. They are both disinformation campaigns designed to alter public behavior to state rather than individual, family, group and tribal ends. So it is not that state interference in the economy cannot be studied in the discipline of economics. It is that doing so studies disinformation, whereas the study of fully informed voluntary cooperation free of error, bias, wishful thinking and deception is the study of moral economics. In retrospect it’s not complicated. So while I partly agree with you, the damage done by his fallacies to the progress of liberty, and their amplification by rothbard/HHH/MI, have been far more harmful than good. LR at MI tried to use Alinsky’s model of creating propaganda and community. But this battle was above the heads of these people. Whether well intentioned or not. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
-
Mises Gets Credit – for both his insights and his failings.
—“Curt Doolittle and Chris Cathcart — I am not sure I get your point that [Mises] will never get credit … he already does!”—Peter Boettke
[W]ell, we all agree that he gets credit for stating that socialism was impossible. The question is whether he did so using justification from axiom, or by analysis of available information, available operations, and rational incentives. I don’t think anyone argues that his insight was correct. What I argue is that he, like Freud, Boaz, Cantor, Marx, (Mises), the Frankfurt School and Rothbard, demonstrated the pervasive Cosmopolitan error of creating an authoritarian pseudoscience in justification of his priors, rather than engaging in science for the specific purpose of eliminating error, bias and priors, wishful thinking and deceit from one’s theories. All knowledge is theoretical because outside of trivialities and tautologies, no premises are certain. Einstein demonstrated that if we cannot count on a concept such as length or time, that no premise is informationally complete enough to deduce necessary consequences. An axiom is a declarative construction – an analogy to reality, and is informationally complete. But no non trivial statement about reality is informationally complete. It cannot be. (hence critical rationalism and critical preference). Science is not justificationary, it is critical: we do not prove something is true, we see if it survives criticism. And the only test of existentially of any hypothesis is operational construction. As such praxeological analysis tests whether a statement CAN be true. So we cannot deduce all of economics from first premises (particularly the incomplete sentence “man acts”). We can observe (empirically) the unobservable, and then construct the observation out of rational actions to test if it is a truth candidate. But we cannot deduce all candidate operations from first principles – demonstrably so. As such correctly positioning Mises in intellectual history as the another failure of the 20th century thinkers to complete the evolution of the scientific method from moral and justificationary to objective and critical. This demonstrates that mises was, like Brouwer and Bridgman and Popper, attempting to eliminate the evolution of 19th and 20th century pseudoscience that Hayek warned us was the advent of a new form of mysticism. Unfortunately, Bridgman and Brouwer did not understand Popper, Hayek could’t put the fields together because he started with psychology rather than ‘calculability’ and ‘computability’. Mises correctly understood calculation but not computability, nor the relation between computably and subjective human incentives. Mises missed the boat by trying to create an pseudoscience or authoritarian logic to suppress pseudoscientific innumeracy in economics. What none of them realized – Popper included – is that the scientific method is a MORAL WARRANTY of due diligence in the elimination of error, bias, wishful thinking and deceit. And that what each of them had done was attempt to prevent the emergent pseudoscience of the Cosmopolitans and Postmodernists that for all intents and purposes functions as the second ‘christianization’ of Europe, this time, by pseudoscientific rather than mystical means. And that mises had incorrectly conflated logical necessity with adherence to the necessary morality of voluntary cooperation. This is a very profound insight into intellectual history. If I wanted to reform Mises I could. But that isn’t necessary. The world has moved on. Instead, the problem we face in our generation is not socialism, but postmodernism and lingering Cosmopolitan pseudoscience and innumeracy in the social sciences. We face pervasive mysticism, pseudoscience, innumeracy, propagandizing, and outright lying in politics and daily life after more than a century of diluting our education in grammar, rhetoric, logic, history and morality. Undermining Rothbardian fallacies is just as important as undermining socialist, postmodern, democratic secular humanist, and neo-conservatism. And unfortunately to undermine Rothbardian fallacies requires we undermine the fallacies that Rothbard depends upon in his arguments. And to some degree that means doing greater criticism of Mises than we might like. A philosopher’s followers can ruin his legacy. His did. There is Precious little Austrian in Mises to start with. He is from Lviv Ukraine, and a Cosmopolitan author in genetics, culture, and method of argument. He is not a scientist. He is attempting to write scriptural law. And he makes consistent errors of conflating law, hermeneutic interpretation in the construction of his insight: it’s not moral or true if it’s not constructible out of rational human actions, and it’s not calculable, moral, and true for human beings to attempt rational planning in the face of state-manufactured deceit. There is very little difference between postmodern propagandism and monetary manipulation. They are both disinformation campaigns designed to alter public behavior to state rather than individual, family, group and tribal ends. So it is not that state interference in the economy cannot be studied in the discipline of economics. It is that doing so studies disinformation, whereas the study of fully informed voluntary cooperation free of error, bias, wishful thinking and deception is the study of moral economics. In retrospect it’s not complicated. So while I partly agree with you, the damage done by his fallacies to the progress of liberty, and their amplification by rothbard/HHH/MI, have been far more harmful than good. LR at MI tried to use Alinsky’s model of creating propaganda and community. But this battle was above the heads of these people. Whether well intentioned or not. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine
-
No, Mises is Not a Hero. (Not that he wasn’t pretty good)
[I] love him but he was wrong. He conflates definitions with demonstrated behavior and this is an example of why he was ostracized for his dogmatic verbalisms. His method of investigation, which he calls Austrian but is arguably Ukrainian instead, is reducible to the study of the means of improving the institutions that facilitate the voluntary organization of production by eliminating all possible frictions to economic velocity. Whereas the mainstream is reducible to the maximum consumption that can be generated by interfering with the voluntary organization of production without producing the disincentives that would increase frictions sufficiently to produce results counter to the ambition. When the differences between misesian and mainstream are one of morality and externality, not definition. Mises engaged in fallacies throughout his work. He makes consistent mistakes in the application of aprioristic logic of axiomatic systems to the proximal logic of theoretical systems. He discovered operationalism in economics just as Brouwer discovered it in math, and Bridgman in physics, and popper in philosophy. But none of them managed to put their efforts together into an innovation in the scientific method and the formal uniting of philosophy and science into a single discipline; and finally retiring moral discourse just as moral discourse retired religious discourse. This is perhaps one of the greatest failures of the twentieth century. Mises was a little right. But his dogmatism ended both his career and his potential to solve the problem not just if economics but if the social sciences.