Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • We Don’t Need To Research Property Any Further

    [W]e Don’t Need To Further Research Property – it’s Settled Science.

    1) Property that we consider ours, is that which we bear costs to obtain or bear costs if we lose.

    2) Property that is necessary within a cooperative kinship group is determined by that which is necessary to prevent free-riding.

    3) Property that we demonstrate to others that we consider ours, is determined by what one is willing to defend.

    4) Property rights demonstrated by others are limited to the property that others are willing to defend on our behalf.

    The question then, is not what is property, but how willing are we to defend the property that we demonstrate.

    We don’t need to invent property – or a limit to it.

    We need to adjudicate disputes over what we demonstrate to be property ourselves, among our cooperatives and kin, from those who we must defend it from, and those who we ask to help us in that defense.

    Every other argument is merely an attempt to gain a discount through verbal deception.

    (Punish The Wicked)

  • Property Rights Are Cheaper Than Slavery Or Serfdom

    CHEAPER FOR THE STRONG TO GIVE PEOPLE PROPERTY RIGHTS

    [P]roperty exists prior to codification in a constitution. So does promise, prior to the institution of contract. A constitution is merely an agreement for reciprocal insurance of the terms of property and contract.

    It so happens that allocation of property rights determines the incentives possible, and the incentives determine the degree of market participation – how many hands make the work light – and therefore the cost of providing individuals with incentives.

    It’s just cheaper for the strong to give everyone property rights – so long as none of the weak band together to extract from the strong under platonic justification via those self-same rules.

    This is the same reason that Slavery is illogical as well as immoral: assuming the prior slaves respect property rights and do not form a government of extraction, then it is merely cheaper and easier to have one’s slaves as vendors and customers.

  • Property Rights Are Cheaper Than Slavery Or Serfdom

    CHEAPER FOR THE STRONG TO GIVE PEOPLE PROPERTY RIGHTS

    [P]roperty exists prior to codification in a constitution. So does promise, prior to the institution of contract. A constitution is merely an agreement for reciprocal insurance of the terms of property and contract.

    It so happens that allocation of property rights determines the incentives possible, and the incentives determine the degree of market participation – how many hands make the work light – and therefore the cost of providing individuals with incentives.

    It’s just cheaper for the strong to give everyone property rights – so long as none of the weak band together to extract from the strong under platonic justification via those self-same rules.

    This is the same reason that Slavery is illogical as well as immoral: assuming the prior slaves respect property rights and do not form a government of extraction, then it is merely cheaper and easier to have one’s slaves as vendors and customers.

  • We Discovered Truth-Telling

    [W]hile Propertarianism does provide the missing logic of cooperation that Mises promised us, and that the prohibition of free riding is the single cooperative problem to be overcome, that the central proposition of Propertarianism is the western struggle to testify truthfully to one’s jury, and that trust is the result of that struggle, and economic velocity the result of that trust. And that economic velocity is the reason for both phases of the west’s rapid advancement: the classical and modern worlds that both times have dragged man out of ignorance, and in our most recent case, dragged him out of poverty.

    So if I want something to be learned, it is that: we discovered truth telling.

  • We Discovered Truth-Telling

    [W]hile Propertarianism does provide the missing logic of cooperation that Mises promised us, and that the prohibition of free riding is the single cooperative problem to be overcome, that the central proposition of Propertarianism is the western struggle to testify truthfully to one’s jury, and that trust is the result of that struggle, and economic velocity the result of that trust. And that economic velocity is the reason for both phases of the west’s rapid advancement: the classical and modern worlds that both times have dragged man out of ignorance, and in our most recent case, dragged him out of poverty.

    So if I want something to be learned, it is that: we discovered truth telling.

  • The Transaction Cost Theory of Government

    PROPERTARIANISM: THE TRANSACTION COST THEORY OF GOVERNMENT
    (second draft) (closer)

    [H]istory says only that the development of a state – a monopoly bureaucracy – transfers high local transaction costs without central rents, to state rents and low transaction cost. Libertarians nearly universally ignore the evidence of universal transaction costs and free riding at the local level.

    And they further ignore the demonstrated necessity using organized violence by a monopoly organization to suppress those transaction costs and free ridings (“local rents”), and to convert them into central rents in order to pay for such suppression.

    The counter-argument is that states are in fact a neutral cost, and that we don’t spend enough on them in the suppression of transaction costs, because states provide multiples of return on that suppression. This is also demonstrable.

    The question isn’t how we can do without the state (a corporation articulated as a monopoly definition of property rights ), but now that we have suppressed local transaction costs, and replaced them with centralized rents in order to produce the commons we call property rights – how do we suppress centralized rents while maintaining the suppression of transaction costs, and the ability to construct commons that such suppression of transaction costs and rents allows us to construct?

    To argue that a monopoly definition of property rights is somehow “bad”, is irrational since property, obtained by homesteading and by voluntarily exchange, under the requirements for productivity, warranty and symmetry, is as far as I know, as logically consistent and exception-less as are mathematical operations on natural numbers. So the imposition of property rights cannot be illogical, immoral, unethical no matter how they are imposed since they define that which is logical, ethical and moral.

    There is nothing wrong whatsoever with violence – in fact, it is violence with which we pay for property rights and liberty – it is our first, most important resource in the construction of liberty. Instead, the question is purely institutional: having used violence to centralize transaction costs into rents, how do we now use violence to eliminate rents from the central organization?

    This is pretty easy: Universal standing, Universal Property rights, and Organically constructed, Common Law, predicated upon the one law of property rights as positive articulation of the prohibition on and the suppression of involuntary transfers: the demand for fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchanges free of externality. Because it is only under fully informed, productive, voluntary transfer, warrantied and free of externality that cooperation is rational, rather than parasitic. And only under rational cooperation is forgoing one’s opportunity to use violence equally rational.

    The question becomes then, who prohibits the formation of authority and this falls to the citizenry: the militia – those who possess violence.

    As far as I know this is the correct analysis of political evolution, and the correct theory for future political action.

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • The Transaction Cost Theory of Government

    PROPERTARIANISM: THE TRANSACTION COST THEORY OF GOVERNMENT
    (second draft) (closer)

    [H]istory says only that the development of a state – a monopoly bureaucracy – transfers high local transaction costs without central rents, to state rents and low transaction cost. Libertarians nearly universally ignore the evidence of universal transaction costs and free riding at the local level.

    And they further ignore the demonstrated necessity using organized violence by a monopoly organization to suppress those transaction costs and free ridings (“local rents”), and to convert them into central rents in order to pay for such suppression.

    The counter-argument is that states are in fact a neutral cost, and that we don’t spend enough on them in the suppression of transaction costs, because states provide multiples of return on that suppression. This is also demonstrable.

    The question isn’t how we can do without the state (a corporation articulated as a monopoly definition of property rights ), but now that we have suppressed local transaction costs, and replaced them with centralized rents in order to produce the commons we call property rights – how do we suppress centralized rents while maintaining the suppression of transaction costs, and the ability to construct commons that such suppression of transaction costs and rents allows us to construct?

    To argue that a monopoly definition of property rights is somehow “bad”, is irrational since property, obtained by homesteading and by voluntarily exchange, under the requirements for productivity, warranty and symmetry, is as far as I know, as logically consistent and exception-less as are mathematical operations on natural numbers. So the imposition of property rights cannot be illogical, immoral, unethical no matter how they are imposed since they define that which is logical, ethical and moral.

    There is nothing wrong whatsoever with violence – in fact, it is violence with which we pay for property rights and liberty – it is our first, most important resource in the construction of liberty. Instead, the question is purely institutional: having used violence to centralize transaction costs into rents, how do we now use violence to eliminate rents from the central organization?

    This is pretty easy: Universal standing, Universal Property rights, and Organically constructed, Common Law, predicated upon the one law of property rights as positive articulation of the prohibition on and the suppression of involuntary transfers: the demand for fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchanges free of externality. Because it is only under fully informed, productive, voluntary transfer, warrantied and free of externality that cooperation is rational, rather than parasitic. And only under rational cooperation is forgoing one’s opportunity to use violence equally rational.

    The question becomes then, who prohibits the formation of authority and this falls to the citizenry: the militia – those who possess violence.

    As far as I know this is the correct analysis of political evolution, and the correct theory for future political action.

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • The Price of Property Rights

    –“You don’t have a right to rights. Pay full price, like everyone else.”–  Eli Harman

    –“The entrance fee to the land of Liberty is your contractual obligation to risk life, limb and property to obtain and defend it. Free riders have permission only – not Liberty. Only fee paying members have existential rights.”– Curt Doolittle (Punish the wicked.)

  • The Price of Property Rights

    –“You don’t have a right to rights. Pay full price, like everyone else.”–  Eli Harman

    –“The entrance fee to the land of Liberty is your contractual obligation to risk life, limb and property to obtain and defend it. Free riders have permission only – not Liberty. Only fee paying members have existential rights.”– Curt Doolittle (Punish the wicked.)

  • The Future: Doolittle, Haidt, Hawkins, Dennett

    William L. Benge just pointed out to me that “Dennett and Hawkins” have pretty much demonstrated the end of the Cathedral’s fallacy, and have moved beyond it.

    I think if you watch Hawkin’s talk, then Haidt’s talk on moral blindness, then my talk on The Inter-temporal Division of Reproductive Labor. Then you begin to see the future : we act more like a set of hives than the individually rational actors proposed by the greeks and the enlightenment.

    DOOLITTLE
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBNg4NpDTxM

    HAIDT
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc

    HAWKINS
    http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_computing

    DENNETT
    http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness?language=en