While we use it as such, Government is not a synonym for a bureaucracy that wields law with which it coerces others by the threat of violence. It is not government itself that people disagree with. It is government whose actions they disagree with. And those actions are only possible because we believe government must consist of a bureaucracy. Everything we disdain about government is a criticism of bureaucracy, and the iron law of oligarchy that is the unavoidable consequence of bureaucracy. We don’t need a bureaucracy. We dont need majority rule. We need a government where groups and classes can exchange with one another. We need something entirely different from what we have.
Source: Original Site Post
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We Need A Very Different Government
While we use it as such, Government is not a synonym for a bureaucracy that wields law with which it coerces others by the threat of violence. It is not government itself that people disagree with. It is government whose actions they disagree with. And those actions are only possible because we believe government must consist of a bureaucracy. Everything we disdain about government is a criticism of bureaucracy, and the iron law of oligarchy that is the unavoidable consequence of bureaucracy. We don’t need a bureaucracy. We dont need majority rule. We need a government where groups and classes can exchange with one another. We need something entirely different from what we have.
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Pew Research: Republicans are More Informed And Open Minded Than Democrats
(From Pew Research.) If Republicans skew male, and Democrats skew female, and men accumulate more economic and political knowledge than women, and women have fewer and less diverse friends than men, then isn’t the fact that Republicans are better informed and more open minded than Democrats simply an artifact of the distribution of men and women between the parties? The classical liberal system was designed to create separate houses for different classes of males. It has not survived the addition of females to the electorate. We should not have eliminated the class division of houses, we should have added to it. Then we could compromise rather than conduct ideological warfare, class warfare, and gender warfare. And the results of these polls would be obvious.
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Why Does The Left Alliance Of Economists Fail? (Krugman, DeLong, Yglasias, Thoma, Smith)
Why does wall street resist QE for example? Wall Street staff are in the business of planning and policy interferes with their plans, both by uncertainty and by impact. Like any specialization with a defined methodology and therefore a limited scope of understanding, Wall Street’s opinion is irrelevant (as @Richard Williamson says above) as their opinions are too unsophisticated to have meaning. WS is a mob not a hierarchy. WS is only material in how they REACT to change. How they react to change in the short term will be negative — to anything that interferes with their existing plans. Where ‘plans’ in this case are vague heuristic assumptions. But because they have the highest liquidity and most flexible liquidity of any industry in the market, their cost for changing plans is lower than the cost of changing plans for anyone else in the market. So, the problem with advancing QE/Spending policy is not wall street. It is politics, of which WS is just one constituency. And the problem of politics is the failure of the four groups of ECONOMIC IDEOLOGISTS to compose an economic program that PREVENTS INVOLUNTARY TRANSFERS between groups and instead BORROWS FROM AND REWARDS GROUPS. Where groups profit from different temporal positions on the human production cycle, and where that production cycle manifests itself as time preference. Your assumption is instead, that it will ‘trickle through’ the economy, making you no different from any one of the OTHER groups of economic ideologists who want to rewards to ‘trickle up’ or ‘trickle down’ or ‘trickle out from the entrepreneurial middle’. ‘Trickling’ produces all sorts of involuntary transfers, of status, of risk, of opportunity, and of wealth. We are not children, we do not have to play one note. we can compose a chord of solutions. The fantasy of the egalitarian community of common interest, for some reason, blinds left-economists and moderates alike to the inequality of function and therefore inequality of methods and incentives that different functional groups have in the economy,and by consequence the incentives of the political groups that represent them. As Kahneman argues, people fight MUCH harder to prevent involuntary transfers than they do for their own reward. This behavior MANDATES that the four major schools, each of whom represent four groups, who represent four periodicities of human planning, conduct processes of voluntary exchange between the groups rather than attempt to support one ‘team’ winning. For this reason I find the left’s position somewhat humorously hypocritical: a pot calling a kettle black. The methodology and incentives of WS are narrow and self serving, and the methodology of Keyensians is narrow and self serving. I will be proven right in time — certainly more right than the Keynesians. I look at that group the way they look at wall street: myopic because of methodologically enforced ignorance, all of which is preceded by a cognitive bias, a cognitive bias which is the product of biology not wisdom. As is evidenced by their failure to grasp the principles of human cooperation that are common sense to conservatives. The conservatives are offering compromises, and have been doing so consistently (DOE and HUD). And you don’t want to pay those compromises, so they fit and fuss over creating a distraction to avoid the fact that they just want what they want regardless of the costs to others. DEAR PROGRESSIVE ECONOMISTS. THE PROBLEM IS YOU, NOT WALL STREET, BUT YOU. THE PROBLEM IS YOU. You’re supposed to be smart. Try to be. Otherwise, if possessed of this knowledge you are just another person seeking involuntary transfers from others under the pretense that outcomes are kaliedic. But they are only kaliedic because of your ignorance. Ignorance others do not possess. In that event, you are either just another fool or just another thief. The question is whether you want to refrain from being both, and become a statesman instead. We need some. Heck, one would do. Cheers
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The Village Voice Calls Me A Conservative (Right) And A Racist (Wrong).
I supposed I should know better, but the Village voice is attacking me, and every other ‘right wing blogger’ for defending John Derbyshire.
Curt Doolittle … allowed as how “racism is just plain stupidity.” Nonetheless he explained that “African Americans FACTUALLY demonstrate African American distributions of IQ are FACTUALLY almost a full standard deviation lower than that of their white counterparts,” and that “whites used to be racist but the wars ended their comfort with self confidence. Blacks are racist at the bottom.”
Doolittle also noted that black people are disproportionately represented in crime statistics. He did not consider their disproportionate representation in poverty statistics to be connected — that sort of thinking, we suppose, would conflict with the Austrian Libertarian tradition — but suggested that “aberrant behavior among minorities” in the U.S. is “tolerated under the principle of diversity and freedom of self expression.” — The Village Voice
To which I replied:
Thank you for quoting me on this issue. I was pretty reluctant to write about it. It strikes me as odd that if I write something on fashion or gender relations, or racism, that it gets a lot of attention — my most popular article was when I stated that tattoos had gone out of style in the middle class. But if I write something meaningful about political theory you can hear crickets. So, I guess this kind of thing goes with the territory.
But I have a few nits with your quote:
1) Racism is just plain stupid. One cannot judge an individual by the properties of his class. Although one can judge a class by the properties of its individuals.
2) Denying that we in the states have a racial issue is not stupid. It’s obvious, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I’lll avoid the detail of why we have a greater problem with race than our English and Canadian counterparts, but the fact that we do, is indicative of the problem. They can enforce behavioral norms, and our society has forbidden such pressure to conformity as the French impose.
3) Denying that poverty is a symptom is not stupid either. You imply that I do not seem to appreciate this issue. Acknowledging that the reason for poverty is not racism but IQ is not stupid either. It’s just what it is. Acknowledging that the distribution of IQ varies among groups isn’t stupid either.
5) I’m not advocating racism – that is an emotional construct. I”m saying that the suite of policy solutions that seek to solve the problem through educational commingling, and treating racial groups as homogenous in ability is simply HARMFUL to those at the bottom, 40% of whom are black. Even the genders are not homogenous. If we look at the data we should not start boys in school for a year after we start girls, and perhaps two years. That’s just one aspect of the Finnish model. Instead, those troubled demographics need special attention. I’m appealing for special attention — ie: schools designed to teach something other than middle class whites and asians. I can forgive you for not knowing my broader political position, and leaping to the conclusion you did. I’m just not sure I want to let the error go unanswered. And a look at the complexion of my family, which is a rainbow, should be enough to convince anyone of my personal disposition.
6) Derbyshire was fired for speaking the truth in order to draw attention to the problem. I”m not sure I think his argument is particularly useful. I am sure I don’t agree with his reasons or his solutions. But he was speaking the truth. If you are one of the deniers that thinks human IQ distributions are environmental rather than genetic, then you can get together with climate deniers and have a celebration. But the matter is settled in the data. It’s settled in the profession. And the dirty secret of the Human Genome project: we now know why. Social classes are genetically determined too. And capitalism’s fast meritocratic rotation makes these differences rapidly visible.
So lets move beyond name calling and solve this problem. We can solve it by throwing welfare money at it, or do what we’re doing and continue to see little progress, or we can understand that a very different school system is needed with far more support for a demographic that needs special care in order to fit successfully into society. Because what we’re doing isn’t working.
The race and class warfare prevents us from “Getting To Denmark” and building an egalitarian society. I don’t believe that society can be created with a 300M+ population like it can in a 5M population if we have to rely on a government where consensus of belief is needed and where the winner takes all. And reorganizing our political institutions to accomodate for our impossibly complex diversity of opinion, desire, visions AND abilities, is what I work on full time.
I don’t expect thanks for it. On the other hand, I have many faults, but I don’t think the one you’re attributing to me is one of them. 🙂
Thanks
Curt Doolittle
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Mises On Determinism: An Agnostic.
His argument is that the human mind must determine action or the human creature cannot survive as an acting animal, And the human mind therefore is incapable of seeing the universe as anything other than a sequence of causes. It is a criticism of the tendency of the human mind to err.
Quote: “It is impossible, … for the human mind to think of any event as uncaused. The concepts of chance and contingency, if properly analyzed, do not refer ultimately to the course of events in the universe. They refer to human knowledge, prevision, and action. They have a praxeological, not an ontological connotation.”
[callout]The universe cannot observe itself, predict it’s own movements, and construct a plan by which it may alter events. It consists of constant categories. The categories used by human beings are limited only by their desired actions, and their desired actions, in collective permutation, are less limited than those of the physical universe.[/callout]
In other words, any notion of determinism is an artifact of the human mind. He goes on to give examples of how different fields err. He summarizes by saying we just don’t know whether it is or not, and that we may be prevented from understanding whether it is or not, simply because we cannot conceive of it otherwise. He’s agnostic. He’s not a determinist. He says we just don’t know, and in all the examples that we have tried so far, none of them survive critical analysis. He argues that the use of numerical aggregates and statistics only reinforce that issue. I can see how someone would not understand his argument if they didn’t read it carefully. But his first paragraph makes the entire argument:
Quote “Whatever the true nature of the universe and of reality may be, man can learn about it only what the logical structure of his mind makes comprehensible to him. Reason, the sole instrument of human science and philosophy, does not convey absolute knowledge and final wisdom. It is vain to speculate about ultimate things. What appears to man’s inquiry as an ultimate given, defying further analysis and reduction to something more fundamental, may or may not appear such to a more perfect intellect. We do not know.”
He’s an agnostic, not a determinist: “WE DO NOT KNOW.” And any illusion that we can know is a byproduct of the structure of the human mind. Therefore by occam’s razor, it’s more likely that we’re simply WRONG whenever we have deterministic ideas. So Mises was not a determinist. Since his time, we have learned enough, that it is possible to defeat the argument to physical determinism in human action, if not the physical world. What arguments to Determinism that remain, are artifacts of religious mysticism and the structure of our minds. 1) Causality Exists 2) Determinism doesn’t. (Unless there is a god who determines everything.)
“RE: “Like “Existence”, “Causation” is, as Gian-Carlo Rota might have said, a folie. There is only direction of entropy as measured by gradients of correlation. It is one of those dirty secrets of philosophy of science.” – A Critic
This view of causality is only true in the abstract, special case of relations in the physical universe which exist independently of human action. When instead, we consider that category of relations which are the result of human action, and where such action requires information necessary to plan, and where such information is of necessity a generalization of the complexity of the physical universe, and as such where a loss of information is necessitated by such acts of generalization, and where such a loss of information is necessary in order to compose an action which will alter the existing course of events using a process of heuristic calculation, where that calculation is made with fragmentary information, and where actions are limited to the possible scope of human actions. Then by necessity causation consists of a set of actions that are observable, and categorically definable both individually, and in the aggregate, by observation of those actions. Actions which produce patterns of outcome which are distinguishable from the entropic limitations of the physical universe. A physical universe to which calculation and aggregation are impossible concepts. The universe cannot observe itself, predict it’s own movements, and construct a plan by which it may alter events. It consists of constant categories. The categories used by human beings are limited only by their desired actions, and their desired actions, in collective permutation, are less limited than those of the physical universe. Anyway, I think I might understand the suggestion that mises was a causal determinist at this point as saying: a) State t1 is the product of prior states tn{..}. b) each state in tn{} is the product of human naming and identity. BUT c) this is not to say that tn{} is complete. d) this is not to say that tn+1 must occur, only that tn+1 can be described by tn+1{…} In this sense, human action is not deterministic, it is however causally determinable. If the question of determinism is metaphysical, then: a) Mises has made no statements to metaphysical determinism, only that humans think in deterministic terms and are incapable of doing otherwise. This is a statement about human beings, not the physical universe. b) If instead of a metaphysical question, it is a question of praxeological action, then all human actions have causes, moreover, all actions are rational (in the broader sense of the term). c) causality is separate from determinacy. That all events have enumerable causes is separate and distinct from the assertion that all causes produce fixed ends. In this sense, the term causal (praxeological) determinism can have meaning separate from Fatalism, Predeterminism, or Predictability, as well as causal (metaphysical) determinism. Mises may have ben a praxeological determinist but not a metaphysical determinist. Clear as mud I’m sure. 🙂
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The Four Academic Political Parties Of The Economic Apocalypse
The Four Academic Parties Of The Economic Apocalypse The 1) Keynesian Spenders, 2) Chicago Monetarists, 3) Classical Liberal Industrial Policy Advocates and 4) Austrian Human Capital Advocates, will not put aside ideological differences and work together to propose a suite of solutions that will both stimulate the economy, and provide each ‘economic political party’, and each ‘governmental political party’ and their respective constituencies, with compensation for the involuntary transfers that will occur, and the negative externalities that will be brought about, if we borrow and spend.Blame Krugman And The Left I blame this set off affairs on on Krugman in particular, but the entire mainstream movement in general, whose ‘party’ is currently in power. And who, like all parties in power, seek to push their agenda independently of compromise rather than the agenda of the collective through artful compromise. Unfortunately, the people in government do not have a sufficient grasp of the different schools to think of them as the adjuncts to political parties that they are. When Obama called a meeting of ‘top economists’, there oval office contained only left wing economists – none of them white or christian either. Thereby demonstrating his preference, and in doing so guaranteeing that a broad based solution was impossible. Exchanges Build Permission To Spend It would be entirely possible for the left to ’spend’ in exchange for wiping out the DOE, HUD and public education tenure. That would be a fair exchange. It would be entirely possible to ’spend’ in exchange for a new immigration policy. That would be a fair exchange. But all efforts at exchange have failed. Polarization continues. And you simply seek economic dictatorship, so that you can remove the means by which the population can rebel against the state. The Reincarnation Of The Devil Himself: The Cashless Economy I agree with the MMT crowd, and Yglasias, that the elimination of paper currency will allow forcible redistribution across the entire economy by way of monetary policy alone, which will allow the Left/Statist/Keynesian alliance to overwhelm the Monetarist, Industrial and Human Capital parties, and each of their supporters, in the domesticl economic legislature of intellectual opinion. The Resistance Movement The other Political/Economic party coalitions object to spending, because they object to further empowering the left/state/keynesian party. This is the opportunity that the moderate and right side coalitions are using to punish the state for over reaching. The conservative strategy is to starve the beast and bankrupt the state before it can bankrupt them, and entirely destroy their culture. (Albiet, it’s probably too late now.) It appears to most of us, who focus on productivity instead of consumption, that both increases in spending, and a cashless society, simply remove the constraints on destruction of productivity, and further encourages the creation of catastrophic bubbles that will not be able to be ‘fixed’ by market corrections, but instead, will be solved only by revolution, economic irrelevance and poverty, or military conquest. Yes People Prefer Depression To Revolution, Civil War, Economic Impoverishment, and Conquest. So yes, people clearly prefer this ‘state of affairs’ to those where the state is further empowered to expose them to risk. And in that sense, it is a rational choice, a fair trade, and it is currently being purchased at a discount. Economics is inseparable from politics. Because economics is a subset of politics. And politics prevail. Politics prevails because the material economy lives at the service of the status economy. It always has and it always will.
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The Four Academic Political Parties Of The Economic Apocalypse
The Four Academic Parties Of The Economic Apocalypse The 1) Keynesian Spenders, 2) Chicago Monetarists, 3) Classical Liberal Industrial Policy Advocates and 4) Austrian Human Capital Advocates, will not put aside ideological differences and work together to propose a suite of solutions that will both stimulate the economy, and provide each ‘economic political party’, and each ‘governmental political party’ and their respective constituencies, with compensation for the involuntary transfers that will occur, and the negative externalities that will be brought about, if we borrow and spend.Blame Krugman And The Left I blame this set off affairs on on Krugman in particular, but the entire mainstream movement in general, whose ‘party’ is currently in power. And who, like all parties in power, seek to push their agenda independently of compromise rather than the agenda of the collective through artful compromise. Unfortunately, the people in government do not have a sufficient grasp of the different schools to think of them as the adjuncts to political parties that they are. When Obama called a meeting of ‘top economists’, there oval office contained only left wing economists – none of them white or christian either. Thereby demonstrating his preference, and in doing so guaranteeing that a broad based solution was impossible. Exchanges Build Permission To Spend It would be entirely possible for the left to ’spend’ in exchange for wiping out the DOE, HUD and public education tenure. That would be a fair exchange. It would be entirely possible to ’spend’ in exchange for a new immigration policy. That would be a fair exchange. But all efforts at exchange have failed. Polarization continues. And you simply seek economic dictatorship, so that you can remove the means by which the population can rebel against the state. The Reincarnation Of The Devil Himself: The Cashless Economy I agree with the MMT crowd, and Yglasias, that the elimination of paper currency will allow forcible redistribution across the entire economy by way of monetary policy alone, which will allow the Left/Statist/Keynesian alliance to overwhelm the Monetarist, Industrial and Human Capital parties, and each of their supporters, in the domesticl economic legislature of intellectual opinion. The Resistance Movement The other Political/Economic party coalitions object to spending, because they object to further empowering the left/state/keynesian party. This is the opportunity that the moderate and right side coalitions are using to punish the state for over reaching. The conservative strategy is to starve the beast and bankrupt the state before it can bankrupt them, and entirely destroy their culture. (Albiet, it’s probably too late now.) It appears to most of us, who focus on productivity instead of consumption, that both increases in spending, and a cashless society, simply remove the constraints on destruction of productivity, and further encourages the creation of catastrophic bubbles that will not be able to be ‘fixed’ by market corrections, but instead, will be solved only by revolution, economic irrelevance and poverty, or military conquest. Yes People Prefer Depression To Revolution, Civil War, Economic Impoverishment, and Conquest. So yes, people clearly prefer this ‘state of affairs’ to those where the state is further empowered to expose them to risk. And in that sense, it is a rational choice, a fair trade, and it is currently being purchased at a discount. Economics is inseparable from politics. Because economics is a subset of politics. And politics prevail. Politics prevails because the material economy lives at the service of the status economy. It always has and it always will.
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From interfluidity: Depression is a choice (Yes, it’s a lower cost for freedom than the alternatives.)
On interfuidity, Steve Randy Waldman writes:
We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives.
That’s true. We are in a depression because further empowering the state to interfere in our lives is a higher cost than weathering the depression. And it is CHEAPER to disempower the state now, than it would be by alternative, more physical means. A depression that deprives the state of power, is a cheap way of buying freedom. Usually we have to risk our lives, not our pocketbooks.
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From interfluidity: Depression is a choice (Yes, it’s a lower cost for freedom than the alternatives.)
On interfuidity, Steve Randy Waldman writes:
We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives.
That’s true. We are in a depression because further empowering the state to interfere in our lives is a higher cost than weathering the depression. And it is CHEAPER to disempower the state now, than it would be by alternative, more physical means. A depression that deprives the state of power, is a cheap way of buying freedom. Usually we have to risk our lives, not our pocketbooks.