Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • The Ethnic Nation State Is The Most Likely Means Of Preserving Individual Freedom.

    Great panel discussion today, with speakers on China, Turkey, Islam, Europe, and the Anglosphere. The closing questions were largely to do with the changing world boundaries, and nationalism. Summary by, I think, John O’Sullivan, was that, it certainly appears, that the small ethnic nation state is the most likely means of preserving individual freedom. And the consensus was that neither China nor the USA had strong chances of maintaining political unity over the long term. That is, the USA only has such chances if we return to federalism, devolving power to the states, rather than central authority. We can only hope.

  • A Mouthful Of Pebbles And The Roar Of The Ocean

    Someone asked me (again) today, why I waste my time on some silly online political debate group. And that’s a good question. But I know the answer. It’s a choice. First, it’s not really very useful to argue with people who agree with you. I spent a good half hour last night at a dinner table overlooking the Aegean, arguing core libertarian ethical theory with Stephan Kinsella, who relies on preference and moral argument for his theories. If I agreed with him, what would I learn? You know, it’s like this: The Athenian orator Demosthenes, who had a soft and stammering voice, said that he filled his mouth with pebbles and practiced over the roar of he waves until his speech was perfect. I have a tendency to speak in high abstraction, making leaps between concepts that are too far apart in causal relation for most people to follow. About a decade ago, two friends, Ali from Iran, and Frank from the USA, abused me daily for this kind of lazy communication. I began to view this tendency as ‘my problem’. A form of impediment. And so for ten years I have worked, as Spinoza suggested, to “speak in a manner comprehensible to the common people”. Unfortunately, the common people will not debate, and are happy in their ignorance. But motivated ideological opponents, regardless of their motives, mental ability or character defect, are convenient foils for the improvement of one’s arguments. So, this group, like most online forums, is my mouthful of pebbles. I don’t seek to convert anyone. Although I do find friends occasionally. I simply seek to improve my argument. If others learn in the process than that is find with me. But my purpose is to improve my ability to express ideas.

  • Reductio Libertarianism As An Effort To Export Costs (ie: Theft)

    In yet another debate with crooks masquerading as libertarians. I ask “Define Moral.” Bob replies “Moral = “Absence of coercion. Immoral = Presence of coercion (force or fraud).” Then he teases me a bit for my usually turgid analytical analysis: “What’s your definition, Curt? We assume it’s gotta be a pretty complex definition or it’s not particularly impressive, correct?” To which I reply: “Yes, you have the correct definition for interpersonal relations. However, the same method of analysis applies to shareholder relations. The problem lies in the process of decision making for transfers of assets, which are determined by the shareholder agreement. ie: “constitution”, whether discreet and written, or traditional and structured, or traditional and unstructured. Moral crimes include crimes against shareholder assets. ie: transfers that are possible because of increasing degrees of ignorance, and therefore without interpersonal coercion. Such transfers are not only possible, but easy and invisible, by the act of transferring opportunity costs: “For example, imagine an island where having a child that you cannot support, and therefore must rely upon charity to feed, is an immoral crime. It is a forcible transfer of wealth, because the shareholder agreement forbids allowing a person or child to starve — and therefore the parent, by having a child, forced other shareholders to pay for the support of that child, otherwise the other shareholders would break the agreement themselves. This is an involuntary transfer. Humans organize. Organizations consist of shareholders. Shareholders have responsibilities to avoid transfers. Any Propertarian analysis must include shareholder agreements and shareholder properties, because people do in fact create and live by those shareholder methods and processes. To ignore such organizations is unscientific. Or, worse, an immoral attempt to privatize opportunities, or externalize costs onto others. 🙂 “So I would state it like this (or as a graph):


    2. There are three forms of coercion:
        1) Violence against a person or property,
        2) Fraud,
        3) Opportunity Deprivation (ie:Ostracization or non-cooperation: deprivation of opportunity) We call this ‘moral’ coercion.

    3. There is only one form of ‘manipulation’ of another person’s actions, which is both voluntary and symmetrical ((I use the term ‘symmetrical’ where most would use ‘equitable’, only because I am somewhat concerned about the loaded content of the word ‘equitable’ which is both imprecise and emotionally loaded for my purposes . )), and that is voluntary Trade (Exchange).

    4. People join organizations in order to increase their opportunities, and decrease their costs of opportunities.

    5. Membership in organizations requires Individuals pay direct costs, such as actions and payments, as well as indirect costs, such as forgoing opportunities for gratification, or choosing a less gratifying alternative in order to adhere to specific moral coercions, because it is these moral self-deprivations that forbid the privatization of other people’s forgone opportunity costs.

    6. People join multiple organizations. They do so by paying the direct costs and opportunity costs prescribed in the ‘shareholder agreement’.

    7. Some organizational requirements conflict with other organizational requirements, therefore people ‘cheat’ on their membership costs in order to obtain additional opportunities at a discount

    8. Therefore Interpersonal Moral Action = Absence of coercion.” But since people join organizations in order to increase their opportunities, and decrease their costs of opportunities, this is an insufficient definition for all exchanges.

    9. Therefore Shareholder Moral Action = Absence of Coercion + Absence of Externalization of Costs + Absence of Privatization of Opportunities. This is a sufficient definition for environments where organizations are present.

    10. All moral human actions consist of one or more actions, using zero or more objects, and zero or more interpersonal exchanges, which occur under zero to many shareholder agreements, where the individual does not use any of the three forms of coercion, and does not externalize costs onto other shareholders, or privatize opportunities unto one’s self, or transfer opportunities to others.

    1. The institution of property itself is a form of coercion. Of sacrificing opportunity costs according to a social contract. Therefore we cannot have property to transfer without the costs paid for self deprivation of opportunity – that’s without even considering the necessity for collective defense.
    2. Narrowly Defining morality only as Interpersonal Moral actions is an attempt at appropriation, that is THEFT, by FRAUDULENT MEANS of the vast opportunity costs paid by all members of an organization, both past and present.
    3. Non-conformity is a form of either expensive research programs, or theft, or forcible redistribution — depending upon whether the objective is to increase production (moral), or to conduct a transfer (immoral)
    4. Humans conduct conflicts between their different organizations using these opportunity cost differences embodied in their different social contracts, to which we apply the terms “culture”. Wars can be conducted by direct violence, or economic competition, or by thefts of cultural opportunity costs. This is why religious cults, and class wars, and immigration can succeed in obtaining power. They steal opportunity costs.

    “Is that OK? Because it’s right you know….. :)”

  • A Better Analysis Of Libertarianism: “Why don’t I kill you and take your stuff?”

    As Camus said, the first problem of philosophy is why we do not commit suicide. But that is followed by the first problem of political philosophy, which is not “how do we best get along?” It is “Why don’t I kill you and take your stuff?” I opt for freedom by advocating the organized application of violence against those who would take my stuff. Violence is a virtue, and the source of the institution of property. Without that violence, there is no property, only slavery to those who have either violence or property. So, property does not insure freedom. Violence insures freedom. Violence is a virtue not a vice. Property is simply a more productive use of freedom, because it allows us to develop fixed capital at lower risk, which then increases production and profits, decreases prices. Yet, once we consider that there are differences in ability between individuals, and therefore their differences in ability to create and obtain property in real time, the question remains: if we ask people to forgo the opportunity for theft, murder and plunder, how do we compensate them for their costs? All costs are opportunity costs. A man who is very powerful, or a group of weak people who by their numbers are powerful, is most free from constraints if they can rape, murder and plunder at will. Since they sacrifice this freedom in order to respect property, then what is their compensation for it? If people form a group, organization or corporation for the purpose of plunder, why should others not form a group for the purpose of preventing plunder and creating property and a market for exchange? Is that not exactly the course of development of these organizations? But once these defensive organizations are founded, and power is concentrated in them the bureaucracy forms, and corruption and predation upon the property of others replaces violence against their ‘person’, people, and things. We then attempt to regulate corruption, rather than replacing bureaucracy with market accountability. We replace violence against the barbarians with bribes so that they will respect our property: redistribution is payment for conformity to the standards property definitions of the organization which defends property. Since all costs are opportunity costs, and there is a cost born by those who respect property, each person who respects property is therefore a shareholder in the market. One could say instead, that access to the market is paid for by the cost of forgoing opportunity to rape, murder, pillage, and plunder, thieve and fraud, deceive and lie. And that might be true. But the question is, whether access to the market is SUFFICIENT compensation for the ongoing cost of opportunity paid by respecting property. And whether this is quantifiable or not, people ACT as though it is insufficient, and they rebel against the constraints. Radical individualism is a rational construct for epistemic purposes. But fundamentally, people ORGANIZE to achieve cooperative ends. Individualism is not enough of a solution to the problem of politics. In effect, propertarianism is an upward redistribution of opportunity costs from the lower to the upper classes. Anarchism is an effort to avoid paying costs of creating organizations that create property and create the market. Anarcho capitalism is a research program that has demonstrated the failure of bureaucracy, and suggested private and competitive rather than public and monopolistic means of achieving group ends. But the question then, is who are the shareholders of this organization that is so costly to implement? The answer is all that forgo opportunities for coercion. And what is their return on their forgone opportunities? I am a libertarian by epistemic method and a classical liberal by institutional method, and a conservative by social class and time preference. And I do not want to privatize the costs of others, and participate in corruption, by failing to compensate others for their forgone opportunities, from which I benefit. I simply want to stop corruption in the bureaucracy, and to privatize everything. I do not want to steal from others. Therefore redistribution of some sort is mandatory, because without redistribution, we cannot say that we respect property.

    [callout] Run the government like a business network. Make it an EMPIRICALLY CALCULABLE DECISION process rather than a RATIONAL AND RHETORICAL POLITICAL DEBATE process: [/callout]

    The problem then becomes how to make this process calculable. The answer is simple. Run the government like a business network. Make it an EMPIRICALLY CALCULABLE DECISION process rather than a RATIONAL AND RHETORICAL POLITICAL DEBATE process: “Loans Not Laws.” Laws are loosely calculable. Loans are narrowly calculable. Laws are rational. Loans are empirical. There is only one law, and that is property. Citizens are shareholders. And as shareholders they are due returns on their investment in opportunity costs. This is the grownup version of libertarianism. Most of which has degenerated into a Rothbardian religion supported by Friedman’s monetary analysis.

  • A Centralized NY, and a Distributed LA

    From Peter Gordon, referring to an article in the Atlantic. “The LA metropolitan area is actually spread over parts of five counties and includes twice as many cities as writer Conor Friedersdorf cites. The Orange county-LA county boundary is invisible to most of us. And even granting Friedersdorf’s view of the world, trading the 88 cities he acknowledges for even more authority accruing to the LA County five-member Board of Supervisors would be no great boon. These five already have much more power and money than they can wisely administer.” “There are many good reasons that Americans migrate to the suburbs and one of them is home-rule. Another one is a measure of local government choice. The City of Bell and some others have been found to be corrupt. But the fact that the bad guys have a small jurisdiction to steal from rather than a big one is a good thing.”

  • Translating Complaints About Private Sector Services

    When people disparage the private sector and seek services from the government what they really mean is one or more of the following: 1) DISCOUNT ON RESEARCH / RISK REDUCTION: “I am not able to judge the services in the marketplace, and unable to determine which of the inexpensive choices at my disposal in the market is optimum, and therefore I wish to circumvent the market in exchange for having the same services available to all.” – ie: the ‘roads and sidewalks’ analogy wherein, “I have a right to use the same common goods as everyone else.” 2) PROFIT REDISTRIBUTION: “I am not a desirable customer by any company and therefore, I wish to circumvent the market in order to obtain services that are greater in value than what I produce for exchange in the market by servicing others.” – The redistributive strategy. (To some degree this is a legitimate concern, since there will always be some that it is not worth the effort to serve other than by charity.) The basic idea is that if one conforms to social norms, and pays the high cost of respecting property, that one should get some return on one’s investment. 3) STATUS REDISTRIBUTION: “For any company to whom I am a desirable customer, I will be given services in a manner, and of a quality, that is less than I desire, or which is substandard to my self perceived social status.” (This is redistribution of social status is as important to many on the bottom half, as is monetary redistribution – and to some, more important.) It is particularly important for the lower two quintiles. It is this perception of status redistribution that creates ‘enfranchisement’ in the social order. Or rather, it is participation in the middle class, as a consumer, that people desire in order to consider themselves a ‘citizen’ who supports the social order. 4) ENCOURAGE GOVERNMENT COMPETITION WITH PRIVATE SERVICES: “I can more successfully petition the government for redress than I can a company, because I am a more valuable customer to the government than I am to any private company.” (There is increasingly truthful content to this perception – an argument which is beyond addressing here, but which is the increasing performance of public market, and public-credit companies, acting as bureaucracies because they can afford to rely on credit and prices rather than care of customers. Again, this is difficult, but there are in fact, ‘evil corporations’. It’s just that the government cannot change it by regulation of business performance.) Note that in listing these choices, I am relying on an assumption that differences in human ABILITY. I have not included the options that simply result from laziness. Laziness as a reason to circumvent the market is not redistribution. It is a form of fraud. (Although this is a longer argument.) If someone posits an argument that the government would better serve them, you can easily control the conversation by making the discourse about their individual preferences, and keep asking questions until you identify wich of these four positions, strategies or meanings, the person is relying upon in their arguments.

  • What Would You Learn From A Lifetime Of Studying Politics And Economics?

    Fundamentally, assuming you were intellectually honest, if you were to spend the next twenty years of your life studying political science, with the goal of long term stability and prosperity, then you would come to these conclusions:

    • The Problem

        a) Time:
        b) Space (distribution):
        d) Acting:
        c) Choosing an Action:
        d) Memory:
        e) Limited Knowledge:
        f) Planning:
        g) Opportunity Costs:
        h) Learning (imitation):
        i) Choosing What To Learn (Alphas)
      • Mankind:
        • The Genders:
        • Society
          • A Society is it’s Market
          • Productivity
        • Institutions:
          • Cultural-Forgone Opportunities:
          • Time Preference
          • Suppression Of Corruption
          • A System Of Property Definitions
          • Metaphysical Objectives
          • Administrative and Procedural:
          • Cooperative Institutions
          • Meritocratic Rotation of Elites / Denial Of Non Meritocratic Access:
          • Recognizing New Rules
          • Coordinating Of Group Investments:
          • Means Of Resolving Differences:
          • Limits On Power
        • Government:
        • hereditary monarch
        • aristocracy
        • democratically elected common house
          • Monarchy:
        • Rule Of Law:
          • Redistribution:

            7) Failure: Governments and empires fail for these reasons:

            • Debasement:
            • Overextension:
            • Birth Rates:
            • Money:
            • Trade Routes:
            • Calculative Institutions:
            • Irrationalism:
            • Cultural Habits/Opportunity Costs:
            • Externalities:
            • Disasters:

            8) Three Types Of Coercion

              9) Social and Economic Classes 10) Human Failure:

                11) Failures Of Political Discourse a) the multitude of transfers 12) The Hierarchy Of Argument

                  13) Personal Ethics a) Speak The Truth, and at worst say nothing b) Do Nothing To Others You Would Not Want Done Unto You c) Engage in no exchange wherein the other party will ever regret his purchase. 15) Social Problems In Advanced Society a) The Loneliness and Anonymity Of The Division Of Labor and The Affect On Society b) The Difference Between The Urban And The Rural c) The Status Competition Between Groups who will seek political power to alter their condition. The utility of different governments can be determined by historical analogy, by articulated reason, by empirical study of economic performance, and by demonstrated stability against revolution, adaptability to external shocks, and the temporal duration of the system of rules itself. Under those criteria, only the class-tiered system of government survives scrutiny. In particular, democratic governments are temporary, and the result of extraordinary wealth created by conquest of new territory or trade routes. And totalitarian governments are impoverishing, regardless of circumstances. It is the combination of all forms of government so that the different social classes have institutions wich allow them to achieve their ends without detriment to the institutions of the society that is superior to forms of government that reflect the desires ONLY of certain classes of society. Our western error has been that we feel we must enfranchise everyone into the same structure without accounting for differences in our knowledge, skill, ability and preferences. Unfortunately, the horrors of the world wars caused westerners to question their civilization’s principles, rather than the rate of technological evolution and the rate of population growth, and our inability to EXTEND our system of western government fast enough to accomodate them, and instead we have, quite wrongly, thrown out the entire system rather than improving it by ADDING to our rather empirical system of government. The consequences of marxian collectivism, coinciding with feminism, the debate over slavery, and the immigration of non-western people’s, was far greater than our system could tolerate. And the reason our system could not tolerate it, was because we were still relying too much on moral religious doctrine rather than fully articulated reason: we simply did not understand the reasons our western form of government was superior.

                • No Whoopie, It’s Not About Race.

                  Over on Real Clear Politics, Whoopie Goldberg says she’s Playing The Race Card. To which I reply: It’s not about race. It’s about the welfare state’s collectivism vs classical liberalism’s individualism. Three Rules of Politics:

                  • RULE 1: “People will not tolerate rulership by someone who despises them and their values.”
                  • RULE 2:“People will not tolerate taxation when the proceeds are used for purposes with which they disagree.”
                  • RULE 3: “Everyone reverts to group persistence under duress. EVERYONE. So people have racial, cultural, class, and genration biases. They are biased for their group under duress, and egalitarian under prosperity. This is basic behavioral economics. There is no data, anywhere, that supports an alternative view.

                  If someone despises you, and uses your taxes for purposes that you disagree with, and you’re under economic duress, then that’s all that’s required to understanding their political position. People despised, and continue to despise Jimmy Carter for the same reasons as they do Obama. FACT 1: Whites pay the vast majority of taxes. While the government does everything it can to obscure the fact that taxes are primarily a white burden, the fact remains, that taxes are almost entirely a white burden. This violates Rule 2 above. And under economic duress it invokes Rule 3 above. If anything is racially loaded, it’s that whites are unique in the world, and in world history, in preferring classical liberalism’s individual freedom and responsibility over the alternatives offered by other, less successful cultures. If race is involved, it’s because Obama demonstrably disdains white people. I didn’t use the word ‘hate’. That’s a loaded word for silly people. But, why else would he call a meeting with a board of six like minded economic advisors this spring without a single white person among them? If race was involved why would whites try to draft Colin Powell, and why would whites be such avid supporters of black conservatives? So, it’s not about race. It’s about being anti-American. American being defined as a class of rights that white, anglo-germanic people invented, and codified in a constitution, and who have consistently extended those rights to other peoples. And have fought wars to extend to other peoples. And born sacrifices to carry to other peoples. So if you want to make it about race, and we actually get the data out during the election cycle, it will have quite the opposite effect that advocates of ‘playing the race card’ will intend. That’s because white people are beginning to act like the minority that they are becoming. And in that process, they have, and will continue to cease feeling guilt over slavery, or their dominance over the expansion of the institutions of prosperity that we call capitalism, and will increasingly act as does the Jewish lobby: in self interest. And for African Americans, if whites lose their guilt and become a minority, and act as diasporic capitalists like the Jews, how is the rest of the world going to treat Africans and African Americans? Playing the race card is a losing proposition. So lets just stick with having the argument over the welfare state and collectivism versus classical liberalism and individualism.

                • The Questionable Ethics Of Climate Scientists And Economists

                  Karl Popper (who wrote the Logic of Scientific Discovery) and Thomas Kuhn (who wrote the structure of scientific revolutions) approached the problem of knowledge in the domain of DISCOVERY, which we call the physical sciences. At the same time, the CLOSE FRIEND of Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, worked on the problem of hubris in the social sciences. Hayek ended up combating Keynes over the frailty of models and reason. Keynes wrote ‘A Treatise On Probability” and then the “General Theory” which led to the governmental use of economic calculation that all of us live under, by trying to solve for unemployment – something Hayek (correctly) stated was not possible in the long run and would lead (as it has) to our bankruptcy. Hayek stated that traditional knowledge that was handed down, and perpetuated by trial and error, was ‘true’ even if we did not understand it rationally as yet. And that our record of rational judgment was exceedingly frail, and that history was filled with examples (past and present) of ridiculous scientific error. Keynes won in the short term however, because his theory solved the problem of socialism by replacing a false pretense of REASON (a managed economy), with the false pretense of PROBABILITY ( a monetarist economy) in the field of national economics. In other words, Keynes gave politicians power over our economies. The power that has led us to our financial crisis. BOTH Popper and Hayek were countering two problems. A) the use of the fairly new field of statistical analysis and it’s limitations at prediction due to what Nassim Taleb calls the LUDIC FALLACY. And B) the rise of Socialism, and the socialist hubris of central planning . These men, plus Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises, effectively undermined and predicted the impossibility of a socialist economy. Both men stated that human minds are frail and capable of very limited reason and prediction. More importantly, that the Anglo RECORD OF WHAT WORKS, or EMPIRICISM, is a superior form of KNOWLEDGE to the French (and then Marxian) fantasy of RATIONALISM. The fact that the average american does not understand this by doctrinare education difference is probably equal to the use of today’s mysticism in Islam or medieval christianity. It is a means of keeping people ignorant. We have attempted to replace mysticism with science without also teaching history (mythology) which teaches us the error of hubris. We do not teach history because in a pluralistic society, history includes value judgments and value judgements are class, race, and culture judgements. However, aside from class, race and culture, we are taught only the error of the churches, without the errors of silly scientists who were little better than shaman. We did not teach our children HUBRIS. Greek mythology teaches one lesson above all others: Hubris.

                  [callout]We have attempted to replace mysticism with science without also teaching history (mythology) which teaches us the error of hubris. We do not teach history because in a pluralistic society, history includes value judgments and value judgements are class, race, and culture judgements.[/callout]

                  To the physical sciences, which is the process of DISCOVERY of what EXISTS already, is the objective of study. The holy grail is to discover the first-causal properties of the physical universe. To economists, the problem is one of INVENTION. This is called Hume’s problem, or the problem of induction. That is, what can humans INVENT given their current state of knowledge. THe problem of economic science, which is the ONLY social science we yet possess, is similar to climate science in complexity, yet additionally more complicated because there is no process of EQUILIBRATION in the intellectual world. (there is no human equivalent to the law of thermodynamics – there is in fact, energy added to the system. We call it ‘increases in production’.) Nor is time constant. In fact, that’s what productivity does: it creates more ‘time’ by using less of it to produce more calories. Instead, of an equilibrium as in nature, the mind of man invents new ideas all the time from permutations of existing patterns and disrupts all attempts at equilibria. Both forms of our theories, whether physical science or economic science, can only be tested by FALSIFICATION. Unless you can stipulate ACTIONS by which we can prove climate hypothesis false, they are not in fact, scientific. For example, Einstein said that the absence of red shift would falsify one of his theories. The first principle of Greek Rationalism is SKEPTICISM as a warning against HUBRIS. Hubris is a danger because of the cognitive biases humans of necessity possess because we attribute higher value to that which we study most. TRUTH IN SCIENCE IS PREDICTION AND FALSIFICATION. Models are not truth. They are tools for rationalizing data. The carpenter may not understand the metallurgy of his chisel. He may not understand the distribution channel for his wood. The scientist is often using chisels and wood that he or she does not understand. If he or she understood, then he or she would understand that the peer review process CANNOT WORK. DOES NOT WORK, and QUANTIFIABLY, given the record, DOES NOT WORK. Furthermore, he or she would understand that only FALSIFICATION, not correspondence with a model, is the means of proving a theory. Since these two problems DISCOVERY (Physical Science) and INVENTION (induction) are the two fundamental problems of the universe, it is not surprising that we are still incompetent at both. What is surprising is that in both PHYSICAL SCIENCE and in ECONOMIC SCIENCE, the cognitive bias we bring to our studies, in which we confuse the practical utility of the limited tools and methods of our craft, consistently overwhelms and suppresses the knowledge that in fact, out tools are rough approximations with very poor records of prediction. And that only a combination of prediction and falsification demonstrate the veracity of any theory in either domain.

                  [callout]A financier who violates one of these principles, or a lawyer, or a craftsman, is held accountable for violating the ethics of his craft. With free speech, comes the same ethical constraint on Physical and Economic scientists. That is because there is HARM put upon populations whenever our work products are put into the public domain such that they may be used for the purpose of policy. The reason is, that all public policy is the application of VIOLENCE[/callout]

                  A financier who violates one of these principles, or a lawyer, or a craftsman, is held accountable for violating the ethics of his craft. With free speech, comes the same ethical constraint on Physical and Economic scientists. That is because there is HARM put upon populations whenever our work products are put into the public domain such that they may be used for the purpose of policy. The reason is, that all public policy is the application of VIOLENCE: the forcible taking of resources and the coercion of individual behavior under the treat of violence. The scientist or the economists is appealing for the application of violence to his purposes. Therefore, a scientist is operating ethically by publishing FACTS. He or she is NOT operating ethically when he publishes theories or predictions unless the theory is accompanied by falsification. Failure to include how to falsify one’s theories is by definition a form of deception. If we made it possible to sue scientists the way we can sue doctors and CEO’s then no doubt the quality of work would increase dramatically. And the fact that we cannot sue scientists for the harm that they cause, puts them in the realm with fortune tellers and astrologists.

                • Camus Didn’t Take It Far Enough

                  Camus starts The Myth of Sisyphus with this insight.

                  “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

                  To which I’ll add:

                  “There is but one truly serious problem of political philosophy, and that is, why not kill others and take their property?”

                  We always assume common interest, and that politics starts with debate. Debate is a proxy for violence. But we too often assume that a proxy is equally advantageous. It isn’t. Debate arose uniquely in the west as a means of enfranchising fellow warriors who must pay the high cost of equipping themselves for battle, so that they can participate in the fraternal defense of market centers – what we call towns, or cities, or the polis. It was a transfer of social status and power from the strong to the weak, so that together they might be stronger. The assumed equality in debate is for the purpose of the debate itself. Equality does not exist outside of that venue. There are the weak, and the strong. Violence is still the choice of the strong. And debate is a trade off for them. They hope to be stronger by it. But if debate becomes a means of making them weaker, they have the choice to return to violence. The only serious question of politics is why the strong do not kill or enslave the weak. From that question all others follow. If instead, we start with any other assumption, there is already a transfer of wealth going on, from the strong to the weak.