“Libertarianism is applied autism.” – Steve Sailer For some reason this phrase affected me pretty deeply. UNIVERSAL ENFRANCHISEMENT A GIVEN? Libertarianism, as I practice it, and as I believe Mises and Hayek practiced their ‘liberalism’ (universal enfranchisement), is the scientific pursuit of political theory using the system of measurement we call economics, and the objective of material prosperity. Which was of course, the great achievement of the innovations of capitalism, empiricism (of which capitalism is a member) and the harnessing fossil fuels. Or rather, These philosophers were engaged in an attempt to define scientific political theory under the ASSUMPTION of universal enfranchisement. I still practice my philosophical inquiry under that same assumption of universal enfranchisement – the prohibition on the deprivation of the choice of “cooperation or boycott” from others. But once you assume some justification for not depriving others of choice, (a) we run into the problem of diverse interests and desires so that we now need a means of choosing between preferences, and the DEMONSTRATED preference of everyone is greater prosperity, for the simple reason that prosperity increases everyone’s choices and greatly reduces the cost of ANY choice. PRIMACY OF PROSPERITY – ECONOMICS AND COOPERATION So, the second assumption of “liberalism” is the priority of economic good. That is, that cooperation facilitates production of prosperity. MERITOCRACY OR NOT? The third assumption of “liberalism” is natural rotation (Meritocracy). But like prices and contracts, humans do not willingly rotate downward if there is any impact upon their status. In fact, people place higher value on their status than almost any other asset that they have. LIBERTY OR CONSUMPTION? The fourth assumption of ‘liberalism’ is that humans desire liberty, rather than that they desire choice and consumption. When in fact, only libertarians and conservatives demonstrate a preference for liberty, and almost all other humans on the planet do not. They demonstrate ONLY a preference for consumption. OTHER ALTERNATIVES TO LIBERTARIANISM EXIST 0) Libertarianism (full enfranchisement, with meritocratic rotation) 1) Select enfranchisement (Pre-enlightenment European, and early American with selective rotation) 2) Totalitarian humanism (Chinese Corporatism and European Corporatist models ceremonial enfranchisement ) 3) Totalitarianism (pre-communist Chinese and most empire and state models) Libertarians are unique. Conservatives are unique. Most of the world does not want to engage in trial and error. They can’t. It’s too hard for them. Then again, why does universal enfranchisement imply monopoly? Why can’t we construct many small states some of which practice communal property and others that practice private property and everything in between? Because the statists could not profit from us? Because that is how humans MUST function precisely because we are not equal in ability whatsoever. A large organization has only so many people at the top. In many small organizations there are only so may people at the top, but there are many more organizations for people to reach the top of. Just as companies and economies have spread out into multiple flexible organizations, so must governments. That is the obvious conclusion: size allows you to conduct war and that is all. As such, if someone attempts to construct a scale empire, they have no other reason than warfare to do so. Our goal then should be to destroy large states so that war is nearly impossible to conduct.
Theme: Class
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TIM HARFORD ON ASSORTATIVE MATING AND INEQUALITY ‘While it may be natural and fa
TIM HARFORD ON ASSORTATIVE MATING AND INEQUALITY
‘While it may be natural and familiar, assortative mating also breeds inequality’
Those of you out courting next Friday, do enjoy yourselves – but with a twinge of guilt. Inequality has been rising for a generation in many places, especially the Anglophone countries. Let’s be honest: you and your romantic pursuits are part of the problem.
The issue here is something economists call “positive assortative mating”, a charming phrase that we blame on the evolutionary biologists. It describes the process of similar people pairing off with each other: beautiful people dating beautiful people, smokers dating smokers, nerds dating nerds. All perfectly natural, you might think.
While it may be natural and familiar, assortative mating also breeds inequality. Economists often look at sorting by education level, which is common and easy to measure. If the MBAs and PhDs were sprinkled randomly throughout the population that would spread the wealth around. But, of course, they tend to pair up with other MBAs and PhDs; meanwhile the high-school dropouts tend to end up with other high-school dropouts. Already prosperous people are made more prosperous yet by their marriages.
This is an interesting idea in theory but does it have any practical significance? A recent paper by Jeremy Greenwood and others looks at a large data set from the US Census Bureau through the lens of the Gini coefficient, which is a measure of inequality. It’s 63 in highly unequal South Africa, 40 in the UK and 23 in egalitarian Sweden. It’s 43 in the US Census data set; but if the couples in the data set were randomly paired off, the Gini coefficient would be a mere 34. Assortative mating increases inequality.
But does this pairing-off process matter more than it used to? Does it explain any part of the rise in inequality we’ve seen since the 1970s? The answer, again, is yes – but a guarded yes. Marriage patterns have little or nothing to do with the concentration of earning power in the hands of the richest 1 per cent and 0.1 per cent: women are major breadwinners in the top quarter of the distribution but less so right at the very top – not yet, at any rate.
But assortative mating is having an impact on inequality more broadly. It’s not so much that well-educated people are more likely to pair off – although they are – but that educated women are more likely to earn serious money than a generation ago.
Consider my own mother: she was well on the way to a PhD in biochemistry when I arrived on the scene in the early 1970s. She then dropped out of education and spent most of her time looking after her children. Her academic qualifications had no impact on our household income. Assortative mating has always been with us but it’s only in a world of two-income households that it increases income inequality.
The sociologist Christine Schwartz showed in 2010 that the incomes of husbands and wives in the US are far more closely correlated than they were in the 1960s, and that this explained about one-third of the increase in income inequality between married couples. John Ermisch and colleagues have shown other consequences: in both the UK and Germany, assortative mating substantially explains low social mobility because the children of prosperous parents marry each other.
We should not place too much emphasis on all this. Assortative mating explains only part of the rise of inequality, and perhaps very little at the top of the income scale. The usual remedies for inequality – unionisation, redistributive taxes, minimum wages – still have the same advantages and limitations as ever, even if they need to reflect the reality of the two-income household. It’s a reminder that the most welcome social trends can have unwelcome side-effects.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-09 11:52:00 UTC
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ARISTOCRACY – WE HAD IT RIGHT ALL ALONG What other scientific evidence of good d
ARISTOCRACY – WE HAD IT RIGHT ALL ALONG
What other scientific evidence of good discipline, good judgement, good parenting, is there than three successive generations of family success?
When one has wealth and status then what achievements can one reach for? Culture. Arts. Civics.
We had it right for most of our history. In an effort to steal control from a reluctant aristocracy dependent upon the productivity of land, we invented a number of lies: equality the most damaging of them.
Had membership in our house of aristocracy depended entirely upon demonstrated economic merit for three generations rather than the loyalty of titled heredity, we could have survived the transition from the productivity of land to the productivity of manufacturing, finance and trade.
Had we created a house of proletarians rather than surrendering the house of common land owners to the mass of rent-seekers, so that the natural division of the classes could cooperate via exchange between those houses, we could have survived their introduction into both the economy and the polity.
Women, who in every walk of life prefer to exercise care taking, would control the house of the proletarians. Men the house of commons and lords. And the competition provided by the church would have been replaced by the lowest house as a means of resistance against exploitation.
Instead we adopted simple majority rule, thereby destroying thousands of years of the principle difference between the west and the rest: the balance of powers and the necessity for forcing a compromise between different interests in the absence of authority, given the assumption of individual sovereignty as the common good, versus an abstract unknowable concept of the common good involuntarily prosecuted upon the public.
That was our mistake. We had everything else right.
It may be too late to correct it. But the first step in fixing a problem is understanding the cause of it.
We had it right all along.
We did it. And only we did it. No other civilizations managed it.
Property = Sovereignty = Balance of Powers.
I have no problem being ruled by the best of each class.
I do have a problem being ruled by the worst of each class.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-06 06:07:00 UTC
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IF LABOR IS NO LONGER VALUABLE THEN WHAT DO THE LOWER CLASSES HAVE TO TRADE? SUP
IF LABOR IS NO LONGER VALUABLE THEN WHAT DO THE LOWER CLASSES HAVE TO TRADE? SUPPRESSION OF FREE RIDING: PROPERTY RIGHTS.
(a couple of profound ideas here)
If labor is no longer valuable – at all, then what do the underclasses have to trade?
Nothing? Well, that’s making a lot of assumptions about the structure of society as if it’s governed by some equivalent of the law of gravity. 😉 So, rather than
They have suppression of all free riding to trade: obedience to norms; manners, ethics, morals and laws: respect for property rights, and voting to reduce the state, and their utility as consumers to trade.
But how do we capture those things into something tangible?
With tokens, so that they exchange their consumption for the production of others. We dont need to distribute money through the financial system any longer. There isnt any need for it. We can directly distribute liquidity to consumers, and bypass the financial system. We can give consumers fiat money or digital currency, and pretty much keep them out of the credit system. This number would need to be a percentage of some revenues such that the citizens possess equal interest in the efficiency of the government, and the need to expand productivity in the economy. Otherwise we create malincentive. But at this point, minimum wage labor is preference not a necessity, and we need not interfere with prices for labor.
The distribution to citizens is their payment for suppressing free riding in all its forms. If they agree to suppress free riding in all its forms, then they have earned that distribution. If they fail to suppress free riding in all its forms, then they do not earn that payment. This is sufficient incentive both positive and negative to prevent crimes not of passion. And as an incentive, the threat of losing one’s means of sustenance is pretty hard to improve upon. It is better than physical punishment.
The accumulation of profits is payment for contributing to productivity – for organizing production – now that we know labor is of no value in production, even if problem solving is of value.
This system of compensating people for their actions is simply transforming the moral code for non-anonymous members engaged in equal production and consumption, into a calculable system for anonymous members engaged in equal suppression of free riding, but unequal organization of production.
And to do otherwise is to attempt to obtain property rights for free.
You can’t every achieve equality by any means, but you can certainly pay people from what they earn without cheating them of payment for it. If all of us are producers then we have our production to exchange and equal interest in respect for the necessary properties of production. But if only a few of us are productive (and that is the current state of affairs) why should those people respect the rules of production if they aren’t compensated for it? That’s purely irrational.
THE OPEN PROBLEM
Now, the only problem we face is bearing a child that you cannot support is free riding on the backs of others. Immigration is free riding unless you bring your skills with you. The problem of the female obsession with free riding must be solved. And we must have the moral courage to solve it through aggressive punishment of women who bear children that they cannot support, to the same degree we punish males who resort to violence for the purpose of obtaining what they want. A woman who bears a child that she cannot support is, under all conditions, without exception, is blackmail: the choice between an paying a woman for her immoral action, or the harm that will come to an innocent child.
If we can agree that bearing a child you cannot support is blackmail, or at least a new crime of the same sort. Then it is possible to unite all people in a country with the same interests. Because large scale democratic government simply creates a vehicle for systematic generation of internal conflict given the dissimilarity of ability and interest.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-04 03:13:00 UTC
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LIBERTY FOR SMART PEOPLE The Dark Enlightenment is the next step in a libertaria
LIBERTY FOR SMART PEOPLE
The Dark Enlightenment is the next step in a libertarian’s intellectual development. It’s where we end up when we see that man does not act as homo-economicus except in a rothbardian dream world.
It took thirty years to abandon rothbard’s ethics of the anarchic ghetto and to turn our attention back to aristocratic monarchy. That was thirty years too long.
But without rothbard’s interesting combination of errors and insights, aristocracy might have continued to be lost in conservative religio-moral pseudo-intellectual nonsense-speak.
The Dark Enlightenment embraces the natural sciences, rather than rejecting them and relying on the absurd proposition of the a priori.
But the Dark Enlightenment is not as philosophically rigorous – which is to be expected for a movement started just a few years ago.
Time to add the philosophical rigor of libertarianism (and marxism) to the Dark Enlightenment.
Time to construct liberty for smart people.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-02 09:48:00 UTC
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THIS IS WHAT GIVES CAPITALISTS A DIRTY NAME
THIS IS WHAT GIVES CAPITALISTS A DIRTY NAME
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/01/31/a-look-at-nine-goldman-trades-that-lost-libya-1-billion-in-one-year/
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-31 18:36:00 UTC
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Why doesn’t the government just come out and say “It’s open season on white prot
Why doesn’t the government just come out and say “It’s open season on white protestant males!”
Cause that’s how I feel these days.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-28 06:47:00 UTC
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CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS You know, it’s freeing cold outside, and we are approachin
CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS
You know, it’s freeing cold outside, and we are approaching a state of revolution nearby. But on this Saturday mid-afternoon, in this middle class neighborhood, in this ordinary restaurant, there are more beautiful women (and men) than you can find in the entirety of most major cities during a warm june day.
I love these people. They’re beautiful because it matters to them.
Americans, other than girls in puberty, demonstrate their status by how careless they can pretend to be.
Sorry west coast people. I love you. But the whole east coast traditional elegance thing just wins hands down. And the farther east in europe you go the better it gets.
Self respect is beautiful.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 09:18:00 UTC
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the income inequality myth
http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/01/debunking-income-inequality-theory.html?m=1Debunking the income inequality myth
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-23 10:08:00 UTC
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LABOR IS MEANINGLESS – CONSUMERS ARE NOT Obvious but interesting, is that marxis
LABOR IS MEANINGLESS – CONSUMERS ARE NOT
Obvious but interesting, is that marxist labor theory of value, and even their supposed social value of ‘labor’ are both in fact valueless and non-logical. But the presence of a ‘consumer’ is not.
It’s not that business value labor. It’s that business and capitalists need CUSTOMERS in order to organize production.
The challenge in expanding any economy, and in the satisfaction of consumer wants, is not production – it is voluntarily organization production for the satisfaction of demonstrated consumer wants.
Money supplies us with information that represents the accumulated savings of time, created by the division of knowledge and labor.
I know this is pretty obvious (and incomplete as an argument) but I still am amazed at how the marxist zombie simply continues to walk the face of the earth.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-19 08:49:00 UTC