Curt Doolittle

Theme: Constitutional Order

  • Statism And Corporatism vs Partnerships And The Common Law

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    [C]an you imagine commercial trade and the market without the abstract entity we call the corporation? Sure you can. The corporation is just a partnership that the government has granted limited liability to in order to increase tax revenues from ventures that are both expensive and high risk. THink of it as off-book investment in research and development. If you can imagine commerce without corporations, then you can imagine government without the state. The state is just a corporation – a collection of people who are insulated from liability for their actions. The common law, and the rule of law under the common law, with private property, and a government that is a contract, wherein the governors have no right to issue law, only to facilitate contracts between groups, which are then enforceable by the courts. Under such a common law system, (the anarchic system), people in corporations and in government are not protected from you suing them for violating our contracts -the most important contract being our constitution. [A]narchy as we describe it, isn’t the absence of organization, of commons, or of law. It’s the absence of the state and the state bureaucracy that through the violence of law, forces us to do what we do not wish to, and its members profit from doing so. We can have all the government we want. but we do not need the state, the bureaucracy, legislation, and majority rule to accomplish it. Our government needs only to facilitate contracts and to forbid all parties, whether parties to the contract or not, from free riding, rent seeking, privatization, socialization, corruption, theft, and violence involving those contracts.

  • Reading: On Law As A Problem Of Calculation, Coordination, And Dispute Resolution, In The Face Of Necessary Ignorance And Diversity Of Interest

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    [T]he common law depends upon experience (scientific evidence), not logic or reason (untested theory), and is relatively impervious to authoritarian influence. In any reading list on Law, I don’t necessarily want to communicate the history of law, so much as emphasize the pervasive problems of the social cognitive biases: a) False Consensus bias, b) the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight, c) Projection Bias, d) Trait Ascription Bias, e) the Illusion of Transparency, that are largely the product of the introduction of women into the voting pool, and their alliance with, and support of, marginal male groups who can obtain power by the use of the near universalism of these female cognitive biases, because these cognitive biases suit the reproductive strategies of females in our prehistoric, pre-agrarian phase of development. 1) Bastiat’s The Law 2) Epstein’s Simple Rules For A Complex World 3) Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (as well as Hayek and Popper on knowledge) 4) Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Common Law 4) Milsen’s A Natural History of The Common Law CLUES TO ADAPTING TO THE 21ST CENTURY 1) Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (Believe it or not), my interpretation of Johnson’s Three Methods Of Coercion (see my site), and Perhaps Arnold’ Kling’s pamphlet “The Tree Languages Of Politics”. In particular I love kling’s metaphors both in the Three Languages, and in his “Recalculation” description of recessions. These are both accurate categorical descriptions but they are not sufficiently causally descriptions. Haidt solves the problem of the three languages. I think in my works I’ve sufficiently combined these different perspectives and using Haidt and property rights, I’ve unified these systems into causal relations. (Which new, and is why people have trouble understanding what I’m trying to get across at present.) 2/2) I want to add here Rothbard’s Ethics of Private Property. But since his moral code is incomplete (and therefore false), and his definition of property incomplete, because he was creating an ethic of rebellion not one of civilization, I’ll just have to wait until I finish my own work on propertarianism which corrects those errors. Without this understanding of the relationship between group size (individualism), reproductive strategy, morality, and property it is impossible to adapt the common law to the complex heterogeneous society, because it relies, at least in the arguments of Melvin Eisenberg and perhaps Holmes, relies on assumptions about society, and norms that cannot survive moral scrutiny in our heterogeneous social order. 3) Epstein’s How the Progressives Rewrote the Constitution. The canonical history of how the feminist, progressive, liberal, socialist, and communist movement was able to effectively destroy the rule of law under the constitution. 4) Barnett’s Restoring The Lost Constitution (I don’t believe that this is possible or advisable, and instead that we must create an institutional framework that supports a diversity of genetic strategies. But his analysis of what the constitution actually said, is exceptional, and therefore it is a prescription for how to articulate the rules of future institutions.) CAVEAT [I] don’t really want to spend a lot of my time with the law. I always feel that I’m slumming and need a shower afterward. But as an institution that we both require for calculative purposes, and an institution that must adapt to contemporary diversity and heterogeneity by expanding the concepts of morality and property. To do so, it’s necessary to articulate the impact on the system of common law, which shall remain the means of contract-making and dispute resolution under any more diverse propertarian model. FALURE OF CALCULATIVE INSTITUTIONS TO FACILITATE DIVERSITY OF INTERESTS, AND THEREFORE INCENTIVES AND CALCULATION Civilizations fail because their institutions can no longer calculate cooperation and the user of resources. (ie: Jarred Diamond is wrong. and I’m not so sure about Fukuyama’s and Acemoglu’s analyses have identified this problem correctly as one of property rights.) MORE DETAIL For more detail see Kinsella’s excellent list at mises.org which also addresses the historical development of the common law. In particular Tulluck’s criticism of the method of dispute resolution. A criticism I think is solved by Hoppe’s privatization and insurance model. Hopefully this was helpful to others. Cheers

  • STATISM AND CORPORATISM VS PARTNERSHIPS AND THE COMMON LAW Can you imagine comme

    STATISM AND CORPORATISM VS PARTNERSHIPS AND THE COMMON LAW

    Can you imagine commercial trade and the market without the abstract entity we call the corporation? Sure you can. The corporation is just a partnership that the government has granted limited liability to in order to increase tax revenues from ventures that are both expensive and high risk. THink of it as off-book investment in research and development.

    If you can imagine commerce without corporations, then you can imagine government without the state. The state is just a corporation – a collection of people who are insulated from liability for their actions.

    The common law, and the rule of law under the common law, with private property, and a government that is a contract, wherein the governors have no right to issue law, only to facilitate contracts between groups, which are then enforceable by the courts.

    Under such a common law system, (the anarchic system), people in corporations and in government are not protected from you suing them for violating our contracts -the most important contract being our constitution.

    Anarchy as we describe it, isn’t the absence of organization, of commons, or of law. It’s the absence of the state and the state bureaucracy that through the violence of law, forces us to do what we do not wish to, and its members profit from doing so.

    We can have all the government we want. but we do not need the state, the bureaucracy, legislation, and majority rule to accomplish it. Our government needs only to facilitate contracts and to forbid all parties, whether parties to the contract or not, from free riding, rent seeking, privatization, socialization, corruption, theft, and violence involving those contracts.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-22 08:31:00 UTC

  • THE CONSTITUTION ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT RELIGION, AND HOW THE STATE HAS CREATED A S

    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/13/texas-gov-rick-perry-americans-have-no-right-to-freedom-from-religion/WHAT THE CONSTITUTION ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT RELIGION, AND HOW THE STATE HAS CREATED A STATE RELIGION IN SPITE OF THE CONSTITUTION.

    “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; “

    WHAT THAT MEANS

    It means what it says. It doesn’t say freedom of religion, or freedom from religion. As a libertarian of course, I would prefer that it did say what we libertarians desire it said. Just like every other faction desires it to say one thing or another. But that’s what it says and all it says. It means only that the congress may not pass a law establishing an official single monopoly religion, or inhibiting the practice of religion by those who desire to.

    WHAT THE FOUNDERS INTENDED

    1) The founders intended that the state not take control of the christian church as it had in France and England, because the state would abuse the church, which was the source of moral teaching, and use the church for immoral ends. However, in practice, the state has made the education system it’s ‘church’ and the source of moral teaching, thereby creating its own religion.

    2) The founders intended that the church retain it’s position as the source of moral teaching. They stated repeatedly that the constitution was an inferior protector of our liberty – that the only material protection of liberty was the moral code of the citizenry itself. In practice, through public education, the state has created its own moral code against the wishes of the majority. We call this code socialism, or the more recent incarnation of socialism: “postmodernism”, or in colloquial terms “liberalism’, or in institutional and political terms ‘social democracy’. But whatever we call it, the state has adopted and sponsored a religion, and not agnosticism, and not atheism, and the state does not practice atheism or agnosticism, or even neutrality – it practices postmodernism, and an intentional attack on christianity, while supporting all other monotheistic religions.

    BUT OUR CONSTITUTION DOESN’T CONSTRAIN THE STATE ANY LONGER

    Political debates that rely upon some set of rights make no sense today. Thanks to the destruction of the constitution by liberals by abusing the 14th amendment as a ruse, and in particular under the threat of stacking the court imposed by FDR, the constitution no longer constrains the state, because other than by the untested principle of nullification, the federal government is now in practice a dictator to the states. WIthout state opposition to the federal government, groups of individuals have no institutional means of cooperating en masse to oppose expansion of the government.

    RECOMMENDED READING (This is really all you need to know)

    Nullification, by Thomas Woods. (The least expensive and least disruptive means of regaining our rights: move, and vote for nullification.)

    How Liberals Rewrote the Constitution, by Richard Epstein. (A detailed history of the project to undermined the constitution so that socialism could be adopted.)

    The Constitution Of Liberty, by Friedrich Hayek. (Freedom is synonymous with property rights and rule of law. That’s it.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-14 05:08:00 UTC

  • Which Articles Of The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights Are Negative Rights?

    1-2 Address who is included in these rights.

    3-20 Address negative rights. These rights prohibit everyone, including government, from violating the life, body, movement, association, speech,  and property of individuals in various ways.

    21-29 Address positive rights.These are ambitions that all governments are chartered with attempting to achieve.

    30 closes prohibiting exception.

    https://www.quora.com/Which-articles-of-the-Universal-Declaration-of-Human-Rights-are-negative-rights

  • Which Articles Of The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights Are Negative Rights?

    1-2 Address who is included in these rights.

    3-20 Address negative rights. These rights prohibit everyone, including government, from violating the life, body, movement, association, speech,  and property of individuals in various ways.

    21-29 Address positive rights.These are ambitions that all governments are chartered with attempting to achieve.

    30 closes prohibiting exception.

    https://www.quora.com/Which-articles-of-the-Universal-Declaration-of-Human-Rights-are-negative-rights

  • RULE OF LAW SUFFERING CALAMITOUS COLLAPSE Well, that started when the liberals u

    http://www.france24.com/en/20130608-assange-us-rule-law-suffering-calamitous-collapseAMERICAN RULE OF LAW SUFFERING CALAMITOUS COLLAPSE

    Well, that started when the liberals undermined the constitution through the 14th amendment. At that point, we lost rule of law. It’s just taken this long to go from originalism: the constitution is a binding legal document – to ‘it’s a living document’ which is code for, it means whatever we want it to mean – to it’s a guideline for us, but a democratically elected government can pass any law it desires to – to there is no law, only whatever we can get away with.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-09 08:43:00 UTC

  • SMALLER COUNTRIES ARE BETTER “Our hypothesis, which is backed by extensive empir

    SMALLER COUNTRIES ARE BETTER

    “Our hypothesis, which is backed by extensive empirical evidence, is that, on balance, heterogeneity of preferences tends to bring about political and economic costs that are traded off against the benefits of size.”

    Enrico Spolaore;Alberto Alesina. The Size of Nations (Kindle Locations 100-101). Kindle Edition.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-04 10:33:00 UTC

  • ANY MONOPOLY DEFINITION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS IS REQUIRED FOR THE RESOLUTION OF DIS

    ANY MONOPOLY DEFINITION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS IS REQUIRED FOR THE RESOLUTION OF DISPUTES:

    “Fundamentally speaking, it is illogical to suggest that a “polyopoly” of property rights and definitions is possible since a homogenous “monopoly” definition of property right is necessary in order to logically resolve disputes over rights, obligations and conflicts. Without property rights, disputes are logically impossible to resolve.

    If there is a monopoly of property rights at any point, that monopolistic definition, in practice, is the premise for all law within that group of people. Therefore even without the institutions of administrative government, any monopoly of property rights is in fact ‘government’. Everything else is just procedure.”

    This is not to say that allocating all property rights exclusively to private property is the only possible solution for a group. We’ve just learned that economic incentives to act, and to produce, and therefore to increase choice and decrease prices, can only exist where individuals have property rights. Without those rights one cannot have incentives. Or rather, without property rights, one’s incentives are balanced between numerous incentives – most of which are not productive, but consumptive.

    Anarchic production and exchange require only private property rights. But if a group with homogenous interests, wants to invest in the development of commons’, most generally called ‘infrastructure’ and in particular, commons that occupy physical (unique) space, then anarchic production under a monopoly definition of property rights alone isn’t sufficient. The reason being, that commons are victim to: (a) free riding (b) competition (c) privatization, and (d) violations of the rights of others. We don’t usually consider competition a problem, but it’s a problem for investors in a commons. And governments ( one or more people) that can outlaw free riding (taxes), competition (indirect privatization), direct privatization (theft), and protect the rights of others from abuses of their property rights through the process of creating commons, turns out to be necessary, since the cost of these appropriations of common investments is higher than the willingness of people to take the risk to develop the commons. Furthermore they also consider free free riding, competition, and privatization to be immoral.

    THis is not to say that private organizations can’t create commons (they can). The difference is that most commons that are other than symbolic such as monuments, are open to such free riding (consumption without compensation) and appropriation (the ancient practice of stealing of stones to build a house from public works for example) that the combination of moral objection and material theft is higher than the desire and willingness to contribute to a commons.

    Furthermore, some commons, like defense, are of such high risk and cost, that near universal free riding (pacifism), or perhaps more clearly, sufficient free riding, is endemic, and therefore it’s very difficult to create both defense, and private property rights. Historically, property rights are determined by those who contribute to defense. Or more commonly, property rights are exclusively possessed by those who contribute to defense

    So that is why we create governments.

    The problem is not that we’ve created governments to resolve conflicts and to create commons. The problem is that the only governments that we’ve been able to create have consisted of monopolies issuing laws rather than a monopoly of property rights under which we issue contracts the terms of which are binding on all members of the group.

    The problems with the organization we call government are (a) lawmaking instead of contract making (b) Monopoly Rule – whether majority, minority, or dictatorship instead of contract negotiating between factions (c) bureaucracy that is insulated from competition and therefore follows its natural incentives to expropriate from shareholders (citizens).

    (Snippet from yesterday’s posting on Quora)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-30 23:30:00 UTC

  • Can Anarchy Be Feasibly Set Up?

    THANK YOU FOR ASKING ME TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION

    I’ll try to do give the the best answer that is available to us today.

    1) If we define anarchy as the absence of RULES (MORALS AND NORMS), then no – without morals and norms humans cannot cooperate.
    2) If we define anarchy as the absence of LAWS and JUDGES then no. Without contracts and the common law support of contracts, then no, not in any meaningful sense.
    3) If we define anarchy as the absence of GOVERNMENT (meaning group of people who coordinate investments in commons then possibly anarchy can exist, but under very constrained and simple conditions. Realistically it would be very hard for these people to compete economically with people from other groups.
    4) If we define anarchy as the absence of LAW MAKERS then almost certainly. The common law alone is sufficient for law making.
    5) If we define anarchy as the absence of an abstract corporation we call the ‘STATE’, then absolutely certainly. In fact, when people complain about government they generally are complaining about the behavior of individuals in a monopoly (government) who are insulated from competition, and whose members also for a bureaucracy that is insulated from competition, and who, as members of a bureaucracy, pursue their own interests. 

    Human societies employ at least these five sets of institutions and by and large, the first three are necessary, and the second two are not.  The question is whether in practice a group could compete effectively without the abstract state and the ability to issue commands (we call them laws, but that’s just a way of trying to give commands the legitimacy of natural laws to what are just political ‘commands’.) 

    So, a homogenous body of people who are not very different in character, belief, genetics, status, and wealth can quite easily create anarchy by writing a constitution with just one a half a dozen rules in it, and then hopefully finding judges that will rule according to those rules and no others.

    A government lf laws then, is quite possible.  A government of men isn’t necessary.  And it’s what our founding fathers were trying to prevent.

    Didn’t work well though. Civil war and all that….

    REGARDING “IN A PARTICULAR WORLD”

    Among a population of people with common heritage, mythology, manners, ethics and morals, who are arguably closely related, it is entirely feasible to draft a constitutions and to supply all services by private institutions.  The problem is whether that LACK of a constitutional government creates an opportunity for a private organization to functionally serve the same purpose, and in that same capacity, eventually develop the monopolistic self serviig bureaucracy that evolves the ability to write laws (issue commands) 

    The general argument in favor of minimal government is that some form of government (weak monarchy for example that ‘owns’ the institutions of dispute resolution) is necessary simply to provide competition against other private organizations that would attempt to function as governments.   I do not believe it is possible to counter this argument in any way – it’s quite sound in both theory and practice. ( Although I’m not going to sidetrack into that kind of depth at the moment. )

    IN A BROADER WORLD
    The anarchic research program commonly referred to as “Anarcho Capitalism” has developed a set of solutions to the problem of institutions, using competing private insurance companies rather than public monopolies.  However, this ‘private government’ still does not solve the problem of heterogenous polities (people with different, competing, and irreconcilable differences.).  Some of us are working on that problem.  We tend to call it some variation of ‘contractual’ government.  Meaning that groups make contracts between competing classes rather than allow one class to dominate another class by majority rule. 

    There is no functional reason why this solution would not work even for large heterogenous polities.

    So there are at least two circumstances under which Anarchy is possible, if we define anarchy as the absence of a monopolistic bureaucracy, but not if we define anarchy as the absence of institutions, rules or law. 

    Fundamentally speaking, it is illogical to suggest that a “polyopoly” of property rights and definitions is possible since a homogenous definition of property right is necessary in order to logically resolve disputes over rights, obligations and conflicts.  If there is a monopoly of property rights at any point, that monopolistic definition, in practice, is the premise for all law within that group of people.  Therefore even without the institutions of administrative government, any monopoly of property rights is in fact ‘government’.  Everything else is just procedure.

    That logic may be hard to follow.  But it is what it is.  🙂

    Curt

    https://www.quora.com/Can-anarchy-be-feasibly-set-up