Curt Doolittle

Theme: Deception

  • “It is of course, the global warming scam, with the … trillions of dollars dri

    http://my.telegraph.co.uk/reasonmclucus/reasonmclucus/15835660/professor-emiritus-hal-lewis-resigns-from-american-physical-society/QUOTE: “It is of course, the global warming scam, with the … trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists… It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. … I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.”

    Source date (UTC): 2011-06-11 12:50:00 UTC

  • George Soros is not a good man. Don’t fall for the ruse

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2633No. George Soros is not a good man. Don’t fall for the ruse.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-05-06 15:21:00 UTC

  • Ayn Rand’s ‘Selfishness’ Is A Play On Words In Order To Hook Your Attention

    Selfishness, as defined by Rand, is a play on words in order to hook people’s attention. It is a classic marketing trick. It assists her in marketing her ideas specifically because the word ‘selfish’ has negative connotations. While she uses the word ‘selfishness’ the general idea is used by other writes as any one of: individualism, responsibility, enlightened self interest, or pragmatic self interest. The purpose of the idea of self interest is epistemic: you can’t KNOW enough to work for other people’s interest in a division of knowledge and labor. In a division of knowledge and labor, you can’t KNOW very much. We’re necessarily ignorant. Our view of the world is very limited. It’s simply a proscription for ‘think globally, act locally’. So, self interest, or selfishness is simply a play on words for the purpose of making us look at individual responsibility inversely – as taking care of others by taking care of ourselves, rather than as the duty that we have to one another to take care of ourselves. Rand was trying very hard to market individualism and freedom during a period of socialist expansion, when there was rampant false attribution of success to the soviet model by western sycophantic pseudo intellectuals – the soviet model that had destroyed her family. So she is making a play on words to hook your attention. There is nothing in rand that is not, at least in implication, in Adam Smith or Frederic Bastiat. Hayek tries to remind us that the source of freedom that we know as Classical Liberalism was a product of the English empirical pursuit of science, and the analysis of data that had accumulated by the 18th century, as the middle class grew in size. But that at the same time, the French were pursuing the concept of freedom as a REACTION to the english, by RATIONAL or verbal reasoning, rather than by data – the germanic protestant versus latin catholic approach to life shows up everywhere. These rational arguments are moral arguments. Moral arguments are by definition specious. But they are easier to digest by the common person, and easier to manipulate by politicians. In large part, the language of freedom was distributed by translation that were made from french literature using the french interpretation in rational terms of english empirical principles and reasoning. So the language we use today to discuss freedom has become the rational of the french, rather than the empirical of the english. This french rationalism is where marx obtained the foundation of socialism and communism.

  • The Remaining Marxists Are Not Trying To End Poverty

    From a Comment on Cafe Hayek: “Marxists must define poverty as a relative phenomenon. Otherwise, they couldn’t in good conscience be marxists.” Or perhaps, better said, they wouldn’t have a semi-rational reason to justify class envy, and therefore attempt to obtain unearned social status through political power rather than through market service of others.

    [callout]Social status is important. It’s a cognitive necessity. It tells us who to imitate.[/callout]

    The left’s desire is not to end poverty, it is instead, the desire to alter one’s natural, biologically and environmentally determined social status either by gaining access to unearned income or by gaining status through access to political power. And social status is not irrelevant. Social status is important. It’s a cognitive necessity. It tells us who to imitate.

  • “Sometimes, the words of political leaders requires interpretation beyond face v

    “Sometimes, the words of political leaders requires interpretation beyond face value. In Russia’s case, abstention (from the vote on Libya) was a calculated move to *facilitate* intervention. The subsequent instability could eliminate Libya as an oil & gas alternative, thus giving Moscow greater market share – and greater control – in Europe. Making sense now?” – STRATFOR

    Source date (UTC): 2011-03-30 10:03:00 UTC

  • Doolittle’s Law: Any Mention Of Sweden In An Economic Discourse Means The Argument Is False

    Do you know Godwin’s law? That any internet discourse eventually devolves into something involving Hitler? There is a new law. I’m coining it, as Doolittle’s law: The minute someone mentions Sweden in an economic argument, you know that they’re analysis is wrong. 1) As Felix Salmon states, Wealth is very different from Income. The WEALTH distribution in the USA and Sweden is similar because sweden is a capitalist country albiet one with a great deal of redistribution, and wealth must be in the hands of the people with the knowledge to EMPLOY that wealth in order for wealth to exist. 2) Felix also states that countries with great retirement schemes require less wealth accumulation, since wealth accumulation is a retirement scheme. So individuals with retirement schemes have less incentive to develop wealth. Swedes have fewer incentives to accumulate weath.

    [callout]Doolittle’s law: The minute someone mentions Sweden in an economic argument, you know that they’re analysis is wrong.[/callout]

    3) Redistribution that affects one’s family, tribe and culture is one thing. Redistribution that allows a group or class to compete with you is something else. Redistribution that is used for purposes that one objects to is something else entirely. No one is against redistribution. It’s the USE of redistribution that gets people up in arms – whether it’s the concentration of wealth in the hands of a competing minority or class, or redistribution to minorities seeking political power. And they’re right to do so. Homogenous cultures are comfortably redistributive. Heterogeneous cultures aren’t. That’s why multiculturalism fails, and always will fail. One can only have multiculturalism under a political system where there is no means by which competing interests can gain political power, and no matter of redistribution. This is why european cities were multicultural before the advent of democracy and nationalism. 4) Sweden is an outlier. It is a small, genetically homogenous, protestant, ascetic, nordic, resource economy with no border issues that did not experience the second world war. It is an abnormal country. It cannot be compared to heterogeneous countries of much larger size. The cultural comparison at scale is Japan, not the USA. Japan is an island based, racially homogenous ascetic culture. 5) Sweden doesn’t have all that much ‘wealth’ with which to create a distortion. The bigger the economy, the greater the potential for concentration of wealth. Sweden is a small country of 10M people, 85% of whom live in a very dense area, and who benefit from the remainder of the country’s low population density and the ability to export natural resources easily into europe. In the USA we have cities that big – and they are full of tribal and competitive minorities, and complex social class structures competing for political influence in order to demonstrate social status for themselves and their tribes. So, that’s why there isn’t a vast difference in income. It’s because sweden is a small country, it isn’t an empire, it doesn’t have the ability to concentrate capital, it doesn’t have the ability to create liquidity and it has a small market. 6) When comparing the USA to another country you must use the whole of western europe, because that is the degree of diversity in the USA. We live in the Nine Nations of North America. And different nations are not generous to each other. They cannot be. I’m happy to debate this with anyone. But humans cannot build a large country with complex relationships and have high redistribution, unless they want to invite civil war. 7) The evidence is pretty clear. You an live a better life with more choices in the USA for less money if you ‘enter the system’. Entering the system means consumer credit, housing, and working reasonably hard for a living. If you don’t want to ‘enter the system’ you’re going to be in the lower quintiles. It’s pretty simple. Furthermore, It’s terribly expensive to live in Sweden and it takes little research of expat writings to see how few people from the USA want to live there after trying, and inversely, how many swedes come the USA and stay here because of greater economic freedom. Social status matters because it determines access to opportunity, and access to mates. Status hierarchies are more valuable in-group than across groups, which means that humans will always be naturally racist and anti-culturalist except under two scenarios: a) at the margins where mate selection is advantageous for one or two generations, or b) (as in the UK) where a a social class can gain temporary social status for one or two generations by demonstrating ‘tolerance’. No data will demonstrate otherwise. And that is what makes good economics. Use of statistics to create ‘errors of aggregation’ and ‘ignoring causality’ in order to intentionally create a false argument is bad economics. Whether bad economics is a a form of fraud and deception, or whether it is immoral, is a matter for someone else to decide. But I’m willing to stipulate that regardless of those potentialities, it’s is simply bad economics.

  • coining a new term. Doolittle’s law: The minute someone mentions Sweden in an ec

    http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2425I’m coining a new term. Doolittle’s law: The minute someone mentions Sweden in an economic argument, you know that they’re analysis is wrong.

    Source date (UTC): 2011-03-26 01:14:00 UTC

  • Violence and Virtue vs Morality and Fraud

    My rights are protected by my willingess to kill in order to defend them. Legal documents either require that many people are willing to kill to defend them, or that many people are willing to kill to enforce them, or that many people are wiling to kill to change them. Moral arguments by contrast are a form of deceptlon by which the weak attempt to gain advantages without paying the costs for obtaining those advantages. That is the sole purpose of moral argument. By contrast, any right that is possessed by virtue of social contracts, formal or not, is possessed only because of the willingness of people to use violence in order to protect it. The government does not protect my rights. I do. Instead, government is a shareholder system whereby we each obtain the productive efficiency of scale in enforcing our defense of established rights, and therefore obtain them at a discount. But the government has that power only because we relinquish it to them. And we do not pay those costs equally. Some of us have a greater virtue of violence at our disposal than others. We are initially wealthier in violence than other people, so the cost of our privileges is higher. While those who are weaker, obtain a higher benefit than do the stronger. This is looking at the mythology from the opposite perspective. Since in all of history, the minority who has the greatest capacity for violence has established all political orders.

    [callout]Moral arguments by contrast are a form of deception by which the weak attempt to gain advantages without paying the costs for obtaining those advantages. That is the sole purpose of moral argument. By contrast, any right that is possessed by virtue of social contracts, formal or not, is possessed only because of the willingness of people to use violence in order to protect it. The government does not protect my rights. I do.[/callout]

    The west was built diffrently from the east or middle east, because it was built by a fraternity of warriors. Even with our vast specialization of careers, it is still protected by vi olence. Violence is a virtue. The fact that women are poorer in violence, and that the poor and ignorant are less able to pay the sacrifice nand discipline eeded to use it, is why they rely on moral arguments. THE PROXY FOR VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL CLASS There is no argument among philosophers, and certainly among political economists, that the system of property rights and exchange, regardless of culture, is a proxy for violence. By monopolizing violence, ‘governments’ force people to compete by production rather than violence. This provides people wiht incentives to produce. Production vastly favors discipline. Wealth vastly favors IQ. Productivity has the negative emotional consequence of amplifying the differences between individuals, and rewarding individuals more diversely than under tribal society, and therefore subjects the proletariat to more negative status signals, and making a social class out of the proletariat because of it, that our tribal sentiments and cognitive biases support. THE ECONOMICS OF MORAL ARGUMENTS Moral statements depend on economic circumstances. In pre-agrarian society, murder, plunder and rape are heroic, not prohibited activities. In post-industrial society, some sort of redistribution is at least suggested by human sentiments. “rights” are a MORAL not NECESSARY argument. Rights are POSSIBLE only when there is very limited SCARCITY. Legal RIGHTS are only POSSIBLE when a minority is willing to exercise violence to protect them. We ACKNOWLEDGE the POSSIBILITY of certain rights only because we can AFFORD them at some period in time. There are vast differences between social classes on what ‘rights’ we can afford at one period in time or another. The lower social classes argue for rights. The upper social classes argue for utilities. The lower classes breed. The upper classes don’t. The lower classes envy the productive classes, the upper classes protect their assets. Property, civilization, society, in ALL CASES WITHOUT EXCEPTION were created by the application of violence by a minority Ideas held in ignorance are just evidence of ignorance, and nothing more. Moral arguments are irrational arguments because they do not enumerate their properties. Economic arguments are NECESSARY arguments, not the display of PREFERENCES nor MORAL arguments. The lower classes use resistance movements rather than actions to work against stronger forces. Resistance movements are ‘costs’. They are opportunity costs. They create economic friction. They create cooperative friction. Resistance increases the costs for the middle class, and can overwhelm the ability to export violence by the upper classes. Moral statements on rights made under the threat of the application of either resistance, political violence, or street violence. “MIGHT MAKES RIGHTS” “Might may not make right. But might certainly makes all Rights.”

    [callout]”Might may not make right. But might certainly makes all Rights.[/callout]

    Hence, my correct statement that my rights consist of my willingness (along with others) to use violence to protect my rights. THE FRAUD OF MORAL ARGUMENTS Violence is a virtue. It is the first virtue. And those who argue otherwise do so out of either ignorance or fraud. Because it is fraud to make a moral argument rather than a necessary and economically necessary argument. Moral arguments are, without exception, arguments made from either ignorance or deception. In most cases they are made from deception, in order to obtain transfer payments in order to accumulate resources at a discount. IN effect most if not all proletariat arguments for transfer payments are threats of organized violence against others. You are welcome to debate this topic with me but I am fairly sure I will prevail. Because unlike you I am not arguing from a network of silly moral deceptions. In moral arguments “follow the money” is a more valuable technique than it is in forensic investigation. Because the world is very clearly separated into people who produce and those who form resistance movements in order to obtain the productive results of others by the reliance on moral arguments the implication of which is violence if their wants for transfer payments are not met. The only good and bad is whether the transfer payments requested by the proletariat threat of violence is Pareto Efficient or not. ie: whether more harm to the economy is done by the transfers (redistribution) than by failing to do so, and over what period of time that harm is created. There is no harm in creating roads because roads increase productivity which is for the good of all. But all redistribution to individuals that is for personal consumption has significant negative consequences. While there is some benefit to Poor Farm’s and Social security, as long as it is a very minimal cost. Creating a dependent class of people by failing to force them to save, is creating an economic hazard. No matter what transfer we talk about the society is exposed to risk by the creation of supposedly risk abating transfer payments. It is very simple really.

  • Anti-Free Market Straw Men vs Reality

    RE: Harmful illusions bedevil ideas about free markets and imprisonment: professor By Sarah Galer In which yet another left wing professor who hasn’t read Hayek, criticizes him (and advocates like myself) while relying upon ‘silly psychology’ to do so. He rails against ‘free markets’. The author (Sarah Galer) is positing a straw man that does not represent these ideas. (and thereby contributing to ignorance). Besides confirming the conservative hypothesis, she’s simply acting immorally by acting in ignorance. I didn’t mention that it’s the jewish wing of libertarianism that invented the silly ideas of anarchism. My response. No free marketer actually suggests ‘unregulated’ market, or the abscence of law. Instead, this is what they say: 1) Free markets spread peaceful coexistence (smith) 2) Government employees cannot know enough to regulate markets (mises/hayek) 3) Insurance companies are better at regulating the market than government (rothbard/hoppe) 4) That bureaucracies become naturally corrupt and seek rents, and harm markets. (veblen, schumpeter, Sorel, michels, burnham) 5) That rule of law (rule of the COMMON LAW) is superior to regulation of markets than is legislative and regulatory law. (Hayek, Bastiat) 6) Economic calculation (dynamic prices and their role in planning), and the natural incentive for self interest, in a division of knowledge and labor (mises, smith) 7) That regulatory law accumulates to the point of causing market failure 8) That all monopolies are CAUSED by state intervention. These are arguments against the PRETENSE OF KNOWLEDGE, and the PRETENSE OF BENEVOLENCE by the political bureaucracy, in contrast to the POSSESSION OF KNOWLEDGE by private actors with market incentives. Therefore, these are not arguments in support of anarchism, they are arguments to privatization in order to avoid the natural tendencies toward corruption in bureaucracies. Curt Doolittle

  • The Cult Of Silly People

    From FP Magazine:

    “How Did Obama Lose Karzai?” … “Karzai now appears mistrusting of the West’s long-term commitment to his country. He considers the Americans to be hopelessly fickle, represented by multiple military and civilian envoys who carry contradictory messages, work at cross-purposes, and wage their Washington turf battles in his drawing room, at his expense, while operating on short fuses and even shorter timetables.”

    We have a president, who is part of a philosophical wing, dominated by a left coalition, that believes ‘silly things’. Like jimmy carter, obama is a president who believes ‘silly things’. But what silling things? The left’s feminine assumption is that we can all agree – like women in a tribal cave. They assume that there is a consensus to reach. Or that such a consensus would persist. Or that such a consensus is advantagous.

    [callout]Only a fool thinks he can fly. But at least he is dangerous only to himself. It is the fool that thinks people can agree, who is dangerous to all of us.[/callout]

    Except that to do anything substantive at all, humans must take risks to cooperate in large numbers. Groups require a hierarchy in order to make decisions. People attach utility and status signals to their positions in those hierarchies. They have many investments, both personal and collective, and those investments are in both means and ends. Having taken those risks, people have ‘interests’. Each person has a set of interests. Each group one or more interests. These interests include both means and ends. Means conflict even if ends do not. Humans cannot agree in large numbers. Interests are always in conflict, because even if ends are not, the means and the organizations of humans needed to achieve those ends are not. THe difference between silly people and sane people is in this simple understanding of the limits of human cooperation. Our president, like all leftists, is a man raised on feminine rather than masculine virutues. He values the famlial model, not the political. Families can agree on ends and means. Political groups cannot agree on means, even if they can agree upon ends. And they rarely agree upon ends, because do to so would be to the advantage of some at the expense of others. Marginalism suggests that if we have sacks of flour in store for the winter, every sack we sell has a different value, whth the first having the least, and the last having the most. It explains why water has much use value but little trade value, and diamonds have little use value but high trade value. But marginalism applies to human sentiments as well: humans recalculate their preferences each step you take toward achieving them. Humans seek opportunity. THey seek ‘relishes’. Only a fool thinks he can fly. But at least he is dangerous only to himself. It is the fool that thinks people can agree, who is dangerous to all of us. Curt