Curt Doolittle

Theme: Deception

  • It’s Not A Privacy Issue: The Economics Of Tracking : Correcting The WSJ’s Sale Of Fear Uncertainty And Doubt:

    From the WSJ:

    The Wall Street Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred.

    In this survey, the vast majority of people were concerned about ‘privacy’.

    [callout] It’s not like Coca Cola, Nike and IBM want to be associated with cheap european amateur adult videos, snippets of skateboarders doing face-plants, or some silly little group of bloggers fomenting rebellion on some little personal political agenda.[/callout]

    To which I respond: Tracking is not a privacy issue. It’s actually good for you, and good for society. (Really.) Tracking = Legitimate Companies. Privacy Invaders = Illegitimate Organizations. It’s not like these tracking-companies are doing anything novel, invasive, or even risky. They aren’t capturing your credit card number, or your home address, or the contents of your romantic emails. They are capturing the kind of things you’re interested in seeing online, so that advertisers can promote goods and services that you’re interested in, rather than spamming you with stuff that completely annoys you. The advertising industry knows perfectly well that people want privacy. Brand owners know perfectly well that if they mistreat your private information, that their brand, their products and their stock price, will pay a very high cost for that abuse. There are plenty of sites that will install malware and viruses. Tracking sites and cookies don’t do that. It’s not in their interest. It would put them out of business if they did install viruses or malware. Advertisers avoid anything negative. It’s too dangerous. Spammers don’t. That’s why spam and certain web sites, or petty criminal web sites (downloading or free entertainment) are the sources of malware and viruses. So, it’s not your absurd searching that will generally get you in trouble. ***It’s trying to get something for free.*** Spammers, Malware and Viruses are delivered by disreputable organizations doing disreputable things on disreputable sites. But advertisers aren’t. Advertisers use TRACKING cookies, and avoid malware, spam and viruses. Nobody Cares. You Aren’t Special But lets also look at it another way: Nobody cares if you surf adult sites, read about absurd human behavior at 11pm, or watch silly animal or kung-fu videos, delve into subcultures you would never interact with in real life, and generally prove that you are surfing under safe conditions for novel, absurd, silly , or radical experiences from the safety of your laptop – which is the best way to explore them.

    [callout]Why? Because you aren’t special. You aren’t interesting. You aren’t rare. In fact, you’re so average that if you saw your surfing behavior graphed next to everyone else’s you’d be horrified and how much you had in common with people form all walks of life. We revel in the absurd. We like to learn from a safe distance. We like to understand the very limits of human behavior. We like to fantasize about what we could never really do. And there isn’t any harm in it. In fact, all things considered, it seems that just the opposite is true: it turns out that it’s a vent, a safe exploration, and it’s good for you, and society.[/callout]

    But that said, no one cares. Why? Because you aren’t special. You aren’t interesting. You aren’t rare. In fact, you’re so average that if you saw your surfing behavior graphed next to everyone else’s you’d be horrified and how much you had in common with people form all walks of life. We revel in the absurd. We like to learn from a safe distance. We like to understand the very limits of human behavior. We like to fantasize about what we could never really do. And there isn’t any harm in it. In fact, all things considered, it seems that just the opposite is true: it turns out that it’s a vent, a safe exploration, and it’s good for you, and society. The private world of browsing is indeed private. It’s like using the bathroom. Everyone does it. We just don’t talk about it in public. That’s because it’s not risky to browse such things. By contrast, it’s very risky to DO those things in real life. That’s why we keep risky behavior safe, private and on the web. A relationship between you and your browser. The Self Interest Of Advertisers But your eccentric surfing behavior isn’t helpful to an advertiser. There isn’t anything really useful to advertise next to those oddities that isn’t already being advertised there. It’s not like Coca Cola, Nike and IBM want to be associated with cheap european amateur adult videos, snippets of skateboarders doing face-plants, or some silly little group of bloggers fomenting rebellion on some little personal political agenda. Or to be gender-balanced, your favorite little gossip site, compromising celebrity photos, rants about how awful men are for being interested in something other than living to fulfill a woman’s every whim, insecurity, status impairment, and nesting urge, and the fact that you shop for clothes that are too young and fitted for your weight, figure and age group. Your sense of individuality – the one that makes you want to protect your privacy – is a self imposed delusion. A delusion we embrace because our self image is part of our sense of social status. We guard that self illusion like we guard our property. If that realization seems unpleasant to your self esteem, then you know why advertisers are good at their jobs: they know this simple fact about you. They know you aren’t special, but you need to think that you are. Brands Only Want To Advertise In Places You Aren’t Ashamed Of Visiting Because of that, they only care about those places where reputable brands can advertise on the web. Not those things where they can’t. And more importantly, even if you were special, it’s not valuable to big brands to associate with perceived absurdities. Brands are public entities. They have public personas. Mixing those brands with anything that would not be done in public would be damaging to them. In fact, if a tracking organization captures enough data that could associate a group of consumer behavior that was aberrant, with a well known brand, (say associating domestic violence with a brand of alcohol) and if that data was released, it would be extremely damaging to the brand. ie: tracking companies don’t want to know, or capture, you’re extraordinary activities. Even having the data in their possession is dangerous to them. It presents them with a liability. Advertisers don’t want them even to collect it. For exactly that reason. Advertisers See The World As Groups Not Individuals Advertisers do not care about you as an individual, or your personal information. They are statisticians. They care about groups. They care about aggregates. About large groups of people doing similar things. They care that of all the people who hit MSN.com, or the NYT or Conde Nast, which kind of things are most of them interested in hearing about? They care about measuring the effect of their ads. They care that if you saw one ad in one place, where else can they show it to you to reinforce it? Because the more targeted the advertisement, the more interested you are, the more times they can show it to you in the hope of making an impression, then the cheaper it is, the more effective it is, and the less chance they will alienate someone by showing them something that they don’t like, while paying dearly for the opportunity to offend someone. They do care about your email. Because if they have your email, they can advertise directly to you. But they know that if they don’t ask permission, you will literally hate them for invading your privacy, and that will hurt their brand. Email crosses the line into privacy for most people, because you can’t shut out advertising that you don’t want. Email is personal. But traffic measurement isn’t stealing your time, or filling your inbox. It’s invisible. The current level of cluelessness among advertisers and marketers on how to use this traditional data and traditional advertising strategy on the web, is not clear to the public. Advertisers have not figured out exactly what to do about the decline in traditional media, and the kind of advertising that has been successful in the past, They don’t know how to advertise to you on the internet. They aren’t sure if it’s good money or bad. They know you want content that helps you make buying decisions. But they aren’t sure how to make you aware of new products and services. Or even if they need to make you aware of them. Tracking Is A Social Good? So to some degree, you’re doing yourself, and society in general a favor. Society needs advertising not only to help fuel the economy, but to simply help us be aware of our choices. If these people collect enough ‘traffic data’ (data about what you view, not about you yourself) then they will build enough information so that they can tell you about what you want to know, not what you don’t want to know. Personally, I would love it, if all the advertising I saw, was about those things I really want to know, but miss out on because there is no way to advertise them to me. For example, a small italian suit designer, or an interesting watch maker, or a small b&b in the Lake District, or a new local Porsche mechanic, or even Proctor and Gamble’s new products, or Crest White Strips, or the WSJ, or Precor Fitness Equipment, or Starbucks to reach me with a sincere sounding and useful message using existing mass market channels. It would simply be too expensive. and it’s not that I don’t want to know about all those things. I do. I just never, ever want to hear about weight loss, or, feminine protection, or a new pharmaceutical, or local football jerseys or sales at Sears, or discounts at Target, or any of the other things that are very relevant to other people and completely annoying wastes of time to me. Advertising is only bad when you don’t want it. And unless you help advertisers understand what you want, you’re going to continue getting what you don’t: stuff that’s irrelevant, and sometimes offensive to your sensibilities. Tracking your behavior lets advertisers target you with the right kinds of ads, and to keep up with your changing tastes and interests. So, tracking isn’t a privacy issue. It’s a public good. (Really.) – An Advertising Agency CEO. (We don’t do tracking. We just don’t think it’s useful to mislead people about tracking either.)

  • The Economics Of Spies: What Spies Really Do

    via What Spies Really Do | Capital Gains and Games. Bruce Bartlett, in reference to the recent Russian spy case, uses an example from his past to pick on the behavioral economics of spying.  But I think, like anything else, there is more to be understood here than meets the eye. He writes:

    I remembered all this some years later when I was working at the Treasury Department and was on the distribution for some CIA raw material relating to economic issues. Almost all of it was worthless. It involved conversations some CIA agent had with a prominent foreign businessman or economist relaying information that could easily be gleaned from that day’s Financial Times.
    Suddenly, I understood what [the spy who had been interviewing me] had been up to. He could have written a memo to his bosses just regurgitating what was in the daily papers, news magazines and other public sources, but that wouldn’t have been very spy-like. It undoubtedly sounded so much better if he could relay the same identical information but say that it had been secured from a high-level congressional staffer. That’s what spies do.

    Bruce, You’re right in part. But there are other factors that might change your opinion of that experience: 0) Yes, a spy is often a bureaucrat, because he exists in a bureaucracy. Often with dismay, frustration and resignation. 1) Spies try a lot of trial-and-error relationship building. In fact, trial and error are a very important part of the business. 2) While Spies are largely from that social group we call ‘nerds’, US spies are usually amazing, wonderful, engaging, intelligent people. But they are, like everyone else, expressions of a bell curve. There are good spies and bad spies and smarter spies and dumber spies. 3) Being a spy is not necessarily doing interesting things and meeting interesting people. And these days, it is a lot more about using relationships to get access to data than it is about human opinion, which is fraught with eror and deception. When a spy talks to you, he is generally looking, like MOST ECONOMISTS ARE, for sources of data, not sources of opinion. And this is very important. Data is more valuable than opinion. They are looking for relationships that will give them access to data. So any conversational content is irrelevant. Your opinion is only a measure of the trustworthiness of the relationship.  The data on the other hand is the reward he is looking for. 4) The value in human intelligence on economic opinion, is not to be found in what you tell them. It’s to be found in the SET of ALL economic opinions found by ALL spies speaking to ALL contacts in any administration and by looking for POLITICAL patterns among the participants. It is not in what you tell them. In fact, a spy will NEVER ask you a direct question regarding his real intentions. This information is then fed to Analysts (Super nerds) who try to obtain value from it. This is a round-about way of saying that you were just a cog in a wheel. And spying is an art of subtlety. And you shouldn’t try to deduce too much about spying from your experience. A spy is, in general, engaged in the trial and error process of creating a large number of relationships while looking for opportunities to gain access to some sort of data. It is a very nerdy business. Forensic accounting and forensic communication data are considered valuable to the trade. By contrast, relationships that are valuable are ‘lottery winnings’. Sure, they target specific people and specific industries, but all the good data is actually in the private sector, and it’s far easier to get there than it is from “another bureaucratic wonk in another bureaucracy who is even more ignorant about that is going on in his country than I am”.

  • A Life In Denial: The Scripture Of Democratic Secular Humanism

    Tenets Of Democratic Secular Humanism (DSH). 1) IQ Denial: The belief that people are, all things considered, equal. When instead they are unequal in ability, and demonstrate that inequality both in testing and by the demonstrated result of their actions in real life. 2) Class and Status Denial: Classes Do Not Exist or are irrelevant. When instead they not only exist, but they appear to be biologically determinant, and are materially useful in the division of labor. 3) Race Denial. Race is immaterial and a construct. When instead, races are material because people act as if they are material, and they act that way because status in-group and status extra-group are achieved with different degrees of difficulty. In grop status is easier to obtain. And status determines access to opportunity, access to mates, and access to talented individuals.

    [callout]Secular Humanism is a faith. It is a utopian religion. And there is no difference between holocaust denial, moon landing denial, and secular humanism’s requirement that members of the religion practice Reality Denial.[/callout]

    4) Gender Denial: The belief that men and women mature at the same rate, have similar IQ distributions, prefer the same experiences, and think in the same manner, and that any difference is environmental. 5) Acquisitiveness Denial: The believe that humans can suppress acquisitiveness — when humans show signs of unlimited acquisitiveness simply to occupy themselves, or to gain stimulation, and their acquisitiveness is a two edged sword: both providing incentives and creating demonstrative differences. 6) Anthropo-implasticity Denial. The belief in the Infinite Plasticity of Humans and their society — When instead, Natural Law is demonstrably correct in that people have permanent unalterable tendencies 7) Rational Limits Denial The belief that rational arguments about political subjects are both persuasive and comprehensible to a democratic polity. 8) Integration Denial: The belief that groups with different racial identities and religions traditions integrate into the utopian homogenity of universal human equality. 9) Democratic Limit Denial: Unlimited people can agree on both ends and means 0- – the Consensus Cognitive Bias – when there are Limits to Political Consensus On Means Of Achieving Goals : 10) Positivism, or The Limits of Empiricism Denial. Empiricism yields universal truths – when there are consequential limits to empiricism and probabilism in prediction of Human Behavior. 11) Concreate Metaphysical Beliefs Denial The belief that people change their beliefs – when people never change their beliefs, they only reinforce them. The restructuring of metaphysical judgments is so expensive only the most dedicated can alter them.All changes in political sentiments come from demographic shifts, not changes in belief. Most political argument is preaching to the choir. Secular Humanism is a faith. It is a utopian religion. And there is no difference between holocaust denial, moon landing denial, and secular humanism’s requirement that members of the religion practice Reality Denial. Secular humanism is anything BUT scientific. Scientific observation would demonstrate what people DO. It is up to religion and philosophy to determine what people SHOULD do, and up to science to determine whether it is possible for them to do it.

  • Angry Old White Men? Hardly.

    Claude Fischer is a sociologist at UC Berkeley who published a piece entitled “Angry Old White Men” in which he categorizes the Tea Party movement as a rural movement of old white men. Mark Thoma, a left-leaning economist picked up the article and posted it on his blog The Economist’s View, where he adds: “Rural America senses that he represents a major shift in the political landscape, one that will no longer put the white male farmer at the center of the American political landscape.” As if its a rural cause rather than a white cause. To which others add:

    “What we’ve got here is a real warning sign that something in our society just isn’t working. It’s not just hand-wringing liberals and right-wing Christians anymore; when your educated upper-middle classes start lashing out, you know the regime’s days are numbered.”

    and

    “The hate directed at “white men” by so many members of leftist establishment(s) borders on blood lust. At their deep core is a burning anger that they focus on the “white man” taking delight in belittling, marginalizing, and taunting that demographic. Perhaps the “delicious irony” is that many of these folks proudly flaunt their fake “tolerance” and calls for “peace” while obviously unable to control their desire to stoke division and strife.”

    and this:

    “Did these [old white guys, especially affluent, Protestant ones] give ground or was it an enlightened choice? … My guess is the shift had more to do with U.S. government based public education, by mostly female primary school teachers, which gave children a sense of respect for all. It still took many generations.

    The last of which is actually the structural answer: our schools teach democratic secular humanism in an effort to replace our traditions and cultures with a state religion. We do not have a separation of church and state. We have a state religion and we send most of our children to the theocracy for education. White Protestants lost political power, status and their culture due to “enlightened choice”. There was no material reason why they HAD to lose power. They chose to be ‘Christian’, which was the sentiment needed to unify a fragmented europe. They could just as easily have chosen to keep slavery, to keep control of government, to forbid immigrants political power, to maintain the requirement of protestantism. In other words, they could have done what most civilizations have done. What most civilizations still do. In fact, the entire purpose of nationalism was to give racial groups their own sovereignty after centuries of tribal distribution across monarchic europe. It Wasn’t Political Power, It Was Economic Power Starting with the industrial revolution, the dominance of the HOUSEHOLD lost importance, and there for the dominance of the MALE waned. The decline has been not just among white men, but among men in particular. Women’s entry into the work place has not hurt high performing men, but since women have taken all the lower risk clerical functions in society, and seem to largely be better suited for it, this has moved men toward the edges – into the riskier professions. They Gave Up Power Voluntarily These voluntary abdicators of male political power were Christians. They tried the experiment. It was a heady debate. We have just wrapped class, race and cultural preference in a deep cloak of secular language instead of religious language. But the underlying sentiments and logic are essentially the same. We have a religion of democratic, secular humanism rather than paternal christianity. The difference is that the political myth of the ‘white man’s burden’ of anglo exceptionalism in order to morally justify the empire, has become the myth of democratic secular humanism in order to justify the empire. The Experiment Failed What has happened is that these previously tolerant people believe that the experiment failed. That their conservative sentiments (the belief that humans have immutable behaviors), have returned to precedence over their liberal sentiments (people can aspire to utopian behavior in the right environment) have changed. White Men in particular tolerated man-hating feminism because they felt it was somewhat justified, but that society would ‘settle back’ because people have ‘natural tendencies’. White Men felt that because of slavery and WW2, that they were wrong in their fantasy of exceptionalism – that they had betrayed their christian sentiments, and so they tolerated criticism in the hope that society would settle down. White men today no longer believe those egalitarian myths. WHen you destroy a mythos you don’t destroy just the ‘bad parts’. You destroy the entire system of myths. They no longer believe in their guilt. They now feel equally wronged. The Levant Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan, describes how he and his fellow members of the levant thought that they had solved the problem of heterogeneity, and that they were more civilized than the rest of the world. But it was a myth. That small civilization is now dead and gone, and gone within his lifetime. People continue to murder each other in droves around the world. And while capitalism decreases costs and increases quality of life, and it because of the prosperity, decreases the incentive to devolve into violence, it is not a sufficient tool for altering the human perception of status, nor of the realities of cooperating in groups: tribes remain fixed in their cooperative networks even under capitalism. It’s just FRICTION that is less important because there is less scarcity of opportunity. What Happens Next The question becomes, a) whether white men will cease tolerating their denigration and become activists, – or b) whether they will do what men have in all other collapsed cultures, which is abandon the Fraternal Order, and become like byzantines, Mediterraneans, or africans, and simply pursue non-political localized self interest which will over time, simply erode the legitimacy of the state. There is another option c) which is violence. But that is always a minority position because it is so costly. And if history is a guide we will get all three of these factors. Western Protestant Culture Is An Anomaly The sentiments of white male culture are an anomaly. It is the product of the fraternal order of city-defending soldiers who treat the ‘market’ (which they don’t differentiate from ‘society’) as if they were shareholders. That sentiment is extremely rare. If that sentiment ceases, we will not get the civilization that utopians aspire to. We have a lot of historically similar situations. We might get something random. But history tells us what we will get will not likely be the ‘free society’ that we aspired to. Urbanization Affects Social Institutions By Increasing Anonymity And Decreasing Economic Conformity We are urbanizing, world wide. And we must. There are too many of us to return to farming. We no longer live where we are self sustaining yet produce excess in order to participate in the market for the purpose of getting money with which to buy what we cannot produce. Nearly all of us must participate in the market for our entire livelihood, trading our skills in manipulating someone else’s tools and materials for money so that we can buy ALL of our needs in the market. We live in a world of perceived risk, surrounded by plenty. But urbanization under market-centricity poses difficult problems. The problem of ‘social order’ (conformity to law or convention) occurs when any civilization sufficiently urbanizes. The human social tools of ostracization (economic exclusion) and fraternalism (economic inclusion) do not operate in dense populations where anonymity is common and therefore social ostracization alone cannot block people from opportunities. There is no evidence that these social tools operate in the dense urban environment. There is no evidence that Law or Religion can cause them to operate either. The Shift To A Racial Minority This is the last generation where white men will feel guilty about their position. They feel disempowered. They are soon to be a minority. They dislike being ridiculed and having their status trampled upon, and are rapidly considering it RACISM against them. (Which they believe will give them the right in turn, to be racist.) The question is what will they do. And if history is any indicator, most of them will do nothing but acquiesce. But like any racial group they will likely form a disenfranchised but radical minority who is activist. This is what is occurring today. If the minority gains traction it gains followers from those who perviously acquiesced – people follow a winning team. White men are also developing the sentiment of racial persecution, and with it, the egalitarian christian sentiments, and their historical guilt are waning. When a people are oppressed they revert to self serving behavior and abandon behaivors of social sacrifice. The Forgone Opportunity Economy Society is not paid for by taxes. We pay for bureaucrats and soldiers with taxes. Society, or social order, is paid for by refraining from seizing opportunities. We create property by not stealing. We create comfort and safety with manners. We create prosperity and frictionless trade by non-corruption and ethical behavior. We prevent ourselves from externalizing high costs to others, and often to ourselves by moral behavior. We take on the burden of truth-telling. We define the granularity of property, the rules of the market. Each of us does ten thousand things a day to pay the tax for social order. And that tax system of opportunity costs is what we call ‘culture’. it is the highest cost of human capital a group can invest in. Groups with different systems compete. They get angry with one another because they ‘sense’ theft or fraud, not of money, but of the sacrifices that they made for their group’s benefit. They get angry when their sacrifices (forgone opportunities) are wasted when another race or social class demeans them. In this way, human groups conduct forgone-opportunity-funded warfare, but they largely do it peacefully. This is the racial and cultural economy. Money, Status, Forgone Opportunity, Access to Opportunity, and Access To Mates. Money is the least of them. Political power is simply the means by which to control the economy. Not just the money economy. But the status, opportunity and mating economy. Institutions (self-perpetuating social habits) are the highest cost development for any civilization. The people in the civilization know the costs. They know the opportunities that they spent on building that cost. They know the taxes that they paid. THey know what property is theirs that they earned. And egalitarianism and charity are happily given as long as they are FRACTIONAL and do not allow one group to steal its institutional costs from another. People are not having a simple emotional reaction. They see usurpation of political power as THEFT. They are ACTING like they see it as theft. The Implications For everyone else who is not a white male, it becomes the question how a society can be managed, or how it will operate without those sentiments of fraternalism. We never get what we think we will. The French and Russian revolutions were horrific both in process and outcome. But most if not all civilizations simply decay once they urbanize, and their expansionist class of males surrenders to the sense of impotence, or the luxury of hedonism, by exporting the effort needed to maintain the social order to the bureaucracy. The general assumption is that the democratic process will solve this problem of social integration and power distribution. But there is no evidence in history that such a thing occurs but rarely, and almost exclusively in England. Politics is a market, and people will circumvent the market when it no longer serves them. No Longer A Nation But An Empire The USA, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt and his ilk, is an empire in imitation the european model. Empires consist of factions. Factions are geographic (trade routes), racial (genetic), cultural (normative), and religious (legal). But an empire over whom half the population feels oppressed and stolen from is simply fragile. We are no longer a country contentiously dealing with a problem of integration caused by our need for population to complete the westward expansion of the continent. Instead we are an empire over some number of smaller nations yearning to be free, and a disenfranchised geographic ex-majority that appears to be developing a new sentiment (acquiescence to failure), a political movement (tea party), and a radical movement (militias). At least, that is where this appears to be going, if history is any indicator. And men who no longer see the existing order as beneficial to them may not work to overthrow it, but they will not work to maintain it. And that may be worse. The Difference Between Methods The difference between conservatives and progressives lies in the different assumptions we have of human nature. Progressives are utopians that believe we are free to build whatever world we choose to – they err on the side of people ‘doing good’ which is why progressivism is a movement of the industrial period. Conservatives err on the side of people ‘pursuing self interest’ which is why conservatism is an ancient sentiment, although conservatism as a political movement is a reaction to the english and french revolutions and the rise of socialism and communism. It is a contemporary reaction to progressivism. And like all conservative movements it is a reaction to the perception of theft of one’s assets by political means (even if those assets were unjustly acquired as in mercantilism or predatory banking or slavery). Conservatives believe that human beings have innate sensibilities, biases and preferences that are immutable. And because they are immutable we should develop institutions that take these immutable differences into account. We should expect people to act with racial preferences because people almost always do act with racial preferences. They do so because intra-racial status is more beneficial for the majority than is extra-racial status. And status controls access to mates. Except at the extremes where status can be increased by breaking racial barriers, status determines access to mates, determines access to opportunities, access to networks, in general, access to a better life. The Economics Of Race And The Impact On Politics So the question is, what will happen in a world where we have a white minority whose traditions create the opportunity for democracy and rotation of the elites, and most people have racial preferences, where there is no method of organization urban conformity, but we have a political system that allows democratic rotation of elites? In general, at least in history, people tend to vote in what is called “Bonapartism” or a totalitarian who can forcibly resolve differences. Bonapartism is democratic totalitarianism. Our systemic answer to urbanization was credit. Credit is more useful than laws because with record keeping it produces both positive and negative incentives. We are likely going to continue to build the credit society instead of the religious and legal societies. In fact, law is so technical it is largely immaterial, and most people are both isolated from it and ignorant of it. We actually operate by credit and exchange instead of legal or religious conformity. We live in the credit society. But while credit solves the problem of anonymity and ostracization, it does not solve the problem of tribal and cultural sovereignty, which is a code-phrase for the system of status signals among people with racial and cultural similarities. In a world of economic plenty and cheap debt and fiat money there is an inflationary impact upon status perceptions that like a tide floats all boats and reduces class and race friction. But in a world of unemployment, which may be structural, permanent, and wherein opportunities are more scarce, and therefore racial status more advantageous, and in a society where there is a very large and disenfranchised minority that is government by an activist political system that they see as tyrannical and against their interest, it seems unlikely that people will support that government, that way of life, or even the assumption that the government and way of life are ‘goods’. Race matters. Race matters because ENOUGH people act with racial preferences, and MORE of them act with racial preferences under economic duress, because acting within racial preferences is economically rewarding for the majority of its members. It’s just simple economics.

  • We Won’t Stop Bloggers From Telling Us Otherwise. This Isn’t A Pursuit Of Truth.

    In an essay that has attracted some interest from the blogging community, Kartik Athreya of the Richmond Fed, correctly states that there are political hacks misusing economic arguments. But she misses the point.

    Economics is Hard. Don’t Let Bloggers Tell You Otherwise “In the wake of the recent financial crisis, bloggers seem unable to resist commentating routinely about economic events. It may always have been thus, but in recent times, the manifold dimensions of the financial crisis and associated recession have given fillip to something bigger than a cottage industry. Examples include Matt Yglesias, John Stossel, Robert Samuelson, and Robert Reich. In what follows I will argue that it is exceedingly unlikely that these authors have anything interesting to say about economic policy. This sounds mean-spirited, but it’s not meant to be, and I’ll explain why.”

    [callout] Bloggers then, like everyone else, are arguing against error with error. Against sentiment with sentiment. Against bias with bias. Against foolishness with foolishness.[/callout]

    “The question is: can they provide you, the reader, with an internally consistent analysis of a dynamic system subject to random shocks populated by thoughtful actors whose collective actions must be rendered feasible? For many questions, I and my colleagues can, and for those that the profession cannot, the blogging crowd probably can’t either.” “…just below the surface of all the chatter that appears in blogs and op-ed pages, there is a vibrant, highly competitive, and transparent scientific enterprise hard at work. At this point, the public remains largely unaware of this work. In part, it is because few of the economists engaged in serious science spend any of their time connecting to the outer world (Greg Mankiw and Steve Williamson are two counterexamples that essentially prove the rule), leaving that to a group almost defined by its willingness to make exaggerated claims about economics and overrepresent its ability to determine clear answers.”

    [callout]So while I laud your ambitions, it seems, that you have fallen into the same error that you accuse of others: to pretend to possess knowledge that you do not.[/callout]

    In a polity where we have traded traditional moral principles for the abstractions of economic theory as the means of resolving differences between the ambitions of our politicians, and where at the same time, economics is a nascent, and perhaps insufficient body of knowledge to adequately inform both our polity and its leaders, both sides of any debate are required to rely upon the accumulated erroneous judgements and confirmation biases inherent in their constituents. Bloggers then, like everyone else, are arguing against error with error. Against sentiment with sentiment. Against bias with bias. Against foolishness with foolishness. Your analysis assumes that economists can be of much help in the public debate. When in fact, there is also a body of economic philosophy that states that the entire DSEM, as well as equilibrium itself, and the descriptive, probabilistic, non-causal mathematics employed in it, are insufficient methods for representing and forecasting economic interactions. In fact, the great progress of economists over the past fifty years has largely been to supply quantitative proof that confirms the traditional descriptions of the consistency of human error, bias and information asymmetry — a set of errors which only needed exposition because of the false pronouncements of the theorists who created the idealistic models suitable for simplistic mathematical modeling.

    [callout]Economics as we know it is a process of describing the past. Politics is the process of inventing the future. The difference between description and invention is infinite.[/callout]

    In other words, politics has little to do with economics. And all economic science seems to have accomplished, is to trade one set of traditional wisdoms for another set of speculations. And while you refer to economics as ‘scientific’, the political use of economic theory has been anything but scientific. And to a large degree, the immature nature of economic theory combined with the foolishness of political rhetoric, has created as much harm as good. In the comfort and support it gave to communism and socialism alone, the record of economic theory is the record of bloodshed, fraud, deception and heady murder. So while I laud your ambitions, it seems, that you have fallen into the same error that you accuse of others: to pretend to possess knowledge that you do not. The greater economists who do much of the great work, often refrain from the political discourse, largely because they possess sufficient wisdom to know that it is a pointless exercise. Economics as we know it is a process of describing the past. Politics is the process of inventing the future. The difference between description and invention is infinite.

  • A Tiff : Hoppe and Tom Fleming and My Response

    Hans Hoppe posted what I thought was a sentimental statement on the five year history of his movement on the libertarian web site VDARE. It’s titled The Property And Freedom Society—Reflections After Five Years In this article, he gives us his interpretation of the history of his organization, the Property And Freedom Society. (of which I am a member.) It describes, as all members of these political groups tend to, the reason why the conservative and liberal wings broke up at The John Randolph Club: they were based upon a relationship between Murray Rothbard, a libertarian, and Tom Fleming, a conservative. And after Rothbard’s death, the society broke apart because there was no replacement for Rothbard that could work comfortably with Fleming. There is no mystery here. This is how the partnership process works. When one partner dies, the remaining partner tends to hold onto the previous set of commitments, and the new partners want to be seen as new peers, and to write new commitments.

    [callout] I care that my waiter is pleasant. I care that my intellectuals are either correct or insightful. [/callout]

    However, Hoppe states that Tom Fleming is ‘a difficult person’. Which is not just hoppe’s opinion, but pretty much everyone else I’ve mets opinion. And I’m not sure it’s an insult. I know I’m considered difficult by plenty of people. Intellectuals are rare, and for them, the unsophisticated are often a lot of work to deal with – it’s just frustrating. Coming to terms with people who have different metaphysics from you, is awfully hard work, and very painful at times. It’s just irritating. And these petty realities are just part of the problem of being a human being. I think Tom has done good work. I think a lot of people think he’s difficult. I think a lot of people are put off by Hoppe. That doesn’t matter to me. I just want to know if they’re right or not. I care that my waiter is pleasant. I care that my intellectuals are either correct or insightful. Their manners are immaterial to me. Tom’s response only served to confirm Hoppe’s statement. The title says it all Hans Hoppe Welcomes You to his Fantasy Island Now I’ve only met Tom I think once, and I’m not sure where it was. And he seemed an intelligent and civil guy. But, I was kind of thrown by his response. You should read it. Myself, I am over-reactive on purpose. I found that as a rhetorical device, false-hostility will give your opponent incentive to invest in, and stay with a complex argument — and that when you’re done, and get to agreement it’s more satisfying. I learned it from watching Friedman, who never gave in. And I supposed I picked up some of it from Hoppe.

    [callout]false-hostility will give your opponent incentive to invest in, and stay with a complex argument[/callout]

    The comments, per usual, are more interesting than the author’s post. My Response below is visible at Chronicles Magazine here. This is a very interesting series of posts to read. I’m a supporter of both LVMI and PFS. (I have given them money.) I’m probably one of the most literate members of the faction in the private sector. And I agree that it’s a tough crowd to spend time with. Yes, it was extremely difficult to get past the doctrinal attitude and Randian cultishness that you are complaining about in order to understand and make use of the philosophical content that’s in their line of thinking. What made it worthwhile was the number of answers provided by them, and the vast amount of effort they put into educating people of all stripes that made it easy to become involved in this branch of the history of ideas.

    [callout]I have never found Hoppe’s theatre anything other than entertaining[/callout]

    First, I don’t really care about someone’s rhetorical posture. I have never found Hoppe’s theatre anything other than entertaining, and have found him helpful and a good mentor if you’re worth his time – which I can count on having received in seconds or minutes at best. And if you accepted praxeology (I don’t for technical reasons having to do with closed systems of logic – and praxeology is a subset of behavior and so it’s a falsely closed system) you’d also look at the world as Hoppe does: if you disagree you’re just wrong because it’s logically impossible to disagree. I am pretty certain he actually believes it. And I have never pressured him on any point and found anything other than honesty underneath his posture. This posture is an incredibly effective, controversial, and therefore valuable, rhetorical device. But it’s important to understand that it’s a rhetorical device. Every single TV Producer understands this, or we wouldn’t have talking-head shows to entertain ourselves with. Part of his knowledge base, (as was Friedmans and Rothbards) is this somewhat intentionally antagonistic posture. It undermines the opposite posture: opting out of the argument. Again, this is an ancient rhetorical technique in the european model. In fact, I suspect that the members of this blog, who have left comments above, do not understand the emotive rhetorical device they themselves are using. Or rather, that Hoppe is baiting in order to obtain engagement, and most of the comments above are attempting to force methodological conformity derived from assumptions of equality under the civic republican tradition – the presupposition of majority sentiment rather than superiority of ones argument. While I’m not certain, Hoppe’s method may in fact, be the only device possible to use against the method that you’re using. And I think you’re relying upon that sentiment rather than the veracity of any argument you possess. I don’t think that needs to be the case. I think that your method lacks an analytical foundation and you’re stuck between a desire for positivist solutions to unarticulated moral problems, and relying upon majority sentiment and tradition as an argument. (WHich is the default human position in any field of endeavor.)

    [callout]Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises have fallen into, or intentionally embraced, a logical Godelian trap in an effort to find a pseudo-scientific device with which to fight the pseudo-scientific positivism underlying the rationalizations of democratic socialism.[/callout]

    Unlike your majority position, I think Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises have fallen into, or intentionally embraced, a logical Godelian trap in an effort to find a pseudo-scientific device with which to fight the pseudo-scientific positivism underlying the rationalizations of democratic socialism. So while they have advanced the body of thought, they have failed to date. Hayek failed as well, at least, to make a strong enough argument, because he relied too much upon psychology rather than calculation — and the two wings of theorists failed, (Along with Talcott Parsons) to actually uncover the problem. Despite these failings, as a research program the Anarchists have proved very fruitful. While Rothbardianism is flawed, for technical reasons this group members would not understand without quite a bit of unwilling-and-skeptically-expended effort, the structure of Misesian, Rothbardian and Hoppian argument is a strong analytical foundation for discussing what have been, for all of the history of thought, undefinable abstractions. [callout]Hoppian argument is a strong analytical foundation for discussing what have been, for all of the history of thought, undefinable abstractions.[/callout] They haves provided an alternative framework (property and calculation) to the process of balance-of-powers-through-debate, which is the technology of republican government. Or rather, they have show that WITHOUT reliance on a calculative framework, that rhetorical debate devolves into either error or fraud. They see property as a moral argument rather than necessary argument – and they do so because they failed to articulate the full spectrum of human behavior by relying on the easy-epistemology allowed by the records left from the exchange of money. They did not include the invisible institutional economy of sacrifices that people make by NOT doing things with their property, their time, their bodies and their money. I suspect the Misesians make these errors because they are a little too enamored of infinite property rights — a bias which stops them from seeing and articulating the limits of property rights, and how those limits can be calculated. (Calculation being necessary when time, permutation and content are beyond human perception without such tools.) And I suspect that they intuit, if not understand, that if they did explain that full spectrum of human action, that they’d be confronted with the necessity, rationality, and morality of redistribution and public services.

    [callout]Rothbardianism and Misesianism are an attempt to create a luddite religion based upon trade, rather than a technical political order based upon land holding, trade route holding, market participation, coordination, calculation and adaptation.[/callout]

    Rothbardianism and Misesianism are an attempt to create a luddite religion based upon trade, rather than a technical political order based upon land holding, trade route holding, market participation, coordination, calculation and adaptation. I suspect that this is simply an unconscious attempt to justify the Jewish maternal minority sentiment that comes from non-land-holding disaporic people, as opposed to the european majority fraternal sentiment of land-holding soldiers. These are sentiments, derivations and residues that we rarely if ever understand of ourselves. This Misesian and Rothbardian jewish wing is in direct contrast to the Hayekian and Christian wing’s sentiments of group persistence in order to be able to defend and hold land, and in holding and defending land, hold and defend markets and trade routes. These sentiments are the underlying difference between the Jewish and Christian wings of libertarianism: jewish reliance on words and systems of though and christian reliance on the republican and militaristic models of land holding. We cannot escape our Hayekian knowledge no matter how hard we try. and in turn, these two libertarian programs are attempts to find a solution to the problem of maintaining freedom and prosperity without having to confront the reality of the necessity of using violence to retain that freedom – when that freedom originated uniquely in the west precisely because it was obtained by, and held by, violence. In other words our political dialog is distracted by the contra-rational desire to ignore the necessity of using violence to retain sufficient power to retain freedom. [callout]our political dialog is distracted by the contra-rational desire to ignore the necessity of using violence to retain sufficient power to retain freedom.[/callout] The question remains which wing of classical liberal thought, whether it be the ‘liberal’ factions or the conservative factions, have made progress in articulating a framework for political economy once the epistemological boundary conditions imposed on the republican model by hard money were broken by the adoption of fiat money. The Austrian prescription is a return to the gold standard. Which is wrong, because the insurance provided by fiat money, or at least, paper money, is too valuable to ignore. This is simply the only solution that they can think of – and since they’re economists rather than information architects, they fall into a selection bias. We must understand that Misesian and Rothbardian thinking is that of luddites, just as was Marx – they are trying to return to a technology they understand without understanding why it’s necessary and what alternatives that there may be. These regressive ideas are conservative solutions — historical solutions to a problem of increasing individual participation in a market consisting of larger and larger numbers of people with increasingly localized and fragmentary knowledge, and operating in real time, in order to exploit opportunities that present themselves because of necessary and permanent asymmetry of information in a large population engaged in diverse production. The gold standard It is not the only solution. There are others. There is a very good one in particular. But you cannot understand that solution unless you understand the value of the methodology used in the Misesian, rothbardian, and hoppian models, and the limits of knowledge brought to bear by Popper and Hayek. This information-weakness in our existing political and economic institutions is the underlying problem of political economy with the civic republican model — If you can fathom it from the few and admittedly abstract words I’ve posted here. The problem is one of practical epistemology that allows experimentation and innovation without exposing us to the risk of human hubris on one end, and corruption, theft, and slavery on the other. [callout]The problem is one of practical epistemology that allows experimentation and innovation without exposing us to the risk of human hubris on one end, and corruption, theft, and slavery on the other.[/callout] And debates like this one over form and protocol, manners and arrogance, are frankly beneath me, and should be beneath anyone who is concerned about discovering real solutions to the problem of political economy. Both sides of this dispute, from my standpoint, are simply acknowledging their failure when they rely upon ideological, methodological, or rhetorical conformity as a means of argumentative discovery of the solutions we seek. All I read into Hoppe’s piece was sentimental reflection, and tame taunting elitism. Perhaps this is one of those debates among academics that is so important precisely because the stakes are so small. And I don’t think the above retort does much to disprove hoppe’s taunt. The tactical response would be to tease him and therefore disprove him rather than reinforce his position. And the real argument here is that everyone within this absurdly minority movement, just like all desperate little academic movements, is that it’s desperate for followers. And not operating logically, but instead, using silly socio-political tricks because we’re all desperately seeking confirmation biases in the face of a problem we cannot comprehend, rather than understanding each other’s position and desperately seeking a solution to political economy. Libertarianism is a fantastic research program within the branch of conservatism. And the world needs the movement simply because conservatives have failed to muster and articulate a rational and technical alternative to encroaching socialism. Historicism is insufficient because HISTORICAL MODELS FAILED. EACH OF THEM FAILED. The Austrians and Anarchists are very close to providing a rational solution to political economy. I suspect that they (myself included perhaps) will fail for the same reasons that this silly dispute of egos and manners illustrates. Even if someone were to publish an essay with the solution in it, and the truth of it were patently obvious, I would venture that everyone in every faction would desperately seek to use whatever content was inside that essay to justify his own position in order to keep his followers or demonstrate that he was right all along. Hume told us what the problem is. Kant failed to find a solution. A legion of political economists have spent a hundred and fifty years trying to find an answer. They came closest in the 1930’s. But Mises, Hayek and Parsons failed, just as Weber and Pareto failed. And because they failed the political sector reached out to Friedman, which provided a temporary solution even if it was the wrong one, and Hayek, because his sentiment was correct even if his solutions were faulty. The conservatives hoped to get enough people into the property society that they could counteract the dependence society. But they used general liquidity (cheap money) rather than direct investment, and so the money was used for consumption not innovation and increases in productivity. The liberals, having converted us from a saving to a debt society, the conservatives hoped to alter it, but only accomplished further indebtedness. Only the libertarians have attempted to reconvert us to mans greatest innovation: the saving and investment society. [callout]Only the libertarians have attempted to reconvert us to mans greatest innovation: the saving and investment society.[/callout] But the way we solve our political problem is not debt, or even monetary policy. It is to create an innovation over the greek city state and the roman empire and the anglo mercantilist and american consumer republic. And to understand why we need to innovate beyond that model: the limits of human perception in a complex division of knowledge and labor. And that when we break with hard money, AND at the same time pool information (accumulate quantities in categories using numeric values of abstract objects we call property) we launder the necessary causal information needed to make rational decisions. And in doing so we also remove the incentive for people to obtain and hold that information, and to be disciplined and truthful in their valuations. The information needed to evaluate Property cannot be embodied in numbers. It’s a perishable not conveyed by the number. Numbers and values are subjective judgements, not objective truths. This is the error of both liberal positivists and the general political fantasy of scientific politics sought by the socialists. [callout]The information needed to evaluate Property cannot be embodied in numbers. It’s a perishable not conveyed by the number. Numbers and values are subjective judgements, not objective truths. This is the error of both liberal positivists and the general political fantasy of scientific politics sought by the socialists.[/callout] The solution is to fix our institutions of banking and accounting, so that we possess sufficient information to make rational decisions under the economically stable civic republican model. This change in institutions is a technical problem, not a philosophical, religious or cultural one. And as a technical problem, it is a solvable problem. It does not ask anyone to ‘believe’ anything. Faith is not a strategy. Hope is not a tactic. As weber said, all advancement in institutions is calculative.

    [callout]it is bureaucracy that is a danger to us, not government.[/callout]

    The second half is to understand that it is bureaucracy that is a danger to us, not government. A bureaucrat lives outside the market, as does a priest, a politician, a union laborer, or a welfare recipient. They are no different – they are class descriptions of the same behavior. But government is the means by which we concentrate all forms of capital. It is a joint stock company whose membership is paid for by respect for property rights, and frankly, whose dividends are paid for in public services and redistribution. The problem we enter into is when public services become the purpose of government, rather than the concentration of capital necessary to provide the joint stock company with competitive economic advantage so that there are returns great enough that redistribution can be performed in one form or another. Aside from the transforming from the saving society to the debt society, the transformation of government from creating wealth to consuming it is the artifact of the 20th century. It is far easier for the houses of government to debate over spoils, than it is to debate over the creation of prosperity so that it can distribute the spoils. [callout]Aside from the transforming from the saving society to the debt society, the transformation of government from creating wealth to consuming it is the artifact of the 20th century.[/callout] The anarchists are working on solving, and have largely solved, the problem of bureaucracy. And the solution is not anarchy. The solution is privatization of the bureaucracy, and the improvement of our institutions such that the knowledge that was provided by individuals THROUGH hard money, can be provided by individuals through shared investment in borrowing from the public’s future commitments in exchange for mutual gain, while retaining accountability, and with those who are willing to be accountable because they possess knowledge by which to make rational decisions. Under this model, the government may make rational decisions about investments, and we are protected from enslavement by either debt or the bureaucracy. This is too much content for a posting, too poorly articulated for the scope of the problem. But I was trying to put the different factions into a context so that we could focus on the real problem: finding an answer to providing institutions that deliver both freedom and prosperity. And for my side, I consider Hans Hoppe a gift to all of us. He’s innovative, creative, pedagogically gifted, and most of all, funny.

  • NYT On Libertarianism

    The NYT posted an article today titled The Economics of Libertarianism, Revealed. And the usual NYT crowd followed with critical comments. Which is useful. Because we get to see what the proletariat think of a subject about which they know little to nothing. This is a very odd set of comments. Heresay on one end and incompetence and error on the other. Desipte that libertarianism is the most fully articulated political philosophy we currently possess, it is both incomplete, its authors mix semi-charismatic language with reason, and they start from a convenient and erroneous premise: non-violence. And thereby simplify the problem of political economy dramatically enough that they overstate the ease of attaining their goals. As a theorist in this field, I’ll try to correct some statements made here: 1) there are a numberer of libertarian sects. They share a preference forindividual freedom and property rights. But they vary greatly from a branch of articulated classical liberalism (cato – english sentiments) to articulated conservatism (hayekians – german sentiments) to articulated radical anarchists (rothbardians – jewish sentiments). You cannot take ‘libertariansim’ as a coherent body of work. Or better stated, you cannot take the words of any thinker at face value: most if not all human debate is an attempt to find a rational explanation for sentiments. And sentiments are residues of our cognitive biases. (Pareto) 2) Libertarianism is NOT anti-government it is anti-bureaucracy. This is the issue that confuses everyone by incorrectly framimg the debate. The terms Government and Bureaucracy are not synonyms. And libertarians are both right, rational, and supported by data when they argue against bureaucracy. It says that humans in bureaucracies (whether private or public) once they become insulated from the market and prices, live by self interest without the market function that puts their self interest to good use in the service of others. It is possible to live a life outside of the market by the homeless or hippie lifestyle, by making enough money to live on your wealth alone, or by joining the bureaucracy and simply living off the efforts of others, and ignoring their signals – prices. The underlying theory of libertarianism is a) economic calculation is competitively impossible without prices and the market. b) market incentives are necessary to create a prosperous advanced society. c) our cultural institutions are economic strategies that, much like our sentiments, we do not yet fully understand and they should be treated cautiously. Most importantly, our most cherished values are often false: people are unequal, cultures are not equal in value, diversity breeds discontent not happiness, people are racist, classist and culturist, and it’s in their interest to be so, even if it is not in their interest for legislation to be so. (Really.) d) Leglislation as we understand it is infereior to credit as a means by which we can change the behavior of people in a society. We must move from the law-society to the credit society, and our government is not organized to make that change, while the private sector is. Therefore we must push our ‘bureaucracy’ into the private secctor where the market will kill off organizations once they are no longer useful. e) insurance companies taht are highly regulated will do a better job than the governmetn of regulating most market activity. But we have over-corporialized both banking, insurance and management. In simple terms, your banker should personally back your loan, and not be able to resell it. Same for insurance. This is a complex topic but we cannot abstract all accountabilty without losing the knowledge to be accountable with in the process. f) All bureaucracies are anti-market, anti-prosperity, self-serving, eventually corrupt, and stagnate the culture and prey upon the citizenry. The market puts our selfishness to better use than the bureaucracy does. It’s that simple. The libertarian strategy is to push as much of the FUNCTON of government into the private sector where iti is subject to competitive market functions so that we can prevent the bureaucracy from forming. Because it is the bureaucracy, or, the market-exiting of people within the bureaucracy that is the problem, not government. None of the libertarians is right, word for word. They are attemtping to find a solution to a perrenial problem: coordinatoin and ocoperatin in a dynamic dividsion of knowledge and labor. They intuit solutoins based upon their cultural heritage then try to articulate solutions in a long term, vast attempt, to explain what it is that we do, and why it works. We’ve had markets for a long time. Economits don’t invent anything. They just try to explain it the best they can. Libertairnism is the best, most fully articulated political philosophy we have. But that does not mean it can be implemented without an ‘event’. Because our government is not structured to replace itself. And the citizenry will always favor democratically imposed tyrrany, commonly called Bonapartism, and teh certainty of it, over freedom.

  • The New York Times Is An Organized Crime Syndicate – And Misrepresenting Libertarianism Is Fraud And Theft.

    THE NYT IS AN ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE Why is the NYT an Organized Crime Syndicate? Because the NYT has committed as much journalistic fraud, at a greater scale, as any of the most controlled of state run media in modern history, and has brought to market a defective and harmful product, and profited from the sale of that defective product. And that defective product has caused harm to both the long term material economy, and the institutions and habits of the citizenry, that have been dearly paid for. We are repeatedly assailed by revelations that yet another corrupt New York Times journalist has stolen from society by creating artificial myths which they bring to the market of political discourse as fraudulently misrepresented products. We are confronted with editorial bias among most of the New York media, but systemically so by the NYT who not only editorializes, but conducts systemic hiring, encouragement of, and acceptance by those editors of authors who confirm the bias of those editors, rather than those who seek to falsify it. [callout] Falsification is the only scientific method we know of. If a news media wished to be engaged in rational and scientific discourse, each would list it’s editorial biases and ambitions and then seek to falsify them, rather than confirm them. But instead we use the MARKET for news to attempt to fix this problem, thereby subjecting the POPULATION to the problem of interpreting information that they are not equipped to qualify, and forcing them into the practical pursuit of confirmation biases rather than the pursuit of political truths simply by exhausting them.[/callout] What is the difference between a corporation that brings such a drug to market for profit, and a firm that manufactures journalism and brings it to market? They are both selling defective and harmful products into the marketplace. So what is the difference? Nothing.Organized Crime Definitions of organized crime vary according to the Mission and Scope of the organizations seeking to prosecute it. In general, organized crime is a form of organizational conspiracy for the purpose of profiting from illegal activities. Illegal activities are those that profit from theft of property or service. But there is another form of organized crime, that is within the mission and scope of another organization seeking to police and prosecute it: the citizenry. The citizenry must prevent systemic and organized theft of institutionally accumulated costs, paid for not with the currency of money, but with the currency of restraint: forgone opportunity costs. These crimes may be petty, such as those of manners, they may be material, such as those of ethics, and they are most commonly moral, as in those that undermine our institutions that assist us in saving and accumulating human capital. Free Speech Free speech is a product of the republican system of government, whereby debate is a proxy for violence. It is a means of resolving conflicts between peers. Its origins are among the strong and wealthy classes. The purpose of free speech is to create a political dialog for determining the optimum solution for the advancement of the polis among share-holding equals.

    [callout] [ It is ] the citizenry who must prevent systemic and organized theft of institutionally accumulated costs, paid for not with the currency of money, but with the currency of restraint: forgone opportunity costs. These crimes may be petty, such as those of manners, they may be material, such as those of ethics, and they are most commonly moral, as in those that undermine our institutions that assist us in saving and accumulating human capital.[/callout]

    Free speech universally degrades into the act of persuasion for pragmatic personal political and economic ends, whenever the cost of fraud becomes too low, and it becomes lowest when taken to it’s extreme under the principle of systemic non-violence. Free speech is only possible to employ without the subjective control of violence if there is a ‘science’ by which to constrain the debate. THe field of economic science is struggling to become that method of articulating moral, political action. ie: Rational debate is a proxy for violence. irrational debate simply trades violence for deception and fraud. Violence is immediate and it is of all things, HONEST, instructive and decisive. Fraud is dishonest, prolonged, confusing and indecisive. Over time we have developed a policy of tolerating errors in free speech because we assume that the truth will prevail. We assume that wise and honest men will honestly correct the course of debate. We assume that men desire the truth rather than simply victory by fraud, ad that when presented with the truth they will acquiesce. We model debate as if we are still peers in the house of lords, rather than disparate groups of common people promoting our elites to heroic status whereby they battle in public circles by allusions, deceptions, barbs and ridicule, rather than reason, logic, and facts. We are further cautious of free speech in media because of the inequality it gives to an individual’s voice, an because it gives our group heroic elites a distorted but unchecked monopolistic voice in a system of politics developed for orators in a forum.

    [callout]… conservatives desire to preserve their freedom, and keep down the cost of it, by creating institutions that meritocratically rotate the elites, and whose institutions are meritocratic and therefore privatized. Conservatives are not against change. They are against change that creates systemic corruption. [/callout]

    Conservatives are particularly cautious of these elites because the conservative’s preferred method of action is individual, functional and one of material commercial action rather than the left’s preferred method of coercion by politics, media, and anarchic violence. Or more simply stated, that conservatives desire to preserve their freedom and the cost of it, by creating institutions that meritocratic-ally rotate the elites, and whose institutions are meritocratic and therefore privatized. Conservatives are not against change. They are against change that creates systemic corruption. Perhaps, they are also cognizant of, and desirous of building a society where one is rewarded for good, honest, hard working and kind social behavior, and bureaucrats whether inside the state, or inside industry, who are not subject to market conditions are not incentivized to conform to good civic behavior as was illustrated by Adam Smith. Regardless of political spectrum, we are further skeptical of media, because media is a means for institutionalizing the act of profiteering from selling class and group conflict. JOURNALISTIC FRAUD IS ORGANIZED CRIMEThe Most Recent NYT Organized Crime Syndicate Initiative Is Against Libertarianism

    It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market.

    No, it was a set of LAWS called the “Jim Crow Laws” that the government instituted in order to create slavery, and maintain its persistence as a social and economic structure. The STATE created slavery. The state funded and protected THE SLAVE TRADE ROUTES. The state sanctioned, protected and taxed slave Markets. The state prosecuted and pursued escaped slaves. It was the STATE that created and built slavery. In fact, in all of human history, it was the a defining property of STATEHOOD that allowed one class of people to enslave another. The Israelites returned from the desert and enslaved people. The Entire egyptian and babylonian societies were enslaved or virtually so. Hellenic and Roman civilizations were slave owning. European civilization was slave owning. Almost all civilizations in agrarian history are slave owning because farming is hard labor.

    [callout]…The STATE created slavery. The state funded and protected THE SLAVE TRADE ROUTES. The state sanctioned, protected and taxed slave Markets. The state prosecuted and pursued escaped slaves. It was the STATE that created and built slavery.[/callout]

    Secondly, it is the innovations in technology by the private sector that have made slavery unprofitable. And it is the insight of libertarian economists that slavery is simply LESS PROFITABLE than turning your former slaves into consumers. Because as consumers they simply have superior incentives to be productive in the market place. No, it was not the state, it was individuals, largely Christian men, who promoted anti-slavery, because as christians they saw this as un-christian behavior. It was women who took advantage of this anti-slavery momentum as a political step in getting their own vote via the suffrage movement once the industrial revolution started to free them from home-drugery. And it was politicians in Washington and the north that promoted anti-slavery, and Lincoln in particular who promoted it as a means of forcing the north to war against the south for entirely political reasons. But these people were not anti-slavery at the outset. They were agitated by the fact that the north and south produced different market products (southern raw cotton versus northern manufactured goods) and that the south was paying the federal taxes that they funded the state. The south was consuming overseas goods, and the north wanted to decrease competition from overseas for their goods, and so the north wanted to use the STATE to force the south to ‘buy american’, and needed to overtake power. Slavery was simply a rallying cry by which the state could get the Christian population to support a war. Slavery was on it’s way out the world over because it is UNPRODUCTIVE under industrialization. Slavery was not conquered because it was immoral. It was for political and economic reasons. The anti-slavery movement only accelerated the natural process of abandonment of slavery under industrialization, for purely self-serving, economic and political motivations. Slavery would have been eliminated by the free market. It was the state that interfered with the process by prolonging it. It was the state that took credit for the dissolution of slavery that was in reality, a dissolution created by the free market. This is what the DATA SHOWS. Regardless of the ridiculous public utterances and pamphleteering in the political arena, slavery was of declining productivity.

    It was government that rescued the economy from the Depression and promoted safety and equality in the workplace.

    No that’s not true. There is a vast body of work on this topic and it is still in dispute. So no, this is not settled science. We know that the governments created the problems that led to the great depression by creating fiat money and rapid immigration. We know that the war is what got the country out of depression. We know the post-war-era prosperity was largely due to the conversion of manufacturing and construction to war-materials (panel products). But we do not know that the government got the country out of depression and there is a substantive and arguably correct body of work that states that the government both caused the rapid decline, and by it’s policies prolonged it. Just as the policies enacted during the depressionary period are the cause of the systemic crash of western economies, which despite warnings from libertarians, are the result of converting society from “cultures of saving and increasing production to inter-generational redistribution and inflationary consumption” which thereby exposed the civilization to cumulative and irreparable risk. Libertarians warned that progress was not eternal, could not be depended upon, and that our economic tools and theories could not provide us with the insights which we attributed to them. But to no avail.

    “Under this philosophy, the punishment for a lunch counter that refuses to seat black customers would be public shunning, not a court order.”

    What it means is that any group should be able to ostracize what they see as anti-social behavior. And they have the right to determine what they consider anti-social behavior to be. Libertarianism states that if you want to build a homophobic, racist little town somewhere, go ahead, because you will descend into poverty by doing so. It says, quite conversely, that if you want to create a homocentric pluralistic city, that you can do so, and that economically you will benefit by doing so. Libertarianism states that it is up to the individual to choose which of those cities to live in. And that neither fantasy has the right to oppress the other. Libertarianism CELEBRATES DIVERSITY of choice, not choice-less mandated diversity. And it does so because it advocates that markets reward and punish. (( To counter argue this position no matter what angle one took, simply would require that you argue white europeans, or some other ethnic group, are a superior race. )) And any group that does engage in such economic ostracization such as refusing to seat customers of one race or another, would accomplish one of the following things: 1) go out of business by the loss of customers and the creation of competitors who serve the rejected customers 2) increase their business by the decrease in presence of anti-social behavior In fact, this is what people DO, in reality. Except in the very RAREST of circumstances in the very largest cities, in the most wealthy shopping and business districts, people congregate with people who look, and act, and speak, as they do. While this observation is trivial to any person on the street, yet escapes the Schumpeterian (( Schumpeterian Intellectual: someone who profits from selling his services as a public intellectual by criticizing the traditions of the society that made his idleness and therefore his criticism possible, and by consequence, subsidizing the bureaucratic evolution of totalitarianism. )) intellectual class, despite the data and evidence that proves uncontrovertibly that people are racist, act racist and always will act racist, and that the will do so for rational reasons: they obtain more status in-group than out of group. And business people are not motivated by social conformity. They are motivated by profitability. And RACISM IS UNPROFITABLE. Period. On the other hand bias against anti-social behavior IS PROFITABLE. And prevents the takeover via government sanction, by the act of denying businesses the right to choose customers, of the business by a market that is detrimental to the owners. Those same owners who risked their savings, retirement, homes and safety in order to buy, build, run and operate that business. And further more, ostracization is the only means by which a group in an advanced society can enforce the INTEGRATION that makes IMMIGRATION both tolerable and economically possible. Societies never have immigration problems. They have IMMIGRATION problems, and ostracization is the most effective method of enforcing integration into the social system. Limits Of The Market Libertairanism has it’s limits, because the market has its limits. It does have limits. The market has become large, far larger than that envisioned by Classical Liberals (libertarians) and too large to solve those problems of infrastructure development at scale, where the body of citizens can be served by long term investment in nuclear power plants, roads, and the electrical power grid. Even at that scale, it is a problem of financing and competing with regulation, not of execution – the market will execute better than the sate.. Liability Libertarianism would also indicate, that the use of media to make such misrepresentations, whether they be errors or deceptions for the purpose of concentrating political power, so that the violence of law and the state could be used to oppress people who seek liberty is a form of THEFT. Freedom of speech is not common to man. It is a sanction given by the nobility in a republic for the purpose of permitting exploration of the optimum set of ideas among a fraternal order of city-defending soldiers whose military tactics and military cost structure required enfranchisement of many men. But even among these people, free speech is not an unlimited right. It has it’s limits. And if we re-instituted liability laws so that one was required to be accurate in both political (fraudulent) and personal (libelous) speech, the NYT would be forced out of business, and the author of this piece, which is a cowardly and unsigned editorial, would be subject to prosecution. And it is that solution that many libertarians (like myself) would advocate. The Fully Articulated Political Philosophy Libertarianism is the MOST FULLY ARTICULATED CAUSALLY-COMPLETE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY that has ever been created by human beings. (( It is arguable that Marxism produced a volume of literature under the erroneous tribal belief in familial bureaucracy, but it is a well understood dead political and economic philosophy, if a living moral philosophy. It can be argued that classical liberalism produced a body of literature under the principles of individualism and organized public debate. However, the contract model has proven non-durable in time against the bureaucracy’s circumvention of the constitution via the judiciary. )) Libertarianism is imperfect, because all political theory is imperfect. That’s because man continues to evolve into a greater and greater division of knowledge and labor — and as he evolves, he requires deeper understanding of what it is he does, so that he can better comprehend how to resolve the necessary conflicts that rise from the speculative but rewarding human interaction in the market. LIke any fully articulated systemic advancements in human thought, libertarianism requires comprehension before criticism can be levied against it. Because as a SYSTEM, it cannot be debated piecemeal, just as any political system cannot be implemented or discussed piecemeal. Because it is a SYSTEM of interlocking processes of coordination and epistemology. And any attempt to argue it outside of systemic comparisons rather than policy comparisons, is an attempt to compare apples and oranges, and as an attempt to compare apples and oranges it is a willful attempt at FRAUD, or a silly and vain error by the incompetent. Incompetence is not something we should tolerate among those who we grant sanctions, and whom we grant the special permission of free speech in media. Curt Doolittle The NYT article is included here for reference.

    Limits of Libertarianism By denigrating several of the signal achievements of modern American society, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act, Rand Paul has performed a useful service for voters who are angry at their elected officials. He has helped to illuminate the limits and the hazards of antigovernment sentiment. Many Americans are sputtering mad, believing that government has let them down in abetting a ruinous recession, bailing out bankers and spending wildly. But is Rand Paul really the remedy they had in mind? His views and those of other Tea Party candidates are unintentional reminders of the importance of enlightened government. In a handful of remarkably candid interviews since winning Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary this week, Mr. Paul made it clear that he does not understand the nature of racial progress in this country. As a longtime libertarian, he espouses the view that personal freedom should supersede all government intervention. Neighborhood associations should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, he has written, and private businesses ought to be able to refuse service to anyone they wish. Under this philosophy, the punishment for a lunch counter that refuses to seat black customers would be public shunning, not a court order. It is a theory of liberty with roots in America’s creation, but the succeeding centuries have shown how ineffective it was in promoting a civil society. The freedom of a few people to discriminate meant generations of less freedom for large groups of others. It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market. It was government that rescued the economy from the Depression and promoted safety and equality in the workplace. Republicans in Washington have breathlessly distanced themselves from Mr. Paul’s remarks, afraid that voters might tar them with the same extremist brush. But as they continue to fight the new health care law and oppose greater financial regulation, claiming the federal government is overstepping its bounds, they should notice that the distance is closing.

  • Krugmanism Of The Day: The Debt-Slaver Strikes Again.

    Latvia is often cited as an example for Greece as it undergoes a brutal internal devaluation while keeping its currency pegged to the euro….. Yes, that’s right: the oh-so-virtuous Baltics have done worse than Iceland. … But their money is sound.

    Well Paul, what do you recommend instead? If not unemployment, and social reorganization and price recalculation, then what? Destruction of what little concentrated capital that there is? Enslaving the population with debt in the false hope that these countries will be able to compete well enough on the world stage that they work their way out of it? Rapid redistribution rather than rapid reorganization? The answer is undoubtably the loss of sovereignty in exchange for security, without acknowledging that people value status and sovereignty as much as they do security. That is, unless your ambition is debt slavery. Which it is, I’m sure: to replace violence and militarism with fraud and slavery. But then, to understand this, one would have to have an ancestry that could hold land, and a culture willing to die for it, as a means of maintaining freedom. Debt-totalitarianism is no different from force-totalitarianism. Personally I find it simply the difference between the honesty of violence and the fraud of debt enslavement. This is the underlying problem with all Krugmanism – totalitarianism under the guise of a false economic equality. Watch what future discipline the Baltics develop versus the Greeks. The most important institutions are those of cultural habits: behavioral institutions are paid for by the accumulation of forgone opportunities: ie: discipline.

  • Krugman Watch: Debt Totalitarian

    Default, Devaluation, Or What?

    Is there anything more to say about Greece? Actually, I think so.

    Krugman goes on to comment on the loveliness of more debt. Why? Because debt causes two systemic changes. First, it transfers power to the banking class and the state. Second, it replaces law, custom, and religion, as a means of social management. We have evolved three systems so far for managing society: first phase: religion and shared labor, second phase: law and taxation, and third phase: credit and debt. My Krugman wants us to enter the third phase without understanding the first: concentration of resources, the second: trade routes and markets, or escaping it’s claws. [callout title=Debt Slavery]Mr. Krugman your world view is full of debt slavery.[/callout] The truth is that we must keep each of these systems of social organization. Religion is a means by which we establish general goals for concentrating effort and resources. Soldiery and market making allow us to control land, trade routes, and to build markets and a division of labor. Credit and Debt let us build a more complex world of incentives and regulations on a more granular individual basis so that we may increase the division of knowledge and labor. But none of these systems is sufficient alone. A reader comments to this effect on Mr Krugman’s blog:

    Konstantin, New York, N.Y. May 4th, 2010 Mr. Krugman your world view is full of debt slavery. Greece should leave the tyrannical European Union and then if it wishes can devalue their currency but not too much.

    To which I responded:

    “Mr. Krugman your world view is full of debt slavery.” Quite true. But this strategy suit’s Mr Krugman’s desire to move society from upper class military control over trade routes for the purpose of creating markets, to working class bureaucratic control over individual lives for the purpose of creating the illusion of psychological certainty. In other words, from a growing to a dying society. Since we possess too little information to predict the future, we invariably make our judgements about the future according to our class and cultural metaphysical assumptions. We confuse these assumptions or ‘preferences’ for truths. But they are just ‘silly ideas’ writ large, whose silliness is obscured by ignorance, time and complexity.

    And unfortunately, it would be a full time job to criticize Mr Krugman’s silly logic. He complains elsewhere that the volume of criticism has increased of late, and that it’s from the Crazies. Crazies simply include a vast number of people in and out of the profession that see him as not an economists but a political hack. But I’m not sure that there is any better way of illustrating the foolishness of the left than to build a body of work that articulates one’s position by showing the consistency of errors in one’s opposition. And it’s entertaining as well as utilitarian. Unfortunately, I dislike the man.