Curt Doolittle

Theme: Deception

  • An Example Of Libertarian Redefinition Of Property – Fraud In Action

    Property Rights and the Paparazzi by JEREMIAH DYKE ….. one cannot own his image or reputation, nor can he own an actual image, a photograph, of himself. Like the mental construction of memory which is a product of one’s eyes and mind, a picture is a product of one’s camera. The question of ownership begins first with the individual, then proceeds to his labor, then the equipment via exchange, and finally to the property from which that equipment is employed. If you don’t want to be photographed, then you must remain where you are veiled from the public. You do not own the rights of another’s’ flashing camera the same way you don’t own the right to another’s gazing eyes. You may only own, or rent, the space from which they snap their pictures. Therefore, what celebrities really need is private roads and private sidewalks from which they may oust those that take pictures. They want more privatization so that they may enjoy their privacy. If not, then their privacy is not something they truly desire.

    This is a mischaracterization of the problem of paparazzi. It is a rare celebrity that does not desire publicity. The problem for most celebrities is to get any and all publicity possible. Instead, the property violation occurs when the paparazzi interfere with a person’s actions and movement, obstruct their conversations and social meetings, invade their homes, or attempt to create news by antagonizing the celebrity. These are all violations of the persons freedom, and paparazzi are granted special dispensation by the state to antagonize celebrities. The violation then, is that the celebrity is prevented from protecting his freedom and property by the intrusive state that has granted the rights of theft to paparazzi. You further mischaracterize the nature of reputation. Reputation exist in minds subject to constantly updated information — in other words, it exists in a market that experiences fluctuations in price. As Rothbard says, a reputation’s daily market PRICE is not controllable. However, it is still a person’s asset, regardless of price, because people ACT as if it is an asset, and that asset has material value to individuals, which we can determine by surveying the ACTIONS that people take, businesses take, regarding their reputations – PR firms are expensive (Mine is too). Hence, profiting by manufacturing damage to a person’s reputation is simply an act of theft. And therefore, if paparazzi are creating news by interfering with the celebrity, then they are engaging in theft. If they are capturing celebrity actions without interfering, then they are simply communicating an observation. Defining property according to your choosing is simply an attempt at fraud. Defining property according to the analysis of human actions is rational, scientific, praxeological, and consequently Misesian. Defining property according by any other arbitrary or constructed means is simply fraud. I do not mean to discount the other principles that Rothbard added to our toolkit – tools which I am using above. Nor to disagree with the value of privatizing what is currently public property. However, this rather foolish constructivist approach to private property is the reason we are frequently disavowed, and perpetuating this kind of error does us no good, not the least of which is because it is entirely FALSE. Constructivist views of private property are an attempted act of fraud. Property is not the name of material objects. Property is a claim on an opportunity to make use of any object, material or abstract, upon which men can act. Either that, or libertarianism is not a science of Human Action, but a silly metaphysical cult no better than the patent absurdity proposed by Marx, and a vast scheme of fraud and theft that we wish to foist upon a skeptical civilization which will have none of it. Instead, the anarchic research program has been terribly valuable in debunking the myth of good government and directing us to focus on the coordination and calculation problems rather than attempting to improve the political institutions – invalidating more than a century of self-congratulatory work on the merits of democracy. But conservatism lacks an argument sufficient to combat the constant evolution of socialist ideas. Libertarians are by and large the though leadership of the conservative movement that resists socialism. Libertarianism contains the necessary elements to provide that argument. It would be far better that we should focus on providing it, rather than perpetuate nonsense which undermines our ability to do so.

  • The Sentiment Of The British And Their Pseudo Intellectual Hypocrisy

    I read a number of the UK papers every day online. They are better than US papers for a variety of reasons. (( In the current ‘intelligence system’ it’s recommended that americans read Al Jazeera, Pravda, China News Daily, BBC News as well as the NYT. All are biased but the important issue is to know how biased our own papers are. )) US papers in general, formed to create homogeneity in the community. That community-centricity is why they’re going out of business in this post-community era. The web allows communities to have disparate voices (like normal people do) rather rather than having a self-centered referee edit, and dramatically bias their opinions toward the fantasy of democratic secular humanism. UK papers are more like the web: they represent factions. Our only ‘faction’ is the financial press. The rest, of the papers are almost universally are left-leaning along with our universities, that by and large, teach the religion of democratic secular humanism, as do our grade schools – a notion notion that has something to do with the fact that our children start to lose competitive ground in education about the time we start teaching them the religion of democratic secular humanism. If a religion has such a negative competitive impact can it be useful for any productive reason? Is not the measure of any philosophy the competitive standing of it’s practitioners? Of course, these ‘priests of democratic secular humanism’ attribute the a supposed american exeptionalism to their religion. But american exceptionalism is clearly false. Differences between US and european productivity are accounted for by differences in the number of working hours. While this productivity generates a lower cost of living in the united states, and while american government consumes less of the GDP than governments do in europe, and while americans live generally better lives, even if they live RISKIER lives, than do europeans, there is no exceptionalism to the culture that is caused by democratic secular humanism. American exceptionalism, which is almost entirely the product of selling off a continent, the military strength to do it, the system of private property rights that allows us to do it quickly and easily, and the use of those profits from selling off the continent being directed to the maintenance of the system of international money, defense and trade and the demand for our primary product: “dollars”, and the profits made by selling those dollars because of that militarily constructed system of money, trade, and soldiery. In other words, “property”, which is the prerequisite for trade, and the conversion of violent efforts at acquisition to peaceful efforts at production and trade, is created by vast military expenditure. The system is prolonged like any social system, by the promise of violence if it is broken. Unlike other systems, it is a system that increases production and makes the ‘pie bigger’ rather than decreases production by wealth transfer. Militarism for the purpose of ENFORCING PROPERTY RIGHTS is part of capitalism’s virtuous cycle of dividing labor, increasing granularity of property rights and types, increasing production and decreasing prices, instead of the use of violence to abuse the system of property rights. Militarism is, and can be, a good thing, depending upon how a culture defines it’s property rights. And the more granular the property rights and the better enforced, the more prosperity that people in a culture can generate by virtue of being ABLE to calculate USES of that property. People are not pacifist by nature. Humans are the most successful super predator that has ever occupied the planet. People are pacifist because they are weak. (( See Kagan in Power and Weakness, as well as Sorel in Reflections On Violence, as well as Keegan’s History Of Warfare )) They are predatory by nature when they are strong. Only by maintaining violence over this system do we make the system one where participation in the game of the virtuous cycle is the only possible solution to the improvement of one’s life and resources. And membership requires two payments: respecting property and control of, and responsibility for, your breeding. So, in today’s Times Online there is another article about the desire of the Taliban to start peace talks with americans. The reason for these talks is that Pakistan is no longer allowing the taliban safe haven, and that they are perfectly willing to wait until the Americans leave to reassert their power over their society. By giving the americans a reason for virtuous exit they buy themselves time to regroup, rebuild their numbers, rebuld the poppy and heroin trade, rebuild tehir finances, and retake social positions in the gangster state of afghanistan. America took over the British Empire, it’s trade routes, naval bases, currency position, after the first world war. Americas policy difficulties stem almost ENTIRELY from british and french colonial history – the foolish organization of territory by other than tribal boundaries, in the foolish presumption that humans do not act, and prefer to at, according to tribal preferences. If America STOPPED maintaining that system, does anyone live under the illusion that there would not be VAST and VIOLENT attempts at filling the vacuum of power? It would be the greatest commercial land grab in human history. It would be bloody. It would be violent. It would involve massive wars, starvation, trade interruption, an the only choice for those that choose not to participate would be to participate or be doomed to poverty and ignorance. As an island nation lacking the resources to support itself, with a culture of feminized men so comfortable in their weakness that they have lost the Civic Republican Tradition of the Fraternal Order Of Soldiers (where the British ‘mates’ cultural concept comes from) how would the UK fare in this new world? It would collapse into either switzerland or return to it’s historical position as a backwater. Just as there are plenty of silly americans in daily press, there are an almost unlimited of silly, ignorant, self deluding brits commenting as well. And these comments are important because they express popular sentiment. One of the comments left on this article is by a nobody named Peter Codner who aside from being a barrister and apparently confusing analytical psychology for something other than another post-christian cult of absurd metaphysics, states that “The semblance to Vietnam which was an humiliating defeat for the americans is uncanny. the yanks will run away.” While I understand that short time preference is a result of social class – meaning that we can educate people to use advanced tools and logic but not if we do not extend their time preference so that they can think beyond their experience, and learn that their experience and ability to comprehend that experience is profoundly limited – I fail to understand how one can live in today’s society and not grasp the problem of extending time preference so that we see all actions and outcomes in both their short, medium and long term contexts. Running from an unnecessary battle for political reasons is very different from both running away from your history, and your own failure as a nation, and your responsibility as a nation for the problems you created. The Yanks won almost every battle in Vietnam. The loss was political, because of home political tensions not a military or economic defeat. And it still achieved it’s strategic ends. As did subverting the soviets in Afghanistan. Democracies lack the stomach for sustaining war. And they do so because of people like you. Of course, such sentiment comes comfortably to Brits, who lost their entire empire trying to stop Germany from taking it from them. Frankly the world would be better off if we had let them. Certainly Americans would be – we would not have to become an empire and live under a government-of-empire, if we did not have to take over the British empire when Britain collapsed, like reed. We would not have to protect a world trade and financial system that only served to inflate our entablements. We would not have to deal with the after effects of poor British (and French) judgement that left behind a post colonial Network of violence and poverty around the world. Brits are a silly, petty, pointless people who inhabit little more than an empty client state living off it’s heritage, and propping up it’s ridiculous system by immigrating it’s way into a temporary fictitious prosperity, by fomenting consumption at the expense of it’s heritage and culture, at the expense of producing increases in productivity, where the government consumes 50% of GDP, the military is only slightly less of a Potemkin village than is the laughable Canadian. I expect this kind of behavior of the french, who ceased being a world power when the effects of killing off their aristocracy and descending into Bonapartism ( democratically justified totalitarianism ) and are happy today to simply rest on past glory, consume their accumulated historical investment in a single century, and who because of it are simply obstructionists – obstruction is the only political power they have – so it is the political power that they exercise. Brits are happily self-congratulatory to live under the US common man’s soldierly umbrella of protection, and his society’s necessary militarism while criticizing him on a daily basis. (( What will happen if the middle-american cultures who supply military talent ever figure out how much contempt that they are held in both by their coastal and international critics? )) A “thank you” might be more appropriate than your petty slander. But then again, while no man is a hero to his debtors, a decent man does not slander his debtors. Only an indecent one. False wisdom is the last refuge of the weak whose current technique is to hid behind the cloak of intellectual and moral fraud. But then, isn’t that the purpose of all religions?

  • Conservatives Cannot Articulate Their Promise, And A Warning Is Not Enough

    The conservative movement lacks skill in articulating it’s position. It does so because it has shifted from the intellectual debate of the 50’s and 60’s to the emotional debate of the post 60’s era. It has, unlike the libertarian movement, failed to provide a vehicle for educating conservatives with POSITIVE statements rather than negative castigations. Conservatives have largely failed to develop a language and ‘scripture’ because they do not have a solution other than to return to the nineteenth century classical liberal model. That model will never rise again. It only occurred because government was very weak, and the individual entrepreneurial need to expand and populate the continent required both private ambition and private capital. It required the conversion of resources into taxable resources, which would empower the government. Conversion requires business people the way conquest requires soldiers. And therefore commercial society was in control during that period. Our current problem is not to convert land into taxable assets. It’s to maintain the international system, and our ability to financially manage the international system. We have been paying for it by trade advantage for some period of time, and then selling dollars for the past forty years. Liberals do not want us to maintain that system but they want the rewards that come from it to be redistributed. Conservatives object to this position. Neither really understands that there is no american exceptionalism except american military exceptionalism. Our future problem is that in redistributing the wealth of that military network of trade and banking we have directed too much of the profit to bankers and not enough to the citizenry. Conservatives do not like this privatization of wealth any more than liberals do. But most importantly conservatives do not like being castigated and treated as Being conservative simply means taking a gradual approach to social change and particularly with respect to the financial, family and military traditions. It means being skeptical that our visions of the future will come true, and looking at the world as what people ACTUALLY DO not what we WISH they would do. We as a nation are notorious for predicting an optimistic future that cannot or has not occurred. The dialog around our prosperity is often inaccurate and self-congratualtory rather than factual. We have transformed our culture of evangelical christianity into one of evangelical democratic secular humanism. Conservatives are skeptics. They may speak in antiquated language, because that is their language. They may fail to articulate their position effectively because of that language, but they ACT conservatively, think conservatively, and treat the world conservatively. This is why conservatives are, in general, more prosperous – and frankly, happy. And the sacrifices that they make in order to be prosperous are material to them. They remember them. And therefore they resent those sacrifices being ‘spent’ by others who do not make the same sacrifices. Monetarists and capitalists are not conservatives. They may hide under conservatism. But they are not conservatives. The conservative class is a military, middle and craftsman class and it always has been and always will be. It is the ‘residue’ of the european fraternal order of soldiers at the bottom, and at the top, it’s a ‘residue’ of the middle class movement that revised and adopted civic republicanism during the enlightenment as a way of transferring power from the kings and church to the middle class. it is an alliance of the military and middle class. Liberalism (socialism, communism) is a ‘residue’ of a union of the priestly cast and the peasantry. Academia is simply an outgrowth of the church. The peasantry has always allied with the church, and the church has always had power because of it’s support by the peasantry. And that said, we do not have a separation of church and state. Our state religion is now democratic secular humanism. We are now a state-run-religion using the myth of division of church and state to oppress (or reform) religions so that we can have a state sponsored church. That’s it. That’s the articulated conservative position. The republican party collects conservative coalitions. The republican party is not a conservative party. conservatives join the republicans because they have no choice. They see the party as corrupt. People are complex and only join parties because of limited choice mandated by our ‘winner takes all’ form of government, which fosters class warfare. In fact, all political decisions exist on a spectrum or bell curve. There are a myriad of political decisions to be made. There are a myriad of people with different abilities to understand each political opinion. Each person is interested in a myriad of decisions. Parties are collections of people with opinions. Very skilled people tend to be highly unsatisfied with party choices. Very unskilled people tend to simply support their party of nearest interest. Parties therefore pick platforms that make enough people happy that they can get into power. arguing that conservatives want to keep things asa they are, is a silly argument. The objection is simply illogical. The question instead, is whether liberals propose a solution that conservatives can live with, and wether conservatives can propose a solution that liberals can live with. If we had listened to the liberals in the last century we would have ended up like either Russia or China. If we had listened to conservatives we would not have had our progressive social changes. It’s the competition of ideas that gives us the choice as a body politic.

  • Pooling Information Is Laundering Information – Governments Are Money Launderers

    What’s the difference between money laundering, general accounting principles as they are currently practiced, the process of taxation, the use of fiat money to create general liquidity, the practice of monthly financial reporting, and the process of electing government officials as proxies for sovereign actions? Nothing. These are all examples of pooling. Pooling information so that causality is removed from that information. They are distortions of the human system of cooperation and coordination. They are an act of money laundering so that the causes and origins of that money can be attributed to mythical causes, rather than identified or deduced to the actual, rational ones. Truth is causality. We can have redistributive government. We can have safe monetary policy. We can disempower the governments ability to generate and foster class and group conflict. We just have to create a form of government that prevents pooling. Pooling is laundering. Laundering is the primary tool of those who commit fraud. Sound incomprehensible to you? It isn’t. It’s actionable. It’s not expensive. It will transform humanity as much as has industrialization. It will radically increase the rate at which humans solve problems together. It will concentrate capital for productive ends, and deliver the results to the populace. We developed libertarianism to stop state theft, and state dissolution of society, and the state’s empowerment of luddite systems of metaphysics like Marxism and Socialism. But in our ambition to do so we lost the purpose of property and trade. We lost our sense of community. Of the general costs of running society that are paid by all men. Of our need to cooperate in groups with others around the world. Libertarianism is a defensive posture. Like conservatism, we need an offensive posture. We need something to promise people in order to maintain our freedom to be the creative class, and to create a competitive society. The answer was laying there since Weber. We were so busy defending ourselves that we didn’t see that answer. Great minds like Hayek and Mises failed. Keynes failed and achieved the opposite of his intent. They were too enamored of the Civic Republican tradition and too optimistic about government. I know that answer. That answer is a program. It will empower conservatives with a message. It will retain a meritocratic society and the propensitiy for hard work, innovation, competitiveness, and retain the most important feature of any culture, it’s symbols of STATUS as those that are founded in the heroic tradition’s self sacrifice and competition for the common good. We can restructure government. We can do it in the USA with amendments. We can rid ourselves of the IRS and the specious justification of government interference in our lives. We can redistribute what is justly the wealth belonging to the people in need. We can. Capitalism 3.0. The Credit Society.

  • Two Misleading Infographics – One Religion of Secular Humanism

    Timeplots posted an infographic on women’s participation in congress, which, all things being equal, has essentially remained flat. However, I take issue with the assumption that participation alone is a measure of somehting valuable, other than than as a vidication of the spread of the religion of secular humanism. Also: The Guardian posted an infographic on military spending, which implies that spending is some sort of jingoistic preference, rather than necessity. Together, these graphics illustrate something other than stated. THey represent a measure of the non-rational ambitions of secular humanism rather than the material expression of economic risk and necessity. The first is a misleading graphic, because it assumes that women would achieve some unstated GOOD by greater participation in political participation, rather than are a reflection of political sentiment. For example, another Infographic that’s misleading is the comparison of the US military’s expenditures, which is far larger than any other nation’s. But this ignores the underlying reason for having a military: protecting trade routes. After first, property rights, and second, corruption the third factor most important in prosperity is trade routes. And the civilization that polices trade routes is, in human history, the prosperous one. Another problem is that Chinese military’s size is overstated versus the US. The US uses vast numbers of contractors, as many or more of them than military personnel. The Chinese do not, but instead they perform these tasks within the military ranks. Another problem is that our military is one of technology not numbers, so cost per soldier is more important. Lastly, a very large portion of the military budget is for benefits and in particular, military benefits. The meaningful, and therefore accurate measure of comparison of military cost is the total dollars minus benefits, adjusted by national purchasing power, expressed as a percentage of GDP spent on the military, divided by the number of miles of air, water, rail and road transit that the nation operates. This would show that the USA is very close to dead last in military expenditure. Or rather, that the cost to its citizens is infinitesimal compared to that of other nations. The same analysis would be informative for viewing other nations. Russia for example has a horrific country to transport goods upon and police. It is vast, much of it is harsh to human life, it has a terrorist threat on it’s border, China at it’s south and east, very little in the way of connected waterways and little access to worthwhile seas. All miltary costs for russia will be higher. It must be a threat in order not to become a victim. (See Stratfor’s articles on Rivers and seas as well as on China’s security needs) The US is, fortunately, or unfortunately, the policeman of the seas, and took on that duty after the fall of the british empire. Our wealth is largely dependent, not upon democracy and all the other self-congratulating features we attribute to ourselves, but almost entirely to our control of the seas, because water transport is so much less expensive than any other. This military dominance makes our political values (secular humanism) and our currency, and our laws, the dominant structure on the planet, and is the reason why americans are prosperous. Early US growth was simply the result of applying european technology for the purposes of selling off and occupying a continent. The assumption made by advocates of decreased military expenditure is that there would be little material impact, or that we would not be impacted. Or that this impact would lead to greater equality at home. But that would nto be true. It would lead to vastly higher costs and a permanent upper class, and a vast reduction of the middle class to lower standards of living. Any argument to the contrary must rely upon an example of decreasing control over shipping that led to something other than widespread decline across a nation. In other words, advocacy of pacifism is an appeal to Ludditeism. The problem with women in politics in the US is related to the underlying political necessity of trade route protection. Since many people in the USA, rightly understand these necessary militaristic sentiments (Pareto would call them residues and derivations, and others would call them metaphysical preferences, others would call them biases, or jingoism) they are accurate representation of the problem at hand. Since our political structure is largely organized to maintain that policing and that trade, the population is more interested in maintaining a similar political sentiment. This tendency is generational, class based, and culturally influenced, and is becoming the minority sentiment (which is how civilizations age). But it is still the dominant sentiment among males. Even hispanic males. The reason other nations have higher percentages of women en-toto, is that trade route protection is not the problem faced by, or sentiment held by, people in weaker states. Redistribution is. The correct analysis of women in politicswould be visible if countries were ordered by their ability to expand trade routes. As such, you would see weak countries dominated by women, correctly expressing the social sentiment, and strong countries dominated by men. This is, another example, of the philosophy of Power and Weakness stated by Kagan. People develop philosophies that they CAN. Women have a preference for maternal redistributive duties, and men have a preference for conflict resolution and status enhancement. These charts, by contrast, are an example of a metaphysical bias toward the religious doctrine of secular humanism. (Which is the evolutionary result of christianity.) A pacifist doctrine that is only possible to maintain in the midst of prosperity – a prosperity generated by trade routes, and maintained by militaristic, expansionist, sentiments in a population. Both sentiments are necessary. But dominance of one sentiment is a function of the nation’s needs. So, in other words, if we look at the miles of transport that we police, we have a very, very cheap military. And women serve according to their preference, and societies preference for their sentiments. Women CAN serve in politics. Ability is not a question. Sentiment is a question. Because, in the presence of inadequate information to allow us to predict the future, we make decisions according to our sentiments. And politicians are of necessity both inadequately informed, and not in their positions because they are informed, but because they appeal to voter sentiments. So these charts do not illustrate what the authors mean them to: an illustration of the progress yet to be made in advancing the religion of secular humanism. They illustrate something else entirely: the resistance by the objective and material world of raeality to the religion of secular humanism, and the rationality of those existing judgements in the face of the irrationality of the ambitions of secular humanism. Men and women have different sentiments, and it is almost entirely biological in nature. And there is no evidence to the contrary. Yet our political discourse must, for secular humanist reasons of faith, deny that fact. Arguably from a man’s perspective, especially a divorced man, we have rendered unto women extraordinary privileges never available to men in human history. To the detriment of men’s quality of life, men’s occupational distribution (men take the high risk jobs and largely bear the brunt of unemployment), and medically, more money is diverted to research for women’s health than for mens. Certanly benefit systems are set up to give women an advantage. Especially when we consider that the world’s primary issue is overpopulation, not pollution, or health care. Overpopulation. We have implemented this shift from male dominated benefit, to women dominated benefit, by women’s participation in the voting structure, not by women’s participation in politics – a participation level which appears to have leveled out. The same is true for women’s participation in the work force. It has leveled out. The same appears to be occurring in the past two generations. Women under 30 are not as activist as they were in the post-war generations. The post war generations were largely an effort to demilitarize society that has been militarized in order to fight the world wars, and recently, because of labor saving devices (invented by men) that no longer made it necessary for women to spend the day in home labor. In other words, we attribute to our politics those causes which were actually effects. This overemphasis of politics is another example of the religion of secular humanism, which attributes to collective judgment that which is an artifact of economic conditions. And economic conditions which are an artifact of military sentiments. In the 19th and early 20th century, our trade routes were largely internal, as the Great Lakes region industrialized so that the west could be populated. In the 1980’s our trade routes moved from the atlantic to the pacific, along with the technology leadership, and increasingly are doing so. The same is true for financing. San Francisco is the primary source of investment capital for experimental ideas. At some future point, our trade routes will change again. When that happens, we will change our political participation to be more masculine, or more feminine, depending upon our nation’s position of power and weakness. Just as every other nation will.

  • Climate Data, Trust In Science, Secular Humanism, Truth, and Economics

    The crisis over climate data has been met with numerous statements about preserving the “sanctity” or trust in the wisdom of science and scientists. As if our scientists were an improvement over their theological predecessors, or their pragmatic and prostituting peers in politics. But that can hardly be true, if one understands the history of science, or the scientific method and it’s limits, or the behavior of human beings belonging to schools of thought, in history. People are driven by material gain, status, and power, and have significant cognitive biases in favor of those selfish traits, that appear in all aspects of human behavior, not just in politics, commerce, or religion, but also in science. My position has been, along with many, that it certainly appears as though the data says the climate is cooling, along with it’s normal historical ice age cycle. The public does not trust academia, or the scientific community. It does trust particular scientists who are also public intellectuals. THe press likes to trust and advocate science because secular humanism has become today’s religion. In an effort to counter scholastic religion, secular humanists frequently tolerate what it considers acceptable losses. But given that, due to current events, we know most mathematical economics since the second world war is faulty, because the logic behind it was faulty. Because they sought to justify government intervention in the economy by monetary policy: Something Hayek believed was the intellectual’s fascination with their levers and their desire to run tests on society to experiment with their efficacy. And there are numerous other ‘givens’. Given that over nine tenths of research papers contain logic errors that invalidate their conclusions, whether in physical science or social science. Given that it at least appears that the peer review method of publishing articles is becoming invalidated when compared to the more difficult job of writing books that require broader integration of a paper into a network of theory. Given that our universities are rated by input rather than output criteria, and that this bias has material impact on society. Given that it certainly appears that there is a great deal of ’skewing’ in the community, on top of the pervasive errors in the logic of conclusions. Given that academic departments are not materially meritocratic, but political – and radically so. Given that we produce large bodies of research that are faulty and repeatedly proven faulty whenever they aspire to affect the political debate, in order to make it easier to obtain grants. Given that academia does not separate teachers from researchers, and that students see their best teachers evicted from universities, for what appears to be political interests of intrenched parties, and all of us who are educated walk around with this knowledge and experience. It becomes somewhat hard to understand why the public should believe in the myth of scientific ethics. Scientists pursue self interest, just like the rest of us. But there are no checks on that self interest when the testing criteria for that self interest is obscured by all the behaviors above. The rest of us are tested by the market. And it appears that the market is a much better test. Scientisim has replaced theology as a means of influencing policy. But I’m not entirely sure it’s all that much better than arguing about angels on the head of a pin. It certainly seems we should be at least as skeptical of our scientists as we were of our theocrats. And perhaps more so.

    Adam Ozimek Curt, The scientific community is a market; a market of ideas. You should not put more stock in individual scientists or “public intellectuals” than in scientific consensus and the market of ideas in which consensus if forged and challenged. The market for ideas is as competitive, self-interested, and as meritocratic as most other free markets- all of which share problems like you cite above.

    @Adam “The market for ideas is as competitive, self-interested, and as meritocratic as most other free markets- all of which share problems like you cite above.” That *cannot* be true. The market has no claim to truth, nor is it a weapon of political coercion. It is ultimately and entirely pragmatic, and the means by which we fill each other’s wants by the pursuit of self interest, at the lowest cost, despite the fact that all people seek to game, or circumvent that market whenever possible. Markets exist, and always have. The state has generally, created sufficient stability so that markets can evolve in a fashion in which only the government molests them. And the government molestation is determined as good or bad only by how it redistributes the profits of its molestation: to itself or to the public. A public who must also fail to molest itself by interfering with trade or property, as well as refrain from molestation of the state. But, the moment that ideas are used to influence government policy, they make claims to truth. Our concept of truth is as a method of coercion. In the context of this discussion, which was the public TRUST in the scientific community, trust must imply truth not pragmatism. Otherwise the conversation is meaningless.

  • A Response To Krugman’s Petty Poke At Prestidigitators

    Paul Krugman wrote today, poking fun at prestidigitators in the financial sector. As the most public advocate of forcible redistribution, I thought it was appropriate to poke back.

    The understanding that we obtain from reading the predictions of the financial sector, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it. The understanding that we obtain from reading the predictions of public intellectuals, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it. The understanding that we obtain from listening to business leaders who risk their capital, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it. The understanding that we obtain from listening to the predictions of common people, is limited to what these people are thinking, and how they will act because of it. The understanding we obtain from the opinions of all of these groups of people,is the understanding of how these same people react to what they hear, and what actions that they will pursue accordingly. There is no future determined in advance, only the future that people make because of the information at their disposal, that they can employ to project that future, and the resulting actions that they take in daily life in comparing their needs, obligations, resources, prices, and their anticipation of coordinating the optimum among them. But when we distort the financial system through credit money, or distort entrepreneurial activity through taxation, or distort public opinion through consensus building in order to gain political control over the levers of power, we distort the evidence that these people use to cooperate in their daily lives, and to build a stable, prosperous economy, especially when a prosperous economy is entirely driven by the willingness of it’s members to take risks in anticipation of reward for doing so. While it seems that our transition from the theocratic and religious public debate about the will of god to that of the Civic Republican moral debate about the pragmatism of laws and human character, to that of the economic debate about the material benefit of citizens, has been toward practical rationality, and material reward, it also appears, that under all three public debates, only the preservation and development of our institutions of truth, contract, property rights, accounting and division of labor, has had any material impact on our quality of life – and that the ongoing pubic debate, the use of taxation, and the use of monetary policy has done more to distort the information systems people use to build these institutions, and habits, and trade, and division of labor, than has the debate and political policy over these previous religious and moral traditions — because we are not debating the subject at hand, but debating who should obtain power to manipulate the levers of tax, law, and money. We are, in this public forum, debating power over spoils, not the productivity and prosperity that results from cooperation and trade under our institutions. Most of our technologies evolve by accident of compounding fractal patterns that increase our ability to cooperate in larger numbers: 1) Restraining the use of violence creates the institution of property. 2) The institution of objective truth and fidelity of contract creates complex trade. 3) The institution of money creates the technology of human calculability and cross-categorical comparison. 4) The volume of trade creates the establishment of prices subject to sufficient stickiness that they become forecastable. 5) Sticky Prices create the ability to lay expectations, and forecast complex uses of property. 6) Credit creates intergenerational cooperation, and the pairing of older wisdom with younger effort. 7) Fiat Money and Credit Money create insurance allowing more risk mitigation at the cost of socializing losses and privatizing wins. Conversely: 1) General liquidity distorts the pricing system. And people are informed by those prices to pursue unproductive, but price-ballooning ends. 2) Taxes distort entrepreneurial activity, and in particular, distort the accounting process, and distort banking, credit, investment, and employment, to the detriment of each, while entrepreneurial skill, the most valuable asset of any economy, is directed to tax reduction, rather than productivity gains. Since calculability is the means by which we cooperate: The state should collect and redistribute interest, not issue taxes. A state based upon interest collected is the only method of political and social calculability currently available to man. The state’s job is as a lender, who redistributes profits to citizens. Taxes should be accelerating and flat, on those people who collect and coordinate interest, when their balance sheets make them financially independent, and therefore living upon credit and interest, not upon entrepreneurs who take personal risk, and who are penalized by taxation for having done so. The citizenry should not be enslaved for decades by the use of intergenerational theft and enslavement by involuntary debt. Class warfare should not be fomented, between classes but cooperation and respect encouraged by a process that rewards politicians not to gain from spoils, but to gain from borrowing from the average person, and returning to him his investments. Under this method a politician can be held accountable but material and calculable methods of measurement. The state should not be able to enslave it’s citizens through taxation and justify it by moral argument, any more than it should justify it by the will of god, or justify it by ti’s capacity for violence. These are all forms of slavery. Taxation is a product of slave society. If we are indeed rational beings capable of democracy, or capable of independent commercial action, then we have exited slave society. Ownership by an individual or ownership by the state are insignificant differences. The polibical debate should not be over who controls the levers, but that the only lever should it should use is lending, and the only purpose of the state is to borrow risk from the population and use it to increase production, and thereby distribute teh spoils justly earned by all parties. In this manner we change the public debate from that of class warfare and the power to conduct class warfare, and distributing the spoils, to the civic republican tradition of generating prosperity. Law and taxes are products of slave societies. “Credit and Interest are the ties that binds us. Law and taxes are the thefts that divide us.” Change the public debate. We have been debating the wrong problem for a century. We should be debating how to make a society free from theft and coercion between classes, and to one of cooperation between them through mutual self interest. This is “Capitalism v3.” But it remains to be seen how long before it takes hold – or fails to.

  • All This From Gorbachev – The Silly Reign On Economists View

    Economists View members are notoriously leftist, and rely on name calling and weak arguments with political bias on a regular basis. There are a number of squatting regulars and they outnumber who seem to avoid commenting on the blog. Every once in a while I feel a compelling need to intervene on what must be moral grounds. In this posting, which started with an argument by Gorbachev against the western model of fairness, I try to point out a few little problems with someone’s platitudes. The first author states an idealized version of production increases in a division of labor, and the consequential stratification of society that remains constant, over the desires and objections of those people more interested in the application of familial ‘fairness’ than the more material necessity of difference that comes from our real differences in value to each other. The second author complains. The third author resorted to name calling, so removed his comment. Should you encounter similar problems, my response to these two is the argument you can use.

    Reality Bites said… [As we] … develop technology, it becomes ever easier to produce material things, and yes, there is decreasing labor needed to supply humanity with the basic material good necessary for survival. However there is an unquenchable demand for other goods that cannot be produced by machinery (yet) and so can employ all the people who lose their jobs to a machine. Entertainment as in movies and TV stories along with music and books will always be in demand and no machine can formula a good plot. Machines also need instructions so that they can operate and take over work formerly done by humans. Programmers will always be needed as we need to “teach” machines what to do. Maintenance is health care for machines, unless we can come up with a network of machines that can take care of each other, humans will have to do this work. In the end, I think the cost to produce anything tangible will fall to nearly zero. Ideally, something like the Star Trek energy to matter converter will materialize whatever we want. It may never get that easy or efficient, but producing THINGS will get cheaper for sure. So what’s left? Ideas and intangible goods. New designs, new fashion, status will always be important and since it’s zero sum, there always will be the need to show or convey status. Humanity will be devoted completely to the intangible, the creator of a popular cup design (or design of any object) will be paid well as his design will be in high demand. What worries me is what about the people who are incapable of creating good intangible goods? People who can’t create a good story, compose good music, or put together an unique design, what about them? I think there always will be room for them because of social status. They could sell their status, or sell their ability to give someone else status. Like being part of an entourage, or even offering human services like a butler. There will be machines that can fulfill that task, but having a human do it instead could convey status and thus human services will still be demanded and those incapable of inventing or creating can still work and make a living. Unfortunately, there will probably much less opportunity for such people and virtually none to move ahead. Creative people will be honored and gain “wealth” in terms of social status. Since we’ll all have everything material that we’ll need or want, wealth will have to take a different form, again probably social status since that’s zero sum. Uncreative folks simply will not be able to get wealthy because they will not be able to supply what society values the most, which will be based on creativity and new ideas. My vision of the future as I think it will be. ozajh said: I can think of two problems with this vision, and there may be more. 1. “Uncreative folks” can join or form armed forces, at whatever level of formality required. At some point losers will accept a lose-lose scenario if it means some level of hurt to the winners. 2. There is currently zero correlation between status/power and true creativity, and the folks at the top will labour mightily to stay there.

    CurtD59 Said: Define “top”. Financial, entrepreneurial, technical, medical, artistic, or political? Are you saying that in the meritocratic fields the best do not reach the top? Or are you saying that you want to redefine best as something other than meritocratic as defined by the field of practice? If you mean political, do you mean that politicians are not creative? And if so this means that you do not understand their product or service. It is the service that we demand from them. Politicians are in the business of selling the service of resolving conflicts between groups of different interests, when those different interests have differences in belief, status, class, and ambition, and each of whom wishes to use the violence of government, which is it’s only means of action, to serve one group or another. Compromises are not universally available. Define “true creativity”. What you mean, I think, is to apply change to achieve your desired end, not that people, in a vast cacophony of differences, each try to improve their status and status of their group when those groups have different interests and priorities. Secondly, there is voluntary creativity, such as entrepreneurship and trade, and involuntary creativity, which is to use the state’s violence to forcibly interfere in that creative process to put to alternate ends. As well as cooperative creativity, which provides incentives to apply one’s efforts and investments to alternate ends. You imply a threat of revolution. In all revolutions, wether violent, economic, or democratic, one power class simply replaces the next, establishes itself as a new power class that attempts to preserve it’s privilege and power. How can this be changed? Of course, you also suggest that the proletariat will rise up against this lose lose scenario, but there are two problems with this fantasy: First, that middle class revolutions tend to increase general prosperity, but proletariate revolutions tend to produce total destruction of the economy, or over time, drive everyone into greater poverty. The second is that those with ‘something’ happily pay a chosen few to conquer and enslave the remainder, thus producing the opposite effect. Capitalism can refer to either functions or biases, functions or ideologies. Capitalism as a set of institutions, incentives and methods of calculation are with us to stay. The world is adopting them precisely because managed economies lack incentives, information schemes, and calculative tools for quickly utilizing people in an increasingly diverse mix of knowledge and labor, and where that diversity increases the value of people’s productive differences dramatically. Religions and ‘common beliefs’ are for slaves and farmers whose land is more marginally different than that of their human workers. Capitalism as an ideology, or bias, of Laissez Faire that exports knowledge, resource, human and intellectual capital as a means of politically converting the rest of the world is dead. Not because of opinion, but because the need to convert the world has been soundly demonstrated and the institutions adopted. But social democracy’s policies and devices which burden future generations, rely upon constant aggressive economic expansion, rely upon credit money to fuel consumption rather than productive innovation, and apply disincentive to savings, is just as dead, although not quite yet as in evidence. The west takes too much credit for it’s political programs, and too little for the gift of profiting from the filling of a continent with risk takers. There is no more magic to the western miracle than there is to the california miracle, and the two philosophies were advantageous, if temporary. Capitalism as a set of institutions works in increasing populations because it is a means of managing and rewarding people where no human or set of humans can understand the vast complexity in time and productivity. Capitalism as a bias is simply a foolish failure to understand that capitalism isn’t a bias or philosophy but a set of mechanical tools that assist us in working together in increasing numbers. The question is: why don’t more governments create positive incentives (credit and profit sharing) for private sector profit applied to public ends rather than negative incentives (class warfare and taxes) that make private activities less rewarding and pit the private sector against the state? Humans exist in diverse beliefs, classes, abilities. All prosperity comes from risk taking by people with specialized knowledge and who can coordinate capital from numbers of others toward a common end. The state can become ‘creative’ by investing (not spending, but investing) in those things that private capital cannot coordinate: infrastructure. But if class war continues it will not be the leftist panacea, or even the european socialist model that prevails. It cannot be. An aging minority population has no means of preserving its productive status. And if the loss of that status appeals to you, in fulfillment of your sense of unfairness – a biological but not rational bias -, then you might consider visiting the third world. Because you will soon be living there. We need to alter government so that each class serves the other, while recognizing that we will always have status and classes. It turns out it’s possible. And it’s not even that hard. While we can redistribute our excesses, what we can redistribute is only what it is possible to do, without the inter-temporal loss of incentives, and without such interference in calculation of the use of property (objects one has understanding of possible utilities) that the groups (state’s) productivity provides it less purchasing power than competitive groups. One difference between group preferences is in the capitalization or consumption of behavioral discipline (saving or learning), and therefore some desire to consume cultural discipline and offload responsibility onto future generations. This has turned out to be very common under democracy. Another issue is status, which we tend to think of as economic, but it is largely a function of mating ritual, and as such will be eternally with us. So we will have capitalism, in the sense that we will have calculative institutions and status differences. We will have redistribution, because it is simply easier to get along if we do so. But we will not have agreement on that as long as government can profit and increase in size by profiting from class warfare. The only way to fix this is not by ideology but by increasing the calculability and record of causality in the finance, tax and credit system that will make political deceptions, errors, and philosophical differences, either commensurable or impossible. And secondly by using the private sector for public good rather than the private sector trying to keep the state at bay. India is doing the best at this today I think. Entrepreneurs will just as happily serve common interests as interests that are opportunistic, if they are able to profit from it.

  • All This From Gorbachev – The Silly Reign On Economists View

    Economists View members are notoriously leftist, and rely on name calling and weak arguments with political bias on a regular basis. There are a number of squatting regulars and they outnumber who seem to avoid commenting on the blog. Every once in a while I feel a compelling need to intervene on what must be moral grounds. In this posting, which started with an argument by Gorbachev against the western model of fairness, I try to point out a few little problems with someone’s platitudes. The first author states an idealized version of production increases in a division of labor, and the consequential stratification of society that remains constant, over the desires and objections of those people more interested in the application of familial ‘fairness’ than the more material necessity of difference that comes from our real differences in value to each other. The second author complains. The third author resorted to name calling, so removed his comment. Should you encounter similar problems, my response to these two is the argument you can use.

    Reality Bites said… [As we] … develop technology, it becomes ever easier to produce material things, and yes, there is decreasing labor needed to supply humanity with the basic material good necessary for survival. However there is an unquenchable demand for other goods that cannot be produced by machinery (yet) and so can employ all the people who lose their jobs to a machine. Entertainment as in movies and TV stories along with music and books will always be in demand and no machine can formula a good plot. Machines also need instructions so that they can operate and take over work formerly done by humans. Programmers will always be needed as we need to “teach” machines what to do. Maintenance is health care for machines, unless we can come up with a network of machines that can take care of each other, humans will have to do this work. In the end, I think the cost to produce anything tangible will fall to nearly zero. Ideally, something like the Star Trek energy to matter converter will materialize whatever we want. It may never get that easy or efficient, but producing THINGS will get cheaper for sure. So what’s left? Ideas and intangible goods. New designs, new fashion, status will always be important and since it’s zero sum, there always will be the need to show or convey status. Humanity will be devoted completely to the intangible, the creator of a popular cup design (or design of any object) will be paid well as his design will be in high demand. What worries me is what about the people who are incapable of creating good intangible goods? People who can’t create a good story, compose good music, or put together an unique design, what about them? I think there always will be room for them because of social status. They could sell their status, or sell their ability to give someone else status. Like being part of an entourage, or even offering human services like a butler. There will be machines that can fulfill that task, but having a human do it instead could convey status and thus human services will still be demanded and those incapable of inventing or creating can still work and make a living. Unfortunately, there will probably much less opportunity for such people and virtually none to move ahead. Creative people will be honored and gain “wealth” in terms of social status. Since we’ll all have everything material that we’ll need or want, wealth will have to take a different form, again probably social status since that’s zero sum. Uncreative folks simply will not be able to get wealthy because they will not be able to supply what society values the most, which will be based on creativity and new ideas. My vision of the future as I think it will be. ozajh said: I can think of two problems with this vision, and there may be more. 1. “Uncreative folks” can join or form armed forces, at whatever level of formality required. At some point losers will accept a lose-lose scenario if it means some level of hurt to the winners. 2. There is currently zero correlation between status/power and true creativity, and the folks at the top will labour mightily to stay there.

    CurtD59 Said: Define “top”. Financial, entrepreneurial, technical, medical, artistic, or political? Are you saying that in the meritocratic fields the best do not reach the top? Or are you saying that you want to redefine best as something other than meritocratic as defined by the field of practice? If you mean political, do you mean that politicians are not creative? And if so this means that you do not understand their product or service. It is the service that we demand from them. Politicians are in the business of selling the service of resolving conflicts between groups of different interests, when those different interests have differences in belief, status, class, and ambition, and each of whom wishes to use the violence of government, which is it’s only means of action, to serve one group or another. Compromises are not universally available. Define “true creativity”. What you mean, I think, is to apply change to achieve your desired end, not that people, in a vast cacophony of differences, each try to improve their status and status of their group when those groups have different interests and priorities. Secondly, there is voluntary creativity, such as entrepreneurship and trade, and involuntary creativity, which is to use the state’s violence to forcibly interfere in that creative process to put to alternate ends. As well as cooperative creativity, which provides incentives to apply one’s efforts and investments to alternate ends. You imply a threat of revolution. In all revolutions, wether violent, economic, or democratic, one power class simply replaces the next, establishes itself as a new power class that attempts to preserve it’s privilege and power. How can this be changed? Of course, you also suggest that the proletariat will rise up against this lose lose scenario, but there are two problems with this fantasy: First, that middle class revolutions tend to increase general prosperity, but proletariate revolutions tend to produce total destruction of the economy, or over time, drive everyone into greater poverty. The second is that those with ‘something’ happily pay a chosen few to conquer and enslave the remainder, thus producing the opposite effect. Capitalism can refer to either functions or biases, functions or ideologies. Capitalism as a set of institutions, incentives and methods of calculation are with us to stay. The world is adopting them precisely because managed economies lack incentives, information schemes, and calculative tools for quickly utilizing people in an increasingly diverse mix of knowledge and labor, and where that diversity increases the value of people’s productive differences dramatically. Religions and ‘common beliefs’ are for slaves and farmers whose land is more marginally different than that of their human workers. Capitalism as an ideology, or bias, of Laissez Faire that exports knowledge, resource, human and intellectual capital as a means of politically converting the rest of the world is dead. Not because of opinion, but because the need to convert the world has been soundly demonstrated and the institutions adopted. But social democracy’s policies and devices which burden future generations, rely upon constant aggressive economic expansion, rely upon credit money to fuel consumption rather than productive innovation, and apply disincentive to savings, is just as dead, although not quite yet as in evidence. The west takes too much credit for it’s political programs, and too little for the gift of profiting from the filling of a continent with risk takers. There is no more magic to the western miracle than there is to the california miracle, and the two philosophies were advantageous, if temporary. Capitalism as a set of institutions works in increasing populations because it is a means of managing and rewarding people where no human or set of humans can understand the vast complexity in time and productivity. Capitalism as a bias is simply a foolish failure to understand that capitalism isn’t a bias or philosophy but a set of mechanical tools that assist us in working together in increasing numbers. The question is: why don’t more governments create positive incentives (credit and profit sharing) for private sector profit applied to public ends rather than negative incentives (class warfare and taxes) that make private activities less rewarding and pit the private sector against the state? Humans exist in diverse beliefs, classes, abilities. All prosperity comes from risk taking by people with specialized knowledge and who can coordinate capital from numbers of others toward a common end. The state can become ‘creative’ by investing (not spending, but investing) in those things that private capital cannot coordinate: infrastructure. But if class war continues it will not be the leftist panacea, or even the european socialist model that prevails. It cannot be. An aging minority population has no means of preserving its productive status. And if the loss of that status appeals to you, in fulfillment of your sense of unfairness – a biological but not rational bias -, then you might consider visiting the third world. Because you will soon be living there. We need to alter government so that each class serves the other, while recognizing that we will always have status and classes. It turns out it’s possible. And it’s not even that hard. While we can redistribute our excesses, what we can redistribute is only what it is possible to do, without the inter-temporal loss of incentives, and without such interference in calculation of the use of property (objects one has understanding of possible utilities) that the groups (state’s) productivity provides it less purchasing power than competitive groups. One difference between group preferences is in the capitalization or consumption of behavioral discipline (saving or learning), and therefore some desire to consume cultural discipline and offload responsibility onto future generations. This has turned out to be very common under democracy. Another issue is status, which we tend to think of as economic, but it is largely a function of mating ritual, and as such will be eternally with us. So we will have capitalism, in the sense that we will have calculative institutions and status differences. We will have redistribution, because it is simply easier to get along if we do so. But we will not have agreement on that as long as government can profit and increase in size by profiting from class warfare. The only way to fix this is not by ideology but by increasing the calculability and record of causality in the finance, tax and credit system that will make political deceptions, errors, and philosophical differences, either commensurable or impossible. And secondly by using the private sector for public good rather than the private sector trying to keep the state at bay. India is doing the best at this today I think. Entrepreneurs will just as happily serve common interests as interests that are opportunistic, if they are able to profit from it.

  • Gaddaffi is indeed a sad spectacle. But in the west we separate words and deeds.

    Gaddaffi is indeed a sad spectacle. But in the west we separate words and deeds. This isn’t a universal perception. And it works for him.

    Source date (UTC): 2009-09-27 13:23:11 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/4416521984