Curt Doolittle

Theme: Demonstrated Interests

  • RUINING AN AUSTRIAN’S DAY “Man must act” is of course, true, but it is an incomp

    RUINING AN AUSTRIAN’S DAY

    “Man must act” is of course, true, but it is an incomplete sentence. “Man must act to serve his interests” is the full sentence. And completing the sentence demonstrates it’s irrelevance. The meaningful problem is that “Man must voluntarily cooperate.” And that is where the problem becomes difficult. Because man must actually “calculate and choose to outwide the current course of events”.

    We call Reductio ad absurdum arguments rhetorical fallacies for a reason. ANy act of simplification or categorization is necessarily eliminative. “

    One must be careful not to eliminate the causal properties of that which is required for later deduction from first principles.

    It’s a cute trick of obscurant logic. And the genius is in constructing the (false) obscurant logic. Not in what we can deduce from it.

    Human cooperation requires the voluntary payment of vast opportunity costs, for which they expect something in return. No activity is conducted for altruistic reasons. All activity is conducted in exchange for something. Most of it for insurance on inclusion in future opportunity.

    Which Mises ignores and Rothbard intentionally avoids.

    It’s possible to fix Mises’ Praxeology and Rothbard’s ethics, but only by restoring the recognition of those costs, and the consequential impact those costs have on the program of ethics we libertarians rely upon.

    Fixing those errors then, returns LIBERTY TO ARISTOCRACY, truth and clarity, and rescues it from the ghetto of obscurant, deceptive language meant intentionally to mislead.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-08 07:21:00 UTC

  • YA. NOW GUESS WHY. America is growing more conservaitive on meritocracy. Free ri

    http://shar.es/EgwN4TOLD YA. NOW GUESS WHY.

    America is growing more conservaitive on meritocracy. Free riding is a sin. 😐

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-09 21:10:00 UTC

  • PROPERTARIANISM: WHAT IS “DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY”? In economics we have the conce

    PROPERTARIANISM: WHAT IS “DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY”?

    In economics we have the concept of ‘demonstrated preference’. This means that people tend to say a lot of things, but they they demonstrate by how they act, what their true preferences are, and those things are often very different from what they say.

    We also have the concept of property. And, we tend to think of property as a legal concept, or a utilitarian concept. But the more interesting question is “What do people consider to be property as is demonstrate by their actions?”

    That’s the interesting question. And, Propertarianism is based upon what people DEMONSTRATE by their actions that they consider their property?

    It turns out, that they consider quite a few things to be property. And, with that observation, it turns out that we can explain all human action and emotion in terms of what people consider to be property.

    So, with private property, we can, indeed, reduce all human rights to private property. But further, with DEMONSTRATED PROPERTY, we can reduce all human action, and perhaps, all human cognition and emotion, to statements of property.

    And with that knowledge we can render different systems of economic preference into statements of a competition for the definition of property rights.

    For example, using Praxeology, we can determine whether any proposed incentive is logical to the individual. With demonstrated property we can further explain why Praxeology was insufficient – because (besides the failure of ordinality) it failed to incorporate the full breadth of what humans considered to be property. And as such, could not explain their behavior.

    Propertarianism, which relies upon Demonstrated definitions of property, is able, along with understanding of our cognitive biases, to complete Praxeology.

    Cheers

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-24 10:32:00 UTC

  • ARE THERE OBJECTIVELY MORAL STATEMENTS? (FROM ELSEWHERE) “There is no such thing

    ARE THERE OBJECTIVELY MORAL STATEMENTS?

    (FROM ELSEWHERE)

    “There is no such thing as objective morality only preferences and demonstrated preferences.”

    I’m not sure that’s true.

    In every society, the portfolio of norms consisting of maners (signals of fitness for voluntary transfer), ethics and morals (prohibitions on involuntary transfer), vary considerably. But all of them are signals of fitness, signals of contribution to a commons, and prohibitions on involuntary transfer.

    Some of these suites of property rights produce superior economic outcomes, and some inferior. That’s true. But they aren’t preferences. Norms are not preferences they are artifacts of the process of evolutionary cooperation according to prejudices (pre-judgements).

    Given that human beings universally eschew involuntary transfer, in every possible culture and circumstance, and will act twice as hard to punish it as they will for their own interest, its clear that it’s not a purely subjective phenomenon.

    And in fact it is a necessary phenomenon which genetics must eventually enforce. So while the arrangement of property rights and obligations in any set of norms may vary, the fact that humans observe norms out of prohibition on involuntary transfer is entirely objective.

    So, moral actions are only a preference in those cases where normative codes, like laws, are general proscriptions, and where for specific circumstances, one’s actions do not create an involuntary transfer.

    Moral codes may correctly or incorrectly constituted at any given moment (because they are intergenerational habits and must be constantly re-tested by each generation). But as long as they are prohibitions on involuntary transfers, then they are in fact, objective.

    If members of a group observe a set of norms, and by observing those norms, forgo opportunities for gratification or self interest, then they have in fact paid for those norms. If others do not pay for those norms, and constrain themselves to signaling, then that’s not an involuntary transfer.if however, others choose to sieze opportunities created by the normative sacrifice of others, then that’s theft, plain and simple.

    This is a quick treatment of one of mankind’s most challenging topics, but hopefully it will at least give you a few ideas.

    – Curt

    BTW: ALSO

    a) an action is a demonstrated preference.

    b) a preference is a demonstrated bias

    c) a bias may or may not be subject to cognition

    d) a habit is not subject to cognition, thats’ the value of them. They’re cheap.

    e) a normative habit is rarely understood, but almost universally practiced. Which is the reason we even have this conversation in the first place.

    f) a metaphysical bias is not subject to cognition, it’s almost never understood by anyone in any culture.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-20 15:49:00 UTC