Great panel discussion today, with speakers on China, Turkey, Islam, Europe, and the Anglosphere. The closing questions were largely to do with the changing world boundaries, and nationalism. Summary by, I think, John O’Sullivan, was that, it certainly appears, that the small ethnic nation state is the most likely means of preserving individual freedom. And the consensus was that neither China nor the USA had strong chances of maintaining political unity over the long term. That is, the USA only has such chances if we return to federalism, devolving power to the states, rather than central authority. We can only hope.
Theme: Ethnoculture
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Regarding The Wars Of Religion: The wars of religion were the result of economic
Regarding The Wars Of Religion: The wars of religion were the result of economic power transferred from the Mediterranean to the atlantic, and the rise in germanic people’s populations which in turn resulted in their ‘revolution’ and separation from the south. Protestantism was a reaction to the political corruption of the church and the export of capital from the north to the south as taxes. The germanic monarchies wanted to keep the money in-country rather than export it to the south, and so they supported Luther. The people were simple pawns in this process, just as they were during the American civil war. The American civil war was fought between a merchant manufacturing north and an agrarian export south, over the markets created by the westward expansion made possible by the Louisiana purchase and the fact that the south could block northern legislation leading to political stalemate, and the south, as an export economy, paid for all the government’s costs, so there was a tension between the two economic and political bases. Europe’s first civil war was not over religion, it was over economics. America’s first civil war was not over slavery, it was over economics. All wars are over economics. It’s not complicated. What we are seeing today in the muslim world is similar. A combination of rapid increase in population accompanied by rapid increase in food prices, when food prices consume 70% or more of the income of these peoples. They are not ideological revolutions. They are about food. The fact that we talk about these historical events in moral and emotive populist terms is why we fail to learn from them and hence repeat them. THe USA is now going through a demographic shift, and trifurcation if not a four way split of the economy, and a political stalemate between regional cultural differences. This will eventually result in some sort of revolution or change int he political system. THere are any number of theories when this will occur. But the economic and cultural interests are sufficiently divergent that it is unlikely that the domestic empire can persist indefinitely. There are no wars of religion. There are wars of economic interest. FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Source date (UTC): 2011-05-18 06:16:00 UTC
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All Cultures Developed Religions Of Some Sort
Mystical Political Religion and the concept of good and evil was invented by the Persians to separate the persian people from the indians who were, at that time, similar peoples. Mystical religion was invented to cause conflict and political division. All cultures developed religions of some sort. If by religion we mean a body of habituated knowledge consisting of Myths and Rituals – but which in modern terms we call ‘education’. History and Political systems are in effect, Myths and Rituals too. If we look at history, the lower clases make use of and rely on mystical religion for insurance and education, the (admittedly small) middle classes on craft, guild, contract and trade, and the the upper classes on politics and bureaucracy, and the different classes cooperate by sharing those different cooperative strategies. So, even the ancient politicians learned how to use education for political purposes. Thats where we get mystical religion from. (See Nietzsche if you can manage it. Gimbutas, Weber and Armstrong otherwise.)
[callout]History and Political systems are in effect, Myths and Rituals too. If we look at history, the lower clases make use of and rely on mystical religion for insurance and education, the (admittedly small) middle classes on craft, guild, contract and trade, and the the upper classes on politics and bureaucracy, and the different classes cooperate by sharing those different cooperative strategies.[/callout]
Moral principles are, without exception, under analysis, economic principles – and as economic principles they can be rationally articulated, or embedded in a narrative like a fairy tale, so that they may be taught to children who cannot grasp more abstract, rationally articulated ideas. There is no need for religion to achieve moral education. The fact that all religions, even post-buddha buddism, have developed a myth of afterlife is to add the force of violence to mysticism. The fact that we teach mystical religious principles instead of rationally articulated moral principles makes it impossible to create political compromises between religious traditions – which encourages conflict. More importantly, religious traditions are economic strategies – they promote the values of particular social orders. (west=fraternal and technical, middle=tribal and mystical, east=familial and bureaucratic) This difference is why the west developed the industrial revolution twice (greece and england) and no one else ever has. It’s simply a better strategy for experimentation. (See Hayek, Weber and Armstrong)
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Yes. “The Final Solution” for eliminating white male Christendom. The White Male
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2011/03/ap-military-report-too-many-whites-men-leading-military-030711/?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d76711665f3457e%2C0Ah.. Yes. “The Final Solution” for eliminating white male Christendom. The White Males are indeed the worst sort of villans. (Well, except for every other group of elites.) The final solution is killing off 2500 years of the Great Fraternity, it’s history, it’s mythos, it’s civilization, it’s economy, and now the source of it’s culture: The west, like all other civilizations, is the product of it’s military cultur
Source date (UTC): 2011-03-08 13:18:00 UTC
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Why Are So Many Equatorial Nations ‘Failed States’?
This posting is in response to “Postcards From Hell: Images fom the world’s most failed states” and commentary on The Agitator. Why are so many equatorial nations ‘Failed States’? “All happy families are the same. All unhappy families are different.” Which means that a lot of things go into making a successful state, and there are a number of reasons why successful advanced cultures develop. And if any one of them goes wrong, a state can fail. Although it will most likely be conquered once it has failed. And there is one particular reason why most of the failed states are currently failing: the legacy of colonialism. But let’s look at the reasons why cultures progress differently: 1) disease gradients are higher (safer) in the cold and lower in the warm. 2) physical effort is difficult in hot weather, which hampers the creation of built capital. (Core body temp also affects IQ during exertion) 3) Agrarian cycles in the north encourage cottage industry in winter, farming in spring and fall and war in summer. This creates certain social orders that foster human, built and technical capital accumulation. Compare to the brutal survival farming of the Chinese and their rice. 4) Rivers and sea: rivers in particular provide safe, easy and low cost product transport. The opposite is true: some areas are simply geographically resistant to trade. Europe is gifted with east-west rivers. 5) Unequal distribution of terrain, water, useful plants and animals favors certain regions in agrarian productivity. Mineral deposits favor certain technologies (europe, coal, wood and iron.) 6) Access to trade means access to knowledge, and greater availability of resources and technology. This increases the probability of innovation, and the development of ‘virtues’ as we understand our commercial and moral code. 7) The abstract thing we refer to as social order, that is embodied in accumulated traditions and habits, are the most important and expensive forms of human capital. These habits facilitate the unspoken normative goals of all social and economic cooperation and coordination. We pay for social institutions by forgoing opportunity: the set of things that we don’t do: the opportunities we do not seize. We pay for infrastructure and governance with the results of trade made possible by those forgone opportunities. These institutions include our different definitions of public and private property, manners, ethics, morals and rituals. Manners, ethics and morals are economic codes just as are written laws, most of which, in all of human history, proscribed punishments for violations of manners, ethics and morals. (A vast oversimplification, but an informative one.) 8) The availability of general technical knowledge (how to craft things) and general systemic knowledge (how the natural world operates). We often confuse education with practical knowledge and scientific knowledge. ( The Muslim world is full of Islamic studies which do nothing except perpetuate ignorance. Some of the sub Saharan world is still in the embrace of magical thinking.) Commercial apprenticeship and on the job learning, not education, (imitation of practice) is the primary means of knowledge transfer. Most knowledge (in the USA as well) is political or secular-theocratic rather than useful knowledge. This is the reason the comparative ignorance of our working classes compared to that of europeans. 9) Concordant technologies. Civilizations need to accumulate a greatdeal of human capital by adopting certain technologies before they can adopt others, else these technologies are not disruptive, and do not increase the division of knowledge and labor. Otherwise tyrants simply use it to institutionalize corruption and profiteering. This isn’t any different from children but on a larger scale. If people do not forgo the opportunity to misuse a technology, they will never be able to gain its productive benefits. You don’t give a child a gun. 10) social orders. The west was built by fraternal orders of city/market joint stockholders, partly because of the high cost of equipment and training. This is the source of our republican sentiments, as well as our tools of argument,reason and science. Other societies have not been so lucky. East asia is largely historically oriented. The northern-west is largely future oriented, the greek, greco (southern) italian and eastern block Mediterranean is largely present oriented, and the near east and Indian continent are magically (‘spiritually’) oriented. Social classes have different time preferences, with the highest classes most future oriented, and the lowest classes most present oriented. 11) Political Institutions: what we call ‘rule of law’ is probably the most important for a market economy – because it permits creative disruption and speculation. But more importantly, it requires the ability to concentrate enough power that the political elite can suppress violence in a geography well enough that people can accumulate capital and trade can develop. If trade can develop productivity can increase, and eventually enough extra production can develop that there is something to redistribute to people, first for the purpose of increasing their productivity, and second for increasing the quality of their lives. We avoid discussing the reality of violence, but without the ability to project violence there is no ‘state’. Because that’s what a state is: a territorial monopoly on violence that forces people to use either the market (good) or to become the victims of exploitative totalitarianism (bad). Now we get to how westerners condemned some cultures: 1) Creating political boundaries and political systems across tribes destroys their ability to create human capital because this uncertainty over-stimulates the need for group persistence and impedes the development of market friendly habits. Thievery and tribal banditry is much easier and cheaper than creating trade and infrastructure. Even today, there is no small sentiment among males that suggests civilization has limited their potential access to mates, and their potential joy, by suppressing their desire for tribal banditry. In certain areas of the globe (in which the USA is fighting) tribal banditry is the primary means of status achievement. And the alternative is the grinding poverty of subsistence farming in an arid landscape. Progress is not always as desirable as it may seem. 2) Colonialism under England was effective in creating stability. In fact the hallmark of the Anglo model is stability. In the entire anglo civilization. In the anglo colonies as well. Stability fosters the accumulation of all forms of capital. If you were colonized by someone else, then you will suffer for it. If you were colonized by the french in particular you will have suffered for it. Anglo social technology is as important as the development of Greek science and reason. That technology, unbenknownst to most of us, is the development of abstract principles that allow calculation and coordination. (Even law is a form of mathematics or calculation. This is a very complex topic for this forum so I’ll leave it at that.). French colonies are a disaster. In fact, the unspoken question is, why were some cultures able to be colonized? It was possible to do terrible things to China via trade, but not to colonize it. And while even the Japanese conquered china, they could not hold or colonize it. 3) Economic interference, and in particular interference by way of charity. This is a hotly debated problem. But individual and local assistance by devoted people seems to make a difference, while insertion of capital is extremely harmful to developing economies that must transform from tribal to market economies. Why we understand that socialism is devastating to economies yet we interfere with primitive and less flexible economies with much less capital, is a mystery of western behavior. Unpleasant realities : 1) Mystical Religion: Unfortunately, there are also ways to manufacture ignorance. Some religions are regressive. In fact it could be reasonably argued that many are simply dangerous. Some have argued that they all are dangerous. The reason one is out gunned out germed and out steeled, so to speak, is a function of a culture’s willingness to adapt disruptive technologies. Luddites perish. Most of the scriptural religions are Luddite systems of thought. 2) The Problem Of IQ: Despite the objections of the inequality-deniers, the one factual reality that the vast body of people will fail to accept in the face of overwhelming objective scientific evidence: that IQ’s are unequally distributed in different races — and in clases within those races. 3) The Problem of Status and Racism: All people are racist in that they prefer acting within and with their race. And this will never change simply because of man’s need to learn, his learning by imitation, and his desire to learn from those he most easily can imitate, and his need to identify WHO to imitate. And the consequential need for visible evidence of status in order to choose who to imitate. Status is a necessary epistemological property of human existence. We cannot exist without it. 4) Mate Selection: The hard reality is that women are hypergamic (marry up). This reality is made more complex because men have a wider IQ variance than women, who are more centered around the mean. This situations presents men with the need to compete for mate selection, while women are increasingly selective about their mates, until they reach a point of either opportunity or resignation. (ie: more women are forced to ‘settle’ than are men.) Furthermore, this status economy requires a diverse range of status symbols within each race and class that inform the eternal search for demonstrable differences in status. Furthermore, this means that within races and within classes, except at the margins, greater status is available WITHIN race than without, and therefore people are incentivized to prefer to act and associate within their races. Racism is as permanent as is classism. The dirty secret of the human genome project is that class is genetically determinant. While economic classes are semi randomly plastic, social classes (which are readily evidenced in the postings on this and other blogs) are decidedly inelastic. (spoken as a member of the upper middle class). Furthermore IQs are different in consequence between groups. A white, Jew or east Asian with a 60 IQ is perceptibly broken. A sub saharan African is not – he or she just has a higher barrier to the learning of abstractions. But otherwise is perceptibly healthy. And IQ distributions affect what can be invented, what can be produced, and what can be maintained in a society. In general, To maintain machines requires an IQ of at least 105. To get a liberal education requires an IQ of 110. To design machines requires an IQ of at least 122 . To design abstractions requires an IQ above 130. To innovate upon a system of thought requires, it appears, an IQ above 140. Everyone else simply uses the tools created by others. It is demonstrably true that the top quintile has more influence on productivity of the society than all the rest combined. And it is the number of people with these IQ’s in the population who are educated enough to employ them, in a society with sufficient capital and division of knowledge and labor to make use of their talents. (For this reason, a capitalist china should rule the world in productivity simply because they have so many people above the mechanical threshold, and so much of the population can participate in complex production.) Since all societies are run by minority elites (even ours) the composition of elites in government, speculative intelligence and innovation in the middle classes, and capable mechanics in the proletariat determine the competitive rates of innovation and change in a society. Despite Racial, national, and class differences in IQ distribution, it does not take a genius to run a market economy. As our pliticians demonstrate daily. What is important is that in any sufficiently large body of people exist sufficient numbers to adopt the rule of law, the institutions of trade, and some form of capital production. The problem is one of numbers: getting the barbarians and potential corrupt bureaucrats to forgo opportunities for personal gain in order to fund the development of their human capital. The problem of coordinating production in a division of knowledge and labor requires a great deal of sacrifice. It is the is a sufficient set of principles govern the progress and adaptability of cultures. As other readers have commented, colonialism is perhaps the greatest determinant today of the relative state of failed nations. I hope this was helpful in providing food for thought.
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Hallman Criticizes Hoppe
I’ve not run across Andy Hallman before. But he posted a blog entry today that is critical of Hoppe entitled A Libertarian Against Free Immigration. Andy States
Neither in this section nor anywhere in the book does Hoppe ever stop to consider that the “millions of third-world immigrants” would be much better off under free immigration. Granted, we should consider the effect of potentially large mass migrations on all the people affected by them, such as the people paying for the welfare state. But to totally ignore the fact that millions of people would almost certainly be better off from the policy is hard to understand, to put it mildly.
When the retort to this, is that they would be better off at other peoples expense – people who did not make the decision voluntarily to aborb that expense. If the wealthy world gave all it’s riches to the poor world, then the poor world would be better off, but there would rapidly cease to be a wealthy world. The correct answer is to export the technology of our institutions for a PROFIT, which would create long term prosperity for the third world, AND the first world. Because it is institutions that create prosperity, in particular, institutions of truth telling. Too few people remember that the Russians, recognizing their inability to govern themselves, asked the Danes to come govern them. One of the better decisions in political history. I responded too broadly for the simplicity of the article. Andy makes a number of errors, the fist is the christian error of giving away what is not his to give, because he did not earn it, the second is more complex, which is not understanding the short and long term costs, and the third is a misunderstanding of the problem of political economy that Hoppe is answering:
Hi, I think you’re confusing multiple concepts. The Hoppe/Rothbard system is just that, a system of interdependencies. It’s an attempt at an explanatory theory based upon an analysis of an ethics of property. (Which Rothbard attributed to natural law and Hoppe to a variant of natural law using a different method of proof (argumentation). Hoppe is answering the problem of maintaining a CIVILIZATION, and the retention of freedom within a civilization, and the quality of life that comes from freedom. (Freedom to DO something, not freedom FROM something – other than violence and coercion.) In your analysis above, you are saying that SOME benefits come from taxing immigrants in the short term. But you have not answered the cost of those immigrants, both in the short and long term. And failing to do so is why you are making such a hasty conclusion. Hoppe, and Weber and others (myself included) would argue that time preference (shorter and higher, versus longer and lower) is part of the division of labor in society, as well as an indicator of class. Time preference may not be a preference but a bias, as it’s a very likely a statement of at necessity. Since humans have different abilities to forgo gratification, since it requires more knowledge and greater intelligence to make longer forecasts, since we learn at vastly different rates, since goals are transmitted intergenerationally, and most importantly since habits and production processes with different periodicity appear to be cognitively incommensurable, it is NECESSARY that we form a division of knowledge and labor in society because it’s all we CAN do, as people with unequal ability. Even if we can educated some people to have increasingly lower and longer time preferences, we cannot teach everyone to have the longest time preference, because they are not able to achieve it, and the division of labor and knowledge appears to require different time preferences. Since the nobility as a class profits from ‘owning society’ it has the longest and lowest time preference. Hoppe himself has that time preference – because like everyone back to the Greeks, we are trying to solve the problem of politics – cooperation rather than conflict. THe assumption here, which appears to be justified, is that a society with longer time preference accumulates all forms of capital for longer term use and creates a more prosperous society that is DURABLE. THis also brings into question whether property rights perpetuate across generations, which would be necessary if a society is to accumulate social order as one of the forms of capital. It’s not uncommon to make a mistake on the value of immigration, because the debate is still open on immigrants. If you immigrate talent (like we did from europe after the fall) then you benefit because you did not pay to create it, and did not take the common with the elite. But if you immigrate talent, even for jobs that your people do not want to do, and especially if they have values that conflict with the values that made your civilization possible, it’s not clear at all that immigrants are a value. In fact, it appears that they’re no different from printing MONEY and inserting it into your economy. No small number of great thinkers have worked on this problem and there is no consensus. However, Hoppe might answer, (and I would) that you cannot have facts without a theory. And unless you can explain the theory which your facts supposedly support, then there is no way of knowing that you’re talking about the same problem, you’re just using CORRELATION, not CAUSATION. (This is the premise of the Mises->Rothbard->Hoppe argument.) Hoppe is giving us a theory of human cooperation and social order. In my own work I agree with Hoppe. I have altered his argument slightly to additionally rely upon calculation and incentive, and added group behavior to it, to better support less individualistic assumptions about human nature which works against the market as much as it works in favor of property. But this is an improvement upon Hoppe’s work, not in any way a refutation of it. The point is, that you don’t refute a Hoppian argument (which is a christian noble’s argument about civilization as much as it is a rothbardian middle class argument about individual rights) with a short term utilitarian expression of tax revenues, because either you are unknowingly supporting his argument, or you haven’t espoused a theory sufficient to compete with the broader theory, and instead are arguing irrelevant and perhaps unrelated facts, that can only be made relevant by the elucidation of a replacement theory. At the very least, you may be describing NOISE not SIGNAL (see Mandelbrot and Taleb) without such a broader theory. (Which is what you’re doing, really, but that’s part of your intellectual development just like it was for the rest of us.) And your theory would have to say that you agree with the USE of GOVERNMENT VIOLENCE to steal property, potential, and freedom from the current citizens of your country to give to immigrants for the sole purpose of empowering government such that it can profit from violating those rights, whether it be out of ignorance, or (as Rothbard and others have stated) because of a misguided application of Christian egalitarian principles, or because of a human foible that makes us feel good about being charitable with public property because we get a social and emotional benefit,a s well as temporary status increase, from giving away what is not ours to give. I’ve tried to lay out a line of reasoning for you in short form, but may not have succeeded. If not, I’ll try to answer what I can for you. Having spent most of my life trying to find an answer to the problem of society, I think hoppe has taken it the farthest. If you assume that we should and can burn accumulated social capital in an effort to make current life better for the global underclass, then you are operating by different PREFERENCES, not by different TRUTHS. And truths are what make argumentative persuasion possible, But you MUST be taking from your citizens, and from their ancestors, to redistribute to your immigrants. THe arguments about productivity increases of immigrants are NOISE if they impose longer term costs on the social order. They are not SIGNAL. They are temporary fluctuations gained by arbitrage, and the theft of property from citizens, not trends to be extrapolated, and upon which we can make value judgements about a theory of political and social economy that is yet to be stated except as a set of “Derivations” (Pareto), or more abstract metaphysical assumptions about the nature of man, or cognitive biases due to incomplete knowledge of human social processes (Popper). For example, what is the cost of making it affordable for your children not to have jobs in their teens, and thereby learning work habits prior to entering the adult work force (the cost of prolonging childhood)? What is the cost of a 20% minority that does not integrate? Or one that proposes a different system of laws? Or one that does not value freedom? All costs are just the choice between one set of costs and another. But those costs have long term consequences. And the measurement of alternate timelines is extremely complex. Cheers. PS: I have a google alert for all articles referencing Hoppe, so that I can educate people about his work, and that’s how I found your posting.
Moreover, neither Hoppe, nor rothbard (nor mises, popper, hayek or Parsons) have answered the problem of the costs of creating property in the first place, and the opportunity and time economies. Rothbard’s analysis is specious because the island does not exist, and violence over property is rife and most often between groups, not individuals in the same tribe or family. The question is, “why don’t I kill you if you if you take my stuff”, or “why don’t I kill you if you take my opportunities away”.