Curt Doolittle

Theme: Governance

  • Why can’t we just say we’re anti-representational, anti-majoritarians? I’m pro a

    Why can’t we just say we’re anti-representational, anti-majoritarians? I’m pro anything that’s voluntary and moral. If it’s involuntary and immoral then I’m not.

    Majority rule is demonstrably immoral and involuntary.

    Contracts don’t require ‘rule’. They require incentives and exchanges.

    It’s not like we can’t produce commons contractually.

    In fact, I think the evidence supports the argument that we would create more commons contractually. It’s just that the Cathedral and the bureaucracy couldn’t parasite upon us. But that would be a good thing now wouldn’t it?

    What is the difference between unproductive priests and shamans, and unproductive overpaid bureaucrats, professors and academic administration workers?

    Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-11 12:16:00 UTC

  • Only Landed People Create Monuments and Art

    UNDERSTANDING CALIFORNIAN STATISM


    [C]alifornia. A very desirable geography. The best other than France. In both cases the geography is a natural resource exploitable by the state.


    As I said to Ron Manners: natural resources make you a slave because States must defend them. Diasporic peoples avoid these high costs at the expense of permanent insecurity. The golden mean (happy median) is Liberty – prevention of the state while also holding land.

    Only landed people create monuments and art.   And Europe is a vast, open air museum. 

  • Eli: Women’s Sufferage

    Guest Post by Eli Harman

    [M]en and women are different, with different priorities, values, motivations, interests, and reproductive strategies (on average.)

    The family is a compromise between male and female reproductive strategies. It isn’t what either men or women would choose if they had their druthers. (Men would build harems and women would be promiscuous and enlist the aid of the tribe to support their offspring.) But it’s the best either can achieve in compromise with the other.


    Now, democracy, as a structure of government can *only* function as a means of selecting priorities among parties with interests that are aligned (that’s why it works so well for corporations, because shareholders interests are perfectly aligned towards maximization of profit.) Democracy and voting can never ever, never ever, never ever, reconcile conflicting interests. In the case of genuine conflict, it can only determine which interests are to prevail at the expense of which others.
    When it was one family, one vote, democracy worked better, because the conflict between male and female reproductive strategies was resolved within the family, and it never rose to the level of politics.


    Families could use democracy to cooperate with one another on shared interests (although this was not without some conflict already.)


    But when women were enfranchised, and permitted to vote independently from men, this completely unbalanced things. Now the essential conflict between male and female could rise to the level of politics.


    And in this arena, women posses the advantage. In the first place, women are 51% of the electorate, so they possess a simple majority. in the second place, women tend to be more similar, and men more variable, so we might expect women to form a more cohesive voting block. Third, in addition to their own numbers, women can always count on the support of at least some men.


    This has a lot of consequences which it would take a while to explain even in part so I’ll let you follow the logic from there.
    But it does not bode well for western civilization. Female dominated societies are always conquered and subjugated by male dominated ones.

    Eli Harman.

  • Eli: Women’s Sufferage

    Guest Post by Eli Harman

    [M]en and women are different, with different priorities, values, motivations, interests, and reproductive strategies (on average.)

    The family is a compromise between male and female reproductive strategies. It isn’t what either men or women would choose if they had their druthers. (Men would build harems and women would be promiscuous and enlist the aid of the tribe to support their offspring.) But it’s the best either can achieve in compromise with the other.


    Now, democracy, as a structure of government can *only* function as a means of selecting priorities among parties with interests that are aligned (that’s why it works so well for corporations, because shareholders interests are perfectly aligned towards maximization of profit.) Democracy and voting can never ever, never ever, never ever, reconcile conflicting interests. In the case of genuine conflict, it can only determine which interests are to prevail at the expense of which others.
    When it was one family, one vote, democracy worked better, because the conflict between male and female reproductive strategies was resolved within the family, and it never rose to the level of politics.


    Families could use democracy to cooperate with one another on shared interests (although this was not without some conflict already.)


    But when women were enfranchised, and permitted to vote independently from men, this completely unbalanced things. Now the essential conflict between male and female could rise to the level of politics.


    And in this arena, women posses the advantage. In the first place, women are 51% of the electorate, so they possess a simple majority. in the second place, women tend to be more similar, and men more variable, so we might expect women to form a more cohesive voting block. Third, in addition to their own numbers, women can always count on the support of at least some men.


    This has a lot of consequences which it would take a while to explain even in part so I’ll let you follow the logic from there.
    But it does not bode well for western civilization. Female dominated societies are always conquered and subjugated by male dominated ones.

    Eli Harman.

  • The Transaction Cost Theory of Government

    PROPERTARIANISM: THE TRANSACTION COST THEORY OF GOVERNMENT
    (second draft) (closer)

    [H]istory says only that the development of a state – a monopoly bureaucracy – transfers high local transaction costs without central rents, to state rents and low transaction cost. Libertarians nearly universally ignore the evidence of universal transaction costs and free riding at the local level.

    And they further ignore the demonstrated necessity using organized violence by a monopoly organization to suppress those transaction costs and free ridings (“local rents”), and to convert them into central rents in order to pay for such suppression.

    The counter-argument is that states are in fact a neutral cost, and that we don’t spend enough on them in the suppression of transaction costs, because states provide multiples of return on that suppression. This is also demonstrable.

    The question isn’t how we can do without the state (a corporation articulated as a monopoly definition of property rights ), but now that we have suppressed local transaction costs, and replaced them with centralized rents in order to produce the commons we call property rights – how do we suppress centralized rents while maintaining the suppression of transaction costs, and the ability to construct commons that such suppression of transaction costs and rents allows us to construct?

    To argue that a monopoly definition of property rights is somehow “bad”, is irrational since property, obtained by homesteading and by voluntarily exchange, under the requirements for productivity, warranty and symmetry, is as far as I know, as logically consistent and exception-less as are mathematical operations on natural numbers. So the imposition of property rights cannot be illogical, immoral, unethical no matter how they are imposed since they define that which is logical, ethical and moral.

    There is nothing wrong whatsoever with violence – in fact, it is violence with which we pay for property rights and liberty – it is our first, most important resource in the construction of liberty. Instead, the question is purely institutional: having used violence to centralize transaction costs into rents, how do we now use violence to eliminate rents from the central organization?

    This is pretty easy: Universal standing, Universal Property rights, and Organically constructed, Common Law, predicated upon the one law of property rights as positive articulation of the prohibition on and the suppression of involuntary transfers: the demand for fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchanges free of externality. Because it is only under fully informed, productive, voluntary transfer, warrantied and free of externality that cooperation is rational, rather than parasitic. And only under rational cooperation is forgoing one’s opportunity to use violence equally rational.

    The question becomes then, who prohibits the formation of authority and this falls to the citizenry: the militia – those who possess violence.

    As far as I know this is the correct analysis of political evolution, and the correct theory for future political action.

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • The Transaction Cost Theory of Government

    PROPERTARIANISM: THE TRANSACTION COST THEORY OF GOVERNMENT
    (second draft) (closer)

    [H]istory says only that the development of a state – a monopoly bureaucracy – transfers high local transaction costs without central rents, to state rents and low transaction cost. Libertarians nearly universally ignore the evidence of universal transaction costs and free riding at the local level.

    And they further ignore the demonstrated necessity using organized violence by a monopoly organization to suppress those transaction costs and free ridings (“local rents”), and to convert them into central rents in order to pay for such suppression.

    The counter-argument is that states are in fact a neutral cost, and that we don’t spend enough on them in the suppression of transaction costs, because states provide multiples of return on that suppression. This is also demonstrable.

    The question isn’t how we can do without the state (a corporation articulated as a monopoly definition of property rights ), but now that we have suppressed local transaction costs, and replaced them with centralized rents in order to produce the commons we call property rights – how do we suppress centralized rents while maintaining the suppression of transaction costs, and the ability to construct commons that such suppression of transaction costs and rents allows us to construct?

    To argue that a monopoly definition of property rights is somehow “bad”, is irrational since property, obtained by homesteading and by voluntarily exchange, under the requirements for productivity, warranty and symmetry, is as far as I know, as logically consistent and exception-less as are mathematical operations on natural numbers. So the imposition of property rights cannot be illogical, immoral, unethical no matter how they are imposed since they define that which is logical, ethical and moral.

    There is nothing wrong whatsoever with violence – in fact, it is violence with which we pay for property rights and liberty – it is our first, most important resource in the construction of liberty. Instead, the question is purely institutional: having used violence to centralize transaction costs into rents, how do we now use violence to eliminate rents from the central organization?

    This is pretty easy: Universal standing, Universal Property rights, and Organically constructed, Common Law, predicated upon the one law of property rights as positive articulation of the prohibition on and the suppression of involuntary transfers: the demand for fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchanges free of externality. Because it is only under fully informed, productive, voluntary transfer, warrantied and free of externality that cooperation is rational, rather than parasitic. And only under rational cooperation is forgoing one’s opportunity to use violence equally rational.

    The question becomes then, who prohibits the formation of authority and this falls to the citizenry: the militia – those who possess violence.

    As far as I know this is the correct analysis of political evolution, and the correct theory for future political action.

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • REPOSESS LIBERTY (humor) I want to drive up to the house of congress with a flee

    REPOSESS LIBERTY

    (humor)

    I want to drive up to the house of congress with a fleet of tow trucks, walk in, and say I’m here to repossess my violence, because clearly they aren’t paying me my annual fee of liberty in exchange for it.

    Oh. I don’t need the trucks really. Or to walk into the house of congress. That’s just a bit of poetic license. 😉

    I have my wealth of violence whenever I choose to employ it.

    And to use it to construct liberty once again.

    BLOOD SPILT FOR LIBERTY IS A BEAUTIFUL THING

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-11 02:54:00 UTC

  • WHAT ALLOWS RUSSIA, CHINA AND ISRAEL TO CONDUCT INFORMATION WARFARE AGAINST THE

    WHAT ALLOWS RUSSIA, CHINA AND ISRAEL TO CONDUCT INFORMATION WARFARE AGAINST THE WEST?

    While we don’t tolerate it from others.

    (I know the answer)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-10 05:26:00 UTC

  • RON PAUL AS KREMLIN STOOGE —“Lack of transparency in funding and the blurring

    RON PAUL AS KREMLIN STOOGE

    —“Lack of transparency in funding and the blurring of distinctions between think tanks and lobbying helps the Kremlin push its agendas forward without due scrutiny.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-10 05:15:00 UTC

  • THE KREMLIN TOOLKIT – INFORMATION WARFARE • The Kremlin exploits the idea of fre

    THE KREMLIN TOOLKIT – INFORMATION WARFARE

    • The Kremlin exploits the idea of freedom of information to inject disinformation into society. The effect is not to persuade (as in classic public diplomacy) or earn credibility but to sow confusion via conspiracy theories and proliferate falsehoods.

    • The West’s acquiescence to sheltering corrupt Russian money demoralizes the Russian opposition while making the West more dependent on the Kremlin.

    • Unlike in the Cold War, when Soviets largely supported leftist groups, a fluid approach to ideology now allows the Kremlin to simultaneously back far-left and far-right movements, greens, anti-globalists and financial elites. The aim is to exacerbate divides and create an echo chamber of Kremlin support.

    • The Kremlin exploits the openness of liberal democracies to use the Orthodox Church and expatriate NGOs to further aggressive foreign policy goals.

    • There is an attempt to co-opt parts of the expert community in the West via such bodies as the Valdai Forum, which critics accuse of swapping access for acquiescence. Other senior Western experts are given positions in Russian companies and become de facto communications representatives of the Kremlin.

    • Financial PR firms and hired influencers help the Kremlin’s cause by arguing that “finance and politics should be kept separate.” But whereas the liberal idea of globalization sees money as politically neutral, with global commerce leading to peace and interdependence, the Kremlin uses the openness of global markets as an opportunity to employ money, commerce and energy as foreign policy weapons.

    • The Kremlin is increasing its “information war” budget. RT, which includes multilingual rolling news, a wire service and radio channels, has an estimated budget of over $300 million, set to increase by 41% to include German- and French- language channels. There is increasing use of social media to spread disinformation and trolls to attack publications and personalities.

    • The weaponization of information, culture and money is a vital part of the Kremlin’s hybrid, or non-linear, war, which combines the above elements with covert and small-scale military operations. The conflict in Ukraine saw non-linear war in action. Other rising authoritarian states will look to copy Moscow’s model of hybrid war—and the West has no institutional or analytical tools to deal with it.

    Defining Western Weak Spots

    • The Kremlin applies different approaches to different regions across the world, using local rivalries and resentments to divide and conquer.

    • The Kremlin exploits systemic weak spots in the Western system, providing a sort of X-ray of the underbelly of liberal democracy.

    • Offshore zones and opaque shell companies help sustain Kremlin corruption and aid its influence. For journalists, the threat of libel means few publications are ready to take on Kremlin-connected figures.

    • Lack of transparency in funding and the blurring of distinctions between think tanks and lobbying helps the Kremlin push its agendas forward without due scrutiny.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-10 05:15:00 UTC