Curt Doolittle

Theme: Governance

  • FROM QUORA: “Is Democracy a viable system for everyone?” ANSWER: By Curt Doolitt

    FROM QUORA: “Is Democracy a viable system for everyone?”

    ANSWER: By Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute.

    Democracy is, at best, a means of peacefully transferring power. But, if by this question, you mean, can representative democracy (a republic) or even a direct democracy (versus an economic democracy), serve the interests of everyone, the answer is apparently “no” for the following reasons.

    a) Majority rule is a means by which a group with similar moral codes and material interests can set PRIORITIES for the use of scarce resources. Because moral codes conflict at the most basic level, It is not possible to use majority rule for groups with competing moral codes and competing material interests to resolve conflicts over GOALS. Democracy is a means of obtaining majority rule.

    b) The lower, working and lower middle classes are and will always be, the largest pool of potential voters. Therefore elites from all moral codes and interest groups w will simply compete for the votes of these groups.

    c) The protestant west was unique in that the church managed to break familial bonds by the long term prohibition of intermarriage, and by granting women property rights. Combined with germanic individualism, and the common law, this made possible the fairly low level of corruption in the west, that is endemic elsewhere. It also gave rise the the universalist ethic, which is contrary to the natural familial and tribal ethic. This is a very long topic on it’s own, but basically the west is fairly unique. China and India cannot solve the problem of corruption for example from different ends of the spectrum. India remains familial and china authoritarian.

    d) We have fairly good data now, that moral codes vary considerably, and that they are slanted toward the reproductive strategies of the two genders. Therefore those things that serve one moral code often violate another. Those things that violate some moral codes (famlilialism) are necessary for democracy to function.

    e) It appears that the philosophers were right, and that a population that can vote itself payments from others will create a fragile economy. This is a particular weakness of the western model versus say the Singaporean and Galveston models, whereby individual accountability is maintained.

    f) There are dominant cognitive biases on the left and right. the left is victim of the false consensus bias, and the right overestimates threats and risks, and the libertarians overestimate human beings. These cognitive problems are impossible to resolve by majority rule.

    I have to rush so hopefully this brief outline will illustrate the problem

    Source date (UTC): 2012-07-16 01:09:00 UTC

  • You may not be able to envision a government without politicians and or bureaucr

    You may not be able to envision a government without politicians and or bureaucracy. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be better to live under.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-07-16 00:50:00 UTC

  • QUESTION FROM QUORA: What is being done to prevent the development of a “cold wa

    QUESTION FROM QUORA: What is being done to prevent the development of a “cold war” between China and the US in the coming years?

    Answer by Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute.

    The USA is attempting to allow China to peacefully rise by use of commercial power rather than military power. Commerce creates consumption which addicts citizens to consumerism, which then makes it difficult for governments to jeopardize without insurrection. That is the only strategy. The USA prefers the world consist of good commercial citizens.

    The fundamental problem though, is that China is a populous and very poor country that also contains conquered and rebellious territories, open to insurrection, and the wealthy coasts can be militarily devastated, and driven to starvation by blockading access to the South China Sea. The Chinese are quite aware of this vulnerability, plus they have a ‘chip’ on their shoulders from both british conquest, the failure of Marxism, and extended poverty, and the impact of those events upon the cultural mythology of Chinese superiority as the center of the world.

    Furthermore, their rise is complicated by the fact that they do not subscribe to the western moral code that currently is enforced by the United States on world trade — a code we take for granted but is antithetical to the Chinese. (We resolve conflicts quickly and rely upon honesty and they wait for opportunity using deception. This difference in ethics pervades both cultures.)

    The USA currently polices the world system of trade (largely the seas) because it took over the British naval bases at the end of the world wars. And petrodollars allow us to fund that policing. We sell dollars to other countries as debt, which they then use to buy oil, and then we inflate away the debt. This is how we ‘tax’ the developed world for our expensive military ‘services’. Services which they object to, but in particular, Europe and Japan do not object to not having to pay for directly themselves (nor could they).

    However, this system of indirect taxation which is breaking down, and the USA can no longer count on those advantages because of demographic reasons, competitive reasons due to internationalization of labor and technology, and monetary reasons due to the use of other currencies as petroleum and reserve currencies.

    General consensus among strategic thinkers is that the USA’s power will decline slowly and that Chinese rise will be moderated at some near point by simple economic pressures. The more radical thinkers suggest that most empires like the USA do not decline slowly, but very rapidly over a period of less than 50 years, and that the standard of living of the average american will be so significantly affected by the loss in purchasing power, that existing political tensions will be drastically exacerbated, sufficiently so that we will have our own problems of insurrection.

    In other words, both countries are more vulnerable to internal pressures due to China’s rise than they are to conflict with one another. The alternative school of thought suggests that when empires succumb to internal conflict, then they exaggerate external threats in order to pressure the citizens to stay united (see Iran for example). So that once the states and china experience internal pressures they will conduct a war over it. I tend to think this is unlikely because the USA’s citizens will have internalized it’s decline by that time.

    As I understand it, that is the current thinking in as short a summary as I can place it.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-07-15 15:39:00 UTC

  • FROM QUORA: HOW CAN THE UNITED STATES REMAIN A GLOBAL POWER? By: Curt Doolittle,

    FROM QUORA: HOW CAN THE UNITED STATES REMAIN A GLOBAL POWER?

    By: Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute.

    I am pretty sure that this represents the best overview of the USA’s current circumstances that exists today.

    There are six factors that play into power:

    1) geography,

    2) demographics,

    3) economy,

    4) currency,

    5) technology

    6) military.

    Given these factors, here are the changing conditions affecting the future of US power at the present time.

    1) The United States has a strategic geographic location, is a large country, and has quite a few natural resources. These factors are is enough to ensure relative importance in global affairs.

    2) The USA (along with the germanic countries) is reasonably free of government corruption, and it’s judiciary can be counted on to resolve contracts. Therefore it has commercial investment strengths that are difficult to duplicate. There is no other place to put risk capital anywhere close to that of the USA.

    3) The liquidity provided by the USA stock market creates a ‘lottery’ that encourages high risk ventures, which is why so much commercial experimentation happens in the states. But statistically speaking, it looks very much like wall street in general produces ‘noise’ and little else. With the collapse of demand for complex financial products, and the rising awareness of the nature of the financial system, plus the backlash against the crash in order to increase taxes on the wealthy, this system appears fragile.

    4) The USA has the highest corporate taxes in the world which encourages companies to invest and make money overseas rather than domestically. Combined with the incentive to use overseas labor, these are strong incentives to create jobs elsewhere.

    5) The USA is plagued by an educational system designed for converting farmers to industrial laborers, and the rest of the advanced economies have converted to systems designed to create a more advanced labor force. Meanwhile a lot of cheaper labor has come online, putting pressure on the lower classes (unskilled labor).

    6) The USA benefits from a) status as a reserve currency, b) price stability in oil caused by threat of military intervention, c) status as a petro-currency, and d) the ability (because of these factors) to accumulate significant debt, then inflate it away rapidly. These benefits are all waning due to the USA’s relative decline in world economic power.

    7) USA’s budget is about 1/3 for Social Security and Medicare benefit programs, 1/3 for the military, and 1/3 for the entire rest of the budget. Taxes only cover 2/3 of the budget. 1/3 must be borrowed and inflated away. So, in practice, the USA cannot maintain the military complex necessary for world power unless it maintains an ability to generate debt, and inflate that debt away.

    8) The military infrastructure built up for the cold war is aging, and modern programs to produce innovative technology have been plagued with technical failures and very high costs. The wars in the middle east have ‘consumed’ existing ‘capital equipment”. The USA will have to invest in new technology and equipment in order to maintain and project power. In particular, the surface navy, which the USA relies upon to project its power worldwide, is an extremely vulnerable technology. We also lack the type of equipment to fight urban warfare, which dominates the future of life and warfare. And it is possible that the structure of the army is unsuited for the future of warfare (and the marines are correctly structured.) Western civilization has generally been more successful at war than other cultures despite being poorer and in smaller numbers, because of its reliance on technology, and willingness to rapidly adapt to technology. Technology is expensive. It is coming into question whether we can endure: a) a racially divisive domestic political ’empire’ which is clearly polarizing along racial and cultural lines. b) an aging population that requires high health and support costs. c) an unemployable unskilled class, and unemployably expensive low skilled working class d) a loss of relative economic power needed to pay for power projection, e) our status as a reserve currency, and our status as a petro currency, creating demand for US debt which is used to accumulate dollars which in turn is used for reserves and for the purchase oil. f) a decline in our abilty to issue and inflate debt as a means of paying for our military program that is not covered by taxes.

    9) Given the size of the economy and its geographic location, the USA will continue to hold onto relatively strong world power. It will however, be increasingly unable to project power, and its abilty to pay for programs necessary to modernize and keep pace with changing world powers is waning.

    10) In particular there are two scenarios that are obvious:

    a) if the Iran is successful in creating an Iranian/pakistani/syrian/iraqi block that becomes a nuclear enabled military force that is capable of dictating world oil prices, and therefore capable of demanding the use of any given currency, the USA will not be able to fund its military program, because all ‘profits’ from reserve currency status, and petro-dollar status, will be captured by Iran. (If I could only get Tom Clancy to write a book on that story. Because that’s the story people might desire to understand.)

    b) China is a geographically vulnerable country (with a huge chip on its shoulder due to its loss of position in world history, and its failure with communism.) It would be very, very, easy to starve chinese citizens and foment civil war there by simply controlling the south china seas. The chinese know this and are very concerned about the ‘conquered’ provinces as well as the conflict between rich and poor and south and north. China also has a significant advantage in IQ distribution and literacy that gives its economy an advantage in spite of endemic poverty. The USA does not have this advantage because of a different (lower) IQ and literacy distribution. The “bottom” quintiles of chinese society are much better than the ‘bottom’ quintiles of american society. As impolitic and unpleasant that fact may be.Edit

    Source date (UTC): 2012-07-15 14:23:00 UTC

  • How Can The United States Remain A/the Global Leader?

    I am pretty sure that this represents the best overview of the USA’s current circumstances that exists today. 

    There are six factors that play into power:
    1) geography,
    2) demographics,
    3) economy,
    4) currency,
    5) technology
    6) military.
    They are all inter-related. Here are the major factors affecting the future of US power at the present time.

    1) The United States has a strategic geographic location, is a large country, and has quite a few natural resources.  These factors are is enough to ensure relative importance in global affairs.

    2) The USA (along with the germanic countries) is reasonably free of government corruption, and it’s judiciary can be counted on to resolve contracts.  Therefore it has commercial investment strengths that are difficult to duplicate. There is no other place to put risk capital anywhere close to that of the USA.

    3) The liquidity provided by the USA stock market creates a ‘lottery’ that encourages high risk ventures, which is why so much commercial experimentation happens in the states. But statistically speaking, it looks very much like wall street in general produces ‘noise’ and little else. With the collapse of demand for complex financial products, and the rising awareness of the nature of the financial system, plus the backlash against the crash in order to increase taxes on the wealthy, this system appears fragile.

    4) The USA has the highest corporate taxes in the world which encourages companies to invest and make money overseas rather than domestically.  Combined with the incentive to use overseas labor, these are strong incentives to create jobs elsewhere.

    5) The USA is plagued by an educational system designed for converting farmers to industrial laborers, and the rest of the advanced economies have converted to systems designed to create a more advanced labor force.  Meanwhile a lot of cheaper labor has come online, putting pressure on the lower classes (unskilled labor).

    6) The USA benefits from a) status as a reserve currency, b) price stability in oil caused by threat of military intervention, c) status as a petro-currency, and d) the ability (because of these factors) to accumulate significant debt, then inflate it away rapidly. These benefits are all waning due to the USA’s relative decline in world economic power.

    7) USA’s budget is about 1/3 for Social Security and Medicare benefit programs, 1/3 for the military, and 1/3 for the entire rest of the budget.  Taxes only cover 2/3 of the budget. 1/3 must be borrowed and inflated away.  So, in practice, the USA cannot maintain the military complex necessary for world power unless it maintains an ability to generate debt, and inflate that debt away.

    8) The military infrastructure built up for the cold war is aging, and modern programs to produce innovative technology have been plagued with technical failures and very high costs. The wars in the middle east have ‘consumed’ existing ‘capital equipment”.  The USA will have to invest in new technology and equipment in order to maintain and project power. In particular, the surface navy, which the USA relies upon to project its power worldwide, is an extremely vulnerable technology. We also lack the type of equipment to fight urban warfare, which dominates the future of life and warfare. And it is possible that the structure of the army is unsuited for the future of warfare (and the marines are correctly structured.)  Western civilization has generally been more successful at war than other cultures despite being poorer and in smaller numbers, because of its reliance on technology, and willingness to rapidly adapt to technology. Technology is expensive.  It is coming into question whether we can endure: a) a racially divisive domestic political ’empire’ which is clearly polarizing  along racial and cultural lines.  b) an aging population that requires high health and support costs.  c) an unemployable unskilled class, and unemployably expensive low skilled working class d) a loss of relative economic power needed to pay for power projection, e) our status as a reserve currency, and our status as a petro  currency, creating demand for US debt which is used to accumulate dollars which in turn is used for reserves and for the purchase oil.  f) a decline in our abilty to issue and inflate debt as a means of paying for our military program that is not covered by taxes.

    9) Given the size of the economy and its geographic location, the USA will continue to hold onto relatively strong world power. It will however, be increasingly unable to project power, and its abilty to pay for programs necessary to modernize and keep pace with changing world powers is waning.

    10) In particular there are two scenarios that are obvious:

    a) if the Iran is successful in creating an Iranian/pakistani/syrian/iraqi block that becomes a nuclear enabled military force that is capable of dictating world oil prices, and therefore capable of demanding the use of any given currency, the USA will not be able to fund its military program, because all ‘profits’ from reserve currency status, and petro-dollar status, will be captured by Iran.  (If I could only get Tom Clancy to write a book on that story. Because that’s the story people might desire to understand.)

    b) China is a geographically vulnerable country (with a huge chip on its shoulder due to its loss of position in world history, and its failure with communism.) It would be very, very, easy to starve chinese citizens and foment civil war there by simply controlling the south china seas.  The chinese know this and are very concerned about the ‘conquered’ provinces as well as the conflict between rich and poor and south and north.  China also has a significant advantage in IQ distribution and literacy that gives its economy an advantage in spite of endemic poverty.  The USA does not have this advantage because of a different (lower) IQ and literacy distribution.  The “bottom” quintiles of chinese society are much better than the ‘bottom’ quintiles of american society.  As impolitic and unpleasant that fact may be.

    https://www.quora.com/How-can-the-United-States-remain-a-the-global-leader

  • is no “we” in USA. The USA is not a superpower country it is an empire in declin

    http://www.gallup.com/poll/155585/americans-confidence-television-news-drops-new-low.aspxThere is no “we” in USA.

    The USA is not a superpower country it is an empire in decline.

    These numbers as well as the loss of confidence in the government are reflections of the loss of common purpose, and the insufficiency of shared reality.

    There is no “we”.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-07-10 18:07:00 UTC

  • Political Strategy: What Is Being Done To Prevent The Development Of A “cold War” Between China And The Us In The Coming Years?

    The USA is attempting to allow China to peacefully rise by use of commercial power rather than military power. Commerce creates consumption which addicts citizens to consumerism, which then makes it difficult for governments to jeopardize without insurrection.  That is the only strategy. The USA prefers the world consist of good commercial citizens.

    The fundamental problem though, is that China is a populous and very poor country that also contains conquered and rebellious territories, open to insurrection, and the wealthy coasts can be militarily devastated, and driven to starvation by blockading access to the South China Sea. The Chinese are quite aware of this vulnerability, plus they have a ‘chip’ on their shoulders from both british conquest, the failure of Marxism, and extended poverty, and the impact of those events upon the cultural mythology of Chinese superiority as the center of the world.

    Furthermore, their rise is complicated by the fact that they do not subscribe to the western moral code that currently is enforced by the United States on world trade — a code we take for granted but is antithetical to the Chinese.  (We resolve conflicts quickly and rely upon honesty and they wait for opportunity using deception. This difference in ethics pervades both cultures.)

    The USA currently polices the world system of trade (largely the seas) because it took over the British naval bases at the end of the world wars. And petrodollars allow us to fund that policing. We sell dollars to other countries as debt, which they then use to buy oil, and then we inflate away the debt. This is how we ‘tax’ the developed world for our expensive military services. 

    However, this system of abstract taxation which is breaking down, and the USA can no longer count on those advantages because of demographic reasons, competitive reasons due to internationalization of labor and technology, and monetary reasons due to the use of other currencies as petroleum and reserve currencies. 

    General consensus among strategic thinkers is that the USA’s power will decline slowly and that Chinese rise will be moderated at some near point by simple economic pressures.  The more radical thinkers suggest that most empires like the USA do not decline slowly, but very rapidly over a period of less than 50 years, and that the standard of living of the average american will be so significantly affected by the loss in purchasing power, that existing political tensions will be drastically exacerbated, sufficiently so that we will have our own problems of insurrection.

    In other words, both countries are more vulnerable to internal pressures due to China’s rise than they are to conflict with one another.  The alternative school of thought suggests that when empires succumb to internal conflict, then they exaggerate external threats in order to pressure the citizens to stay united (see Iran for example).  So that once the states and china experience internal pressures they will conduct a war over it.  I tend to think this is unlikely because the USA’s citizens will have internalized it’s decline by that time.

    As I understand it, that is the current thinking in as short a summary as I can place it.

    https://www.quora.com/Political-Strategy-What-is-being-done-to-prevent-the-development-of-a-cold-war-between-China-and-the-US-in-the-coming-years

  • How Corrupt Is The U.s. Government?

    Government by it’s nature, because it is a monopoly, and concentrates capital, draws corruption.  In the USA, corruption tends to be systemic rather than individual. Meaning that the system encourages politicians to work for special interests, and government workers to collect extraordinary benefits – on avearage have retirement benefits equivalent to something like 750K in savings, compared to 50K for the average citizen — plus they cannot be fired and unlike the rest of us are insulated from market pressures.  Monetary corruption, meaning, the privatization of public funds or goods, in exchange for favors, is actually amazingly rare in the USA.  Almost all of it is systemic.

    Americans are somewhat unique in their belief that it is possible to construct virtuous politicians and insert them into a system that encourages systemic corruption. We attempt to change the human to fit the system, rather than change the system to fit human nature.

    https://www.quora.com/How-corrupt-is-the-U-S-Government

  • Do Machiavellian Philosophies Carry Over Into The Modern World?

    You’d need to define what you mean by Machiavellian tactics.  Machiavelli was the first political scientist after Aristotle, and arguably the father of politics as a scientific endeavor.  He entreated rulers to move away from ancient traditions, religious or abstract moral principles, to material, logical, evidence based, principles necessary for the state to persist in the interests of its citizens. At the time of his writing, trade was moving north, and the principalities were being both threatened externally and undermined from within. 

    In this sense, almost all political action in the contemporary world is Machiavellian.

    So if you mean some other sense, then state it, and I’ll try to answer.

    https://www.quora.com/Do-Machiavellian-philosophies-carry-over-into-the-modern-world

  • How Corrupt Is The U.s. Government?

    Government by it’s nature, because it is a monopoly, and concentrates capital, draws corruption.  In the USA, corruption tends to be systemic rather than individual. Meaning that the system encourages politicians to work for special interests, and government workers to collect extraordinary benefits – on avearage have retirement benefits equivalent to something like 750K in savings, compared to 50K for the average citizen — plus they cannot be fired and unlike the rest of us are insulated from market pressures.  Monetary corruption, meaning, the privatization of public funds or goods, in exchange for favors, is actually amazingly rare in the USA.  Almost all of it is systemic.

    Americans are somewhat unique in their belief that it is possible to construct virtuous politicians and insert them into a system that encourages systemic corruption. We attempt to change the human to fit the system, rather than change the system to fit human nature.

    https://www.quora.com/How-corrupt-is-the-U-S-Government