Curt Doolittle

Theme: Governance

  • Our Failure To Keep It.

    The takeover of the administration of state by the middle class in England created a problem for politicians. WIth their new found responsibility, they were not against the king any longer, and now were against each other. Some were cognizant of the risk. Conservatism: Sentiments of freedom from totalitarianism, brotherhood of protection of the city, individual responsibility. group persistence. the unity of church and state. fidelity to one’s word. Objective truth in all statements. Purity. These are sentiments of group persistence. Classical Liberal: institutional Balance of power, the rule of law, enfranchisement of the many, contractually explicit government, the virtuous citizen created by trade and exchange. Libertarian Anarcho Capitalist: privatized institutions of social services, sound money, and the credit society. Hoppian Monarchy: the inter-temporal incentives of monarchy to accumulate social capital. Insurance companies as vehicles for Machiavellian: power maintained by minority willing to keep it by violence. violence is superior to fraud in both practice and logic. Compulsory saving. What separates the west from the less successful cultures, is that the [glossary:aryan] tradition’s philosophy is political rather than interpersonal. The greeks solved the problem of politics. The romans adopted and spread it. The church by contrast teaches empathy. The military state teaches objective truth. Neither compromises. Our version of ying-and-yang is not philosophical and personal, but institutional and political, and people are expected to master both empathy and objective truth. We did not fail to solve the problem of politics as did the other societies. We failed to keep it once we solved it. Monarchy, Senate (lords), Parliament, militarism, and the credit society. A house for each class. Not class warfare, but class cooperation.

  • A Method For Moderating Dialogs

    “The Cult Of Offensive Moderation” Note: I am in the process of creating a plugin for political moderation of debates, without censorship. There is far too much censorship on debate sites and blogs. Especially censorship of in-group language. The sentiment of inclusion in Democratic Secular Humanism (our current religion in the west) is at odds with the change in our word-wide status and economic position as a polity. In-grop sentiments are becoming increasingly important again.

    [callout]Solution? Categorize posts in a debate as to whether they are:
    1) content free or off topic
    2) sentimental expressions
    3) mythical, Platonic, or scriptural reasoning
    4) Objective rational arguments
    5) scientific arguments (using survey data but which are very fragile in the social sciences) and
    6) economic arguments (which because of scale and aggregation allow cultural comparison.)
    If you could filter conversations by these arguments,the reader could participate in a conversation of his own level of capacity.[/callout]

    1) The strategy of moderating sentimental (non rational) expressions will not work, because it leads to regression – increasing sensitivity as a means of ostracizing people to the point where commenting becomes more an act of policing until the board declines. It increase the transaction cost of participation. 2) As someone who runs a large advertising agency that must help companies and groups understand ‘social interaction’, I spend a great deal of time trying to educate editorials that the ONLY thing people find interesting is CONFLICT. Talking head shows are either internally engaging in conflict (crossfire), or externally (oprah/hannity). Conflict leads to ratings and ratings to participation. WIthout conflict, in either a novel, sort story, or a talk show, there isn’t much to hold anyone’s attention. And the more attention that you hold (the more viewpoints included) the more likely one is to have a member of the audience identify with one of the participants, and become involved. 3) People learn by first identifying the SENTIMENTAL statements that they agree with, and then seeing those statements refuted. If you eliminate the religious nuts, or the racists, or the culture-ists, you’re actually killing off the social value as well as the attraction of your medium. Because all people operate by sentiments. They may learn to articulate those sentiments as mythology, as reason, as science, or as economics, but they are still, almost universally, articulating their sentiments – simply with a different degree of precision. 4) Personalities (contributors) cannot be allowed take over the board or its brand and become the show itself. That’s board-hijacking, rather than thread-hijacking. So if you have permanent troublemakers that begin to draw too much attention to themselves then it is better to heavily moderate them. But not because of the content and form of their arguments. You ban them because they dominate the conversation and make their own ‘show’ on your dime. Losing participants is dangerous for any medium. Even bad ones. Sanitizing a board usually ends up with no board at all. 5) Increasing the number of editors so that they split posts into new threads is better than banning or correcting. Remember – people are largely seeking attention for their niche fantasies. Ignoring people is the most effective means of negative reinforcement. 6) Sentiments (unarticulated expression) are the most common form of narrative. They are analogical arguments. Reason (to the degree that few people can actually articulate causal properties of categories), science (directly measurable subsets) and economics (indirectly measured supersets). Religion as we mean it, refers to scriptural command, or external non-human knowledge, in the monotheistic meaning. Polytheism and history are simply differences of degree. It is scripture. 7) it is particularly troubling to eliminate what is called hate-speech or inter-group expression of sentiments. That ‘s because the most important dialog of our age is the change in group sentiments now that the worldwide change in status and power hierarchies has come about because of the worldwide adoption of western economic and material technologies. SOLUTION? Editing and moderating are hard. It is very, very, difficult to ascertain the quality of an argument in the social sciences. We are fairly sure that the entire Marxist religion, masquerading as a political movement, is as irrational as the Islamic political movement masquerading as a religion, are both extremely dangerous to mankind. But since we live in a POLITY, and the member of that polity largely use SENTIMENTS rather than reason in debate, and that their beliefs and debates are highly influential upon the outcome (more than reason by a long shot), and that most people criticizing these sentimental arguments lack causal depth in their own arguments, then the best board, the best discussions, the best social outcome, is determined by keeping an argument on track, rather than censoring it. An alternate solution, (and I have done a little work on this) categorizing posts in a debate as to whether they are 1) content free or off topic 2) sentimental expressions 3) mythical, Platonic, or scriptural reasoning 4) Objective rational arguments 5) scientific arguments (using survey data but which are very fragile in the social sciences) and 6) economic arguments (which because of scale and aggregation allow cultural comparison.) If you could filter conversations by these arguments, you would be able to stack them by methodology, and the reader could participate in a conversation of his own level of capacity. DIFFERENT IDEOLOGIES Although, we should note, that as scripture, you will have a hard time actually arguing against catholic doctrine as it’s based upon natural law: the observation of what men actually do. WHich is, what appears to be, the general sentiment and strategy underlying most semi scientific argument on this board. (Which I admire). If you want to argue using reason, the libertarian methodology will most likely lead you to correct conclusions. However, libertarianism consists of a set of branches, some of which do NOT correspond to reality, including 1) Rothbard’s principle of non-violence which is a silly argument, since the entire problem of social order is non-violence 2) free trade would lead in the end, to as state of affairs not any different from world-governance 3) libertarians have not included the cost-of-forgone-opportunities which is how we pay for the creation of some set of property rights, and therefore, failed to account for the cost of developing social order. As such, it’s a platonic fantasy counter to evidence. Conservatism is the best strategy for preventing social destruction, revolution and un-meritous rotation of elites. It is very skeptical of power – power should be obtained by public service in the market, or in the military in the defense of the market. Any other grab at power is specious. That’s the sentimental origin of the western city-market building shareholder system we call ‘citizenship’. But conservative philosophy has not provided a solution to our vast increase in the division of knowledge and labor. It has not provided us with an updated set of institutions for the contemporary world. And FWIW : Conservatism is largely an unarticulated sentiment that is more complex than left-liberalism, as conservatives rely on at least five axis the most important of which is group persistence, and liberals only one (harm/care). The combination of harm/care simplicity, egalitarian equality, Keynesian macroeconomic policy (statistics, full employment, liquidity) and democratic government, are ideal tools for competing with a sentiment thats primary purpose is to avoid hubris, and protect the group for the long term. In other words, consumption on the left versus capitalization on the right.

    [callout]The balance between liberalism (Pareto’s Instinct for Recombination, or Machiavelli’s Foxes) and conservatism (Pareto’s Preservation of Aggregates, or Machiavelli’s Lions) is a necessary conflict between the forces of stability that must allow change, but not disruption, and those that desire change regardless of consequences – because both innovation and stability are valuable to a civilization This debate in sentiments is particularly useful because reason is insufficient for solving this problem, largely because we have failed to make the same progress in induction and the social sciences that we have in deduction and the physical sciences. And partly because the physical sciences are vastly less complex than the more heuristic social science governed by the properties of the human mind.[/callout]

    The balance between liberalism (Pareto’s Instinct for Recombination, or Machiavelli’s Foxes) and conservatism (Pareto’s Preservation of Aggregates, or Machiavelli’s Lions) is a necessary conflict between the forces of stability that must allow change, but not disruption, and those that desire change regardless of consequences – because both innovation and stability are valuable to a civilization This debate in sentiments is particularly useful because reason is insufficient for solving this problem, largely because we have failed to make the same progress in induction and the social sciences that we have in deduction and the physical sciences. Partly because the physical sciences are vastly less complex than the more heuristic social science governed by the properties of the human mind. And just so we’re all living in rational reality not committing the error of confusing our own religion with neutral objective science, much of what is argued for on this board by well meaning products of our the past sixty years of western educational system, most often is doctrine of the RELIGION of Democratic Secular Humanism (which is a religion as it is contrary to the facts). Or of egalitarian equality, which is is a property of the Democratic Secular Humanist religion, and is also contrary to the facts. Or the assumption that freedom is the desire of the majority is counter to the facts. That is, as long as we realize that people are racist, culture-ist, class-ist, nationalist, cultist, members of competing civilizations, and they all are, because they all act that way under DURESS, and that it’s advantageous both for elites and for the underclass to be ‘anything-ist’, and that these traits are beneficial to economic man, beneficial to individuals, and an enduring part of the human experience. And if one doesn’t think so, then truth isn’t one’s objective, platonism is. Truth is correspondence with reality.

  • The Child Of Democracy And Secularism Is Stillborn

    (Posted in the comments section of the NYT) In response to the comments section of one of Paul Krugman’s articles: British Decline I felt that all the people that were commenting were right. They understood the failure of conservative policy. The same way that conservatives understand the failure of liberal policy. But they are working on different axis. Neither to do with one another. Our ideological war has now become a race and class war. New elites are emerging. They are less invested in the previous order. They are messianic. They are driven by the one force that is unstoppable: the loss of status and power, which no group will tolerate, and which whites only tolerated because of the combined guilt of slavery and colonialism, and the attack on men by feminism. The elites widthrew from society, participated in the commercial marketplace, left the arts to immigrants, and abandoned high culture. This was fine until the middle class was threatened. At this point, not only is the middle class threatened but so are the working class whites. Under duress people rely upon the mirror test: people who look like them. They are under duress economically. And they feel that their government, the very government that they surrendered, is against them. The ascendency of europeans and the protestant reformation is being undone. Classical liberalism is being undone. It is being undone for exactly the reasons conservatives stated it would be undone. The inability of conservatives to produce a cult (romanticism) and the abilty of conservatives to produce an economic and political model to compete with socialism and social-democracy, using the tools of monetary policy, and the state, to transfer power and advantage. RE: “Japan has a big asset: a leadership that honestly cares for its people. This caring (amateur sociology, according to professional economist), is due to their tribal unity.” This comment correctly states the issue: that despite hardship and demographic changes, the japanese remain under solidarity.

    [callout]Neither side wins. Period. We all lose. A nation is its cult. Economics is not a sufficient means of organizing a polity. Democracy wasn’t the only god that failed. It married secularism. And it’s child is stillborn.[/callout]

    This is scientific data, not amateur sociology: The japanese are a homogenous racist society. Economic success by any group will not lead to political disenfranchisement of another group, wherein the dominant group will lose privilege and opportunity, or the competing groups will not eliminate but simply alter the baises of privilege and opportunity. The USA is an empire. People of different races, cultures and religions, do not mix except under very rare circumstances at the margins, largely to do with status economies and the resulting access to mates and opportunities. The human accounting system is status, not money. Because intra-group status is more rewarding than extra-group status. We will not have multi-culturalism when different groups have the ability to obtain political power, and can undermine the majority status system. There was far more multi-culturalism under the great monarchies of europe than today. Simply because commercial excellence was the only status route available to minorities, because the political system was not open to them. Power is not meritocratic. It just is power, and the most important objective of power is to deprive other people of it. And the most important feature of western culture was that it allowed status gain by market activity even if denied access to political office which might alter that dichotomy. The conservative movement was a reaction to a violation of its core principle of long term group cohesion – a necessary component of land holding and trade-route holding – persistence which cannot be maintained through economic means alone. Only tribalism and pure military strength are strong enough to hold trade routes. THe conservative movement since the end of the war was a reaction against the disintegration of the sentiments of group-persistence, due to immigration, post-slavery political problems, feminism and anti-colonialism, as a coalition against the established political order. And instead of obtaining their ‘rights as englishmen’ of property, and market participation, these groups sought political power – political power is not meritocratic. It is just force. This process s playing out, and will play out, as materially important and highly predictive. Our culture will not assimilate and unify. It will not achieve the grand vision. We are demographically adopting the south american model. We will, and are, fragmenting to the point where the government may lose the ability to govern. If we get only two states to make use of nullification that will be the end of our multi-cultural, melting-pot fantasy. And three more years of low employment will almost guarantee it. Good economics is not macro economics. All economics is micro. Because the vast movement of human beings over time is determined by what they cannot sense by quantitative means, and what they can sense by qualitative means: the loss of their status and opportunity due to enforced competition, and competition from people who are no longer asked to integrate and to be ‘american’ and adopt american values, but to oppose those values and retain their culture at any cost, because en-masse, it is a way to obtain political power, rather than participate in the market and become an american by earning status in the market. All your criticisms of the free trade movement are correct. Conservatives were attempting to preserve the cult of american classical liberalism, preserve existing status hierarchies, and force people to conform to that value system – their cult – and therefore force people into the market under the monarchic classical liberal model. THe conservative policies that you are railing against are simply means of undermining the attack on the classical liberal cultural order. Justified as economic nonsense maybe. But pursued for precisely conservative reasons. Neither side wins. Period. We all lose. A nation is its cult. Because economics is not a sufficient means of decision making in a polity. Democracy wasn’t the only god that failed. It married secularism. And it’s child is stillborn.

  • Anarchists and Elitism?

    From The Liberty Defense League, an exceptionally intelligent posting on the weaknesses of anarchism.

    Some libertarian friends call for anarchy to prevail. While such a state of affairs may be offering momentary delights, we need to remember that if we stand for nothing, we will fall for anything. Anarchy is government of nothing, and is only a transitional period between different states of order. Order always arises from chaos, and anarchy is often a tool of leftists. I am sure true libertarians are well meaning in upholding individuals’ self-rule in looking to a utopian anarchy, but I believe they are being used, even misled, to merely be creating conditions for another tyranny to prevail. The libertarian anarchists are correct in stating why the current Federal Union of Criminals Unlimited gives us ample reason to secede. But to what goals do we truly aspire?

    (My comment posted from the site, copied below for recording purposes.) Exceptionally intelligent article. Thank you. A couple of insights for context.

    [callout]The Anarchist movement, and the Rothbardian Libertarian Philosophy, are reactions to the failure of the conservative movement as well as the traditional classical liberal movement that is the jeffersonian model under which our nation has been founded, to provide an intellectual framework that can compete with the combination of marxist philosophy, socialist sentiments, and political tools that derive from the combination of Keynesian monetary philosophy with the rise of the dynamic stochastic equilibrium model. [/callout]

    The Anarchist movement, and the Rothbardian Libertarian Philosophy, are reactions to the failure of the conservative movement as well as the traditional classical liberal movement that is the jeffersonian model under which our nation has been founded, to provide an intellectual framework that can compete with the combination of marxist philosophy, socialist sentiments, and political tools that derive from the combination of keynesian monetary philosophy with the rise of the dynamic stochastic equilibrium model. (I realize that this is a mouthful, but it is the correct analysis.) Mises, Hayek, Parsons, Popper, Rothbard, Nozick, fall failed despite great minds, to provide a solution to the semi-rational tools provided by the above listed models. The conservatives from Kirk onward produced sentimental historical references, but no rational philosophical framework. Especially that could compete with the heady religious scripture, rational philosophy, and volume of production of marxism and marxists. They failed because government consist of both the associations you refer to, as well as the institutions that limit the use of free associations to become governments themselves, and therefore have the ability to project their will by edict, rather than the ability to advocate their will upon the desirous. From this viewpoint, the anarchic research program, when approached as a program of research in limiting government (as largely done by Hoppe), has accomplished more than all other freedom-driven intellectual programs. But as a practical political movement it will fail. It wil fail for the reasons you have stated. However, it has contributed greatly to the philosophical debate. We just do not yet know how to change our institutions to make use of the libertarian anarchist framework of privatization in order to balance the use of monetary policy and redistributive sentiments, with freedom. Libertarians figured it out. Most of it. And we should thank them for it. The primary change in the nature of government was that western government ceased attempting to increase economic productivity after the great war, and instead, emphasized expansion and redistribution. And this treat to our freedom was started by the Louisiana Purchase and our fate sealed with the civil war. Liberty is for small homogenous states. And as Federalist 10 states, any time you have a government over people with dissimilar economic and cultural interests, it’s not a government, it’s an empire, and as an empire, it’s oppressive. – a member of the anarcho capitalist research program.

  • A Political Movement Pretending To Be A Religion Replaces A Religion Pretending To Be A Political Movement

    From The Left’s Unlikely Alliance with Islam By Robert Eugene Simmons Jr.

    [callout]First we encounter Marxism, which is a religion masquerading as a political movement. When we finally defeat Marxism the void is almost immediately filled by Islam, which is a political movement masquerading as a religion.[/callout]

    Most fair-minded Americans have no problem with people who wish to practice their religion. In addition, most fair-minded Americans know of the difficult pasts of Christianity and Judaism and would demand of Islam what has been demanded of other religions. Americans don’t tolerate inquisitions anymore than they do Sharia courts. Americans realize that religious freedom is inherent in the melting pot that is America, but they also understand that all religions must exist under an umbrella of mutual respect and within the boundaries of common law. Americans would no more accept honor killings than they would accept a Catholic man killing atheists for the sake of his religion. The freedom of religion, in the end, is not a carte blanche to do whatever you wish and then yell “first amendment,” but rather a constraint to prevent the government from imposing a single religion, as Islamic governments do.

    I would add, that any religion that seeks dominion over temporal matters (to establish laws) is not a religion, but a political movement masquerading as a religion. And any religion that encourages its people to lie about their convictions, is incompatible with democratic government. Even worse, it’s incompatible with the western way of life. First we encounter Marxism, which is a religion masquerading as a political movement. When we finally defeat Marxism the void is almost immediately filled by Islam, which is a political movement masquerading as a religion. Islam and Marxism are the same. They are the totalitarianism of equality in ignorance and poverty. (In retrospect, Christianity wasn’t much better when it was brought into the empire. )

  • China And Defining Freedom – Easterly VS National Review

    In William Easterly’s post “Why can’t leading conservative magazine understand freedom?” he refers to a National Review article “China Teaches US Lessons About Economic Freedom“. I replied in the comments: William, I’ve read this post four times, and it’s still not very clear what you’re arguing for and against. I think you’re reading far too much into a what are simple, broad analogies that express a sentiment not a formula. All he’s saying is that small increases in freedom produced a great impact on china. And he’s implying that small decreases in freedom here in the USA, will have as grand a set of effects. I think you’re both confused and you both overrate government, overrate individuals, and underrate demographic migration and change. Growth was easy for the USA during the 1800’s: buy half a continent from Napoleon and import millions of Europeans into it. Sell them all sorts of consumer goods so that they fill up the territory, and so that you can collect profit and create capitalist barons doing so. Use the cheap land and labor to produce commodity goods and sell them to europe. Cause a price catastrophe in europe. Let them have a horrendous civil war and inherit their intellectuals and england’s naval empire. Now, take a country like china, forcibly held back in ignorance and poverty by Mao who decided it was better to have everyone poor and suffering than a wealthy south and a poor north and west — fragmenting the chinese empire. Now, import vast amounts of western technology, western banking and accounting technology in particular, and use your inexpensive labor to produce goods based on that technology cheaply and sell back to the westerners. China’s growth is largely in the form of construction: moving people from hovels in the rural areas, to apartments in urban areas. The country is vastly poor. And it’s per-capita GDP is horrid. They used totalitarianism and capitalism to manage their expansion, we used republicanism and capitalism to do the same thing. There is nothing interesting about china. Nothing. There is nothing interesting about america, either, which is why you’re both confused. What’s interesting is how Europe in general, and England in particular, created so much innovation, how Americans capitalized on it, and how we can use that tradition and culture of innovation to compete in a world where we are no longer the one making money from a huge demographic change. Once cheap labor stops, and marginal differences in knowledge are exhausted, what remains is a nation’s ability to dynamically reorganize production in real time, and to competitively innovate in real time. The question is, whether Americans will maintain their innovative risk taking speculative culture without the military and economic dominance they possessed in the last century, and the resulting control over the international banking and trade system.

    William Easterly wrote: Curt and Sam, thanks for your comment. I was making a simple point: the article had a double standard for the Negative Changes in Economic Freedom in China and the US. And, 2nd, in giving so much general credit to Deng Xiao Ping vs. America’s leaders, it ignored Deng’s despicable actions against individual freedom in Tien An Men Square, and continued violence against and imprisonment of dissidents in China.

    William, thank you for replying. Let’s define Freedom. Because unless we define it, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Let’s see: Freedom: absence of external constraint.

      The only form of ‘freedom’ you can have, that is non-contradictory (you can equally grant it to others and they to you) is personal, individual freedom. And even then, the only form of political freedom you can have is to DENY others the right to their political freedom. And at that point you are stuck with the problem of either getting to the point where you can convert the barbarians into paying the opportunity cost of becoming property holders in the first place, (establishing the system of property definitions) and without that need for coercion, you’re stuck in poverty even if you want to change the established order. But the only freedom you can have is individual freedom – the freedom of constraint. We can grant it to others equally. The rest of the freedoms are not ‘freedom’. They’re rights to take from others. All political freedoms are rights to take from others. They are rights of coercion, oppression. But then one cannot have a division of labor, a complex society, economic calculation, and the incentive to participate in productive activities unless you apply the ‘coercion’ of private property – at least to some degree. Confucianism is a high-opporunity-cost social order. It is very conservative. It requires respect for hierarchy and authority (opportunity costs). It requires consensus (opportunity costs but with risk reduction). It is an almost entirely shareholder-property society with low rates of creativity, low risk, slow moving social and economic model. But if it is BIG enough that people cannot sense external competition from OTHER social orders then internal status symbols can be preserved by way of nationalism or culturalism and the social order can work. (it doesn’t: the south is a competitor with the north of china, which is their whole cultural problem – that’s what Mao did. He destroyed the country economically to keep the south from outpacing the north.) This is not necessarily ‘bad’ in Confucian society. It may bear understanding that Confucius failed to solve the political problem (it is somewhat evident that he understands this) and directed everyone to hierarchy and family. So the Confucian model is not republican at it’s base. It is not tribal. It is hierarchical, and familial. The entire nation operates as a family. This is not a bad strategy unless you are competing with a group of high-risk, highly-innovative, fast moving westerners, for whom individual heroism, innovation and achievement are viewed as ‘keeping the group strong’. Competition and individualism are a ‘group good’ in the west. They are not in the asian societies. we are free to copy the innovators, and in doing so, everyone has the opportunity to be ‘better’. The west is an innovation and adaptation society. Freedom as we understand it, is not possible, and probably not necessary under Confucianism. Economically speaking, a nation that does NOT participate in heavy research and development will eventually fall behind, and governments can concentrate more wealth than the private sector on Research and Development. (What would the impact be of 200 new nuclear power plants in the USA? We have people feeling good about not wasting energy but manufacturing is the greatest energy consumer, and we need more manufacturing. Economizing is a spiritual act, not a material one.) China is making productive investments. We are making redistributive expenses, and spending trillions defending oil and trade routes, and our primary export – the dollar. And we will not get anywhere thinking that some very small minority of a Confucian population, or our odd obsession with the religion of Universal Democratic Secular Humanism will have any long term effect on the Sinic culture. The rest of the world is clearly condemning it. There isn’t even any evidence yet that our UDSH values will persist in the west without the Militial and Commercial balance to it, that is the foundation of western civilization. The calculative institutions of capitalism, which provide incentives in the form of pricing, sensory information in the form of objects defined as property, expressed and manipulated quantitatively, and the technologies of intertemporal collaboration and coordination in the form of money, interest, banking, fiat money and the technologies of dispute resolution in the form of contract and law, have little or nothing to do with the technologies of redistribution, and the methods of capital concentration, as well as the ‘forgone opportunity costs’ which citizens pay for participation in society and market’. Political freedom is not economic freedom. Political freedom exists either to defend ones self against a predatory state, or to use the violence of the state to put extra-market pressure on competing groups with competing interests. The reason for the western matrix of freedoms is to promote innovation, competition and wealth, so that the nobility, the upper middle class, and therefore prosperity will be maintained, and management elites, will rotate keeping the society competitive. At least, that’s the implied theory: meritocratic rotation of the elites – a thematic value system inherited from western heroic competitive militarism. ie: it’s a knowledge production engine. China values stability and security, not change and innovation. It is a culture where conflict is a sin. Where the individual is subordinate to the state. Where virtue is not heroic excellence, but duty. (At least, until the middle class is large enough.) Conservatives are in large part, whether knowingly or not, subscribers to ‘natural law’ theory, which states that human behavior is what it is, always has been and always will be. They do not subscribe to the philosophy that all men would work happily for the common good, nor, if given the opportunity, that they would do some common good in political power, or even know what such a good would be, simply because of the number of trade offs and secondary causes. Nor, that we are capable of implementing any designed change in our social orders without horrific consequences. And under that view, they would say that you are making a moral equivalency where there is none. Moral statements are economic actions, and either economic payments or theft. Ethical statements are economic actions, and either economic payments or theft. Manners are economic demonstrations, contributions, and payments. But these payments are made against a vast, habitual, rather than written set of legal, cultural and class body of accounts – and vastly different concepts of property definition, and they exist largely to ‘pay for the social order’ by reducing opportunity for friction and conflict. In the west, we have a very different payment system. We are all trying to be noblemen or priests. In the east, they are all trying to be Confucian – to hold their place. More like the German model prior to ww1. Our anglo model, is very rare. And it may simply be the artifact of a thousand years of wealth generated by expansion under the reformation. So before I get too far into this (I already have gotten way too far into it) I think you are being literal with conservative (allegorical) language. Conservative language is allegorical because conservatives have failed (especially during the 1870’s and 1930’s) to articulate a causally sufficient social science. (Myself and two or three rather off the wall libertarians, excluded perhaps.) Where the social democratic method can rely on the coincidence and correlation between easily collected monetary transaction information the Dynamic Stochastic Equilibrium model, and christian egalitarian sentiments, and Jewish anti-western-militial sentiments. But that does not mean that conservatives sentiments, expressed in allegorical language are false. It means they are insufficiently articulated. (and worse -foolishly wrong as in the case of many libertarians.) It simply means that they don’t yet know how to do otherwise. I think furthermore, that a) China is simply importing knowledge at very low cost. It is not producing it. Wealth may make knowledge production possible. But we have seen the Asian model is great for incremental improvement and the western model is better for radical innovation. b) cultures do not change. There is a high cost of changing norms. And Sinic civilization is very resistant to change. It is highly racist and highly culturist. (And it has a huge chip on it’s shoulder.) c) Their entire obligation structure (morals, ethics, property rights, manners) is a set of established costs. Our values are antithetical to them. d) their identity ( the means by which they judge the world) and their status signals (the human natural intuitive economy of events and consequences) will continue to force them in their native direction. And lastly, (why am I just getting to this now?) all the conservative writer was saying is that ‘a little momentum made a big difference’, and that ‘even if we make a little momentum in the wrong direction it will make as big a difference’. He is not comparing statements, he is comparing trajectories in time. And that’s what it means to be conservative: taking the long view.

    • Hayek, Kling, Austrians And Providing The Libertarian Solution

      From Arnold Kling, By way of the WSJ, By Peter Boettke:

      Mr. Hayek rightly warned of the dangers of central planning, Mr. Boettke says, but “he didn’t give a prescription for how to move from ‘serfdom’ back.”

      – Austrian Resurgence by Arnold Kling (Taken and expanded from my comments on EconLib.) Back From Serfdom? Hayek didn’t solve the problem of the social sciences. He gave us the right warning, but no meaningful prescription for government other than to rely upon what we already knew. Liberty is the desire of the minority. The minority participates in the market. The majority on the other hand lives off it, but does not participate in it. The majority is often frightened of the market. And if not frightened, they simply want to avoid the dirty reality of market participation: spending one’s life trying to understand and satisfy the wants of others, and risking one’s capital to test his or her judgement. We’d all rather be selfish. CALCULATION AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Mises, Hayek, Popper and Parsons all failed to solve the problem of the social sciences. The conservative sentiment remains a sentiment, and not an unarticulated rational philosophy. What structure it does have, remains allegorical and historical. This is why it cannot easily win a rational battle against the various forms of positivism aligned with marxist and collectivist sentiments.

      [callout]Austrian ‘Calculation’, Austrian incentives, the abstractions of Property and Opportunities, along with the properties of human memory and cognitive bias, are, when taken together, a necessary and sufficient system for economic and political order, and a rational means of articulating the conservative and libertarian sentiments. [/callout]

      Austrian ‘Calculation’, Austrian incentives, the abstractions of Property and Opportunities, along with the properties of human memory and cognitive bias, are, when taken together, a necessary and sufficient system for economic and political order, and a rational means of articulating the conservative and libertarian sentiments. This structure. This answer to our problem of the social sciences, is in Austrian Theory. It’s just incomplete. Our political system relies upon debate and rhetoric as means of resolution of PRIORITIES and METHODS among people with SIMILAR interests. Debate relies upon relevant knowledge of the content policicians are debating. But without data that is sufficiently complex, and formulae that are sufficiently PREDICTIVE, their debates must rely upon social class and cult preferences. And since the society is comprised of multiple classes and people with multiple interests, debate in the absence of rational data, and a rational social science, must descend into sentiments and rhetorical contrivance of people wth dissimilar material interests, rather than rely upon scientific Without additional complexity in our information systems, and without additional complexity in our political process the differences in our interests are too divergent to be solved by irrational discourse. It is a battle of who can win the greatest sentiments, rather than the determination of priorities among people with similar interests. We need data, and a system of applying that data that will allow us to move beyond the convenient contrivance of the DSEM model, and that will permit human beings to rationally make political decisions based upon something other than the tyranny of the majority won through the artifice of irrational sentimental political debate, unbounded by the practicality of hard money, and the difficulty of borrowing hard money. KLING’S RECALCULATION IS THE CORRECT MODEL Calculation and Incentives are the reason the Recalculation Story is the correct analogy. But without rational, causal, articulation, it remains an allegory, and is an insufficient argument relying on explanatory power, rather than causal definitions. There must be a way to combine knowledge of a nation’s market practitioners the way that the market does, and put it in the hands of politicians. We need politicians because if we are to pool our resources (if only to defend ourselves and our property from the barbarians and the proletariat) then there is a scarcity of resources to apply to infinite political choices. PAST FAILURES Past civilizations failed because law, rhetoric, bureaucracy and religion were insufficient means of coordinating a large division of knowledge and labor. They failed to create property definitions and calculating institutions sufficient for cooperatively managing their resources and for forecasting their use by combining the knowledge of the body of practitioners who were participating in the market. This is the reason all civilizations fail internally. It is a structural problem of complexity. Complexity does not have diminishing returns as some authors have suggested – just the opposite. But as complexity increases so must our cooperative technologies. And the tendency of governments to become corrupt, ritualistic, and calcified, combined with the lack of information systems and lack of conceptual models, and lack of institutions to use those models and data, leads to cooperative failure. HARD MONEY AND KNOWLEDGE VERSUS SOFT MONEY AND PROBABILISM Hard money and lending allow this cooperation between power and knowledge. Hard money requires borrowers to make a case to their debtors, and debtors can apply their knowledge of potential profit and loss. But hard money has given way to fiat money, in order to keep the supply of money needed for it’s uses available, while limiting inflation. Had government the inability so spend money itself, this process of inflation targeting would work. Fiat money is also a form of insurance. It makes government the insurer of last resort. It increases productivity by socializing risk. It will not prevent booms and busts. Instead, such easy credit encourages them. But human society has made the decision to tolerate this risk of credit distortion in exchange for the ability to provide each other with national insurance – the ability to borrow from everyone by printing money, and providing restitution of losses to those who have catastrophes. And as the Anglo-Rothschild-French alliance has proven, and the USA has taken to extremes, the most heady insurance a nation state can make use of, is the ability to print money as debt in order to wage war. And, as all developed nations have demonstrated, fiat money also permits governments to create social programs by borrowing against a future that is uncertain. In the absence of hard money – hard money that must be willingly lent – we can no longer rely upon the wisdom and knowledge of property holders we call lenders. Instead, we rely on mathematical prediction — which specifically does not contain the wisdom of property holders and their predictions of the future. Nor is our government debt actually comprehensible. It is simply too complex and vast, and speculative to understand. A SOLUTION THAT ALLOWS COOPERATION AND CALCULATION Thankfully, we already have the model of banking and credit. We’ve just allowed banking and credit to embrace precisely what we have warned politicians from embracing: the error of aggregation, called ‘pooling’ in fixed categories inherent in our current accounting technology, which is further enabled by an erroneous application of probabilism that violates the primary principle of property: it’s dependence upon knowledge of it’s dynamic utility. Hayek identified the problem but not the solution. We have a solution. We have the technology to implement it. It’s implementing it that’s now the problem. The fundamental problem for any civilization is increasing the granularity of economic calculation and keeping the temporal pace of their categories of measurement with the dynamism of their utility. In addition, if we are to have the self-insuring system of fiat money, then we must also have a means of capturing knowledge of lenders, and practitioners that was inherent in hard money. Then, possessed of that means, alter our form of government to take advantage of that knowledge. So Hayek was right. Kling is right. But they answer to WHY they are right has not yet been articulated. And the truth is, that since freedom is a minority sentiment, it is very difficult for such changes to be implemented in a polity. Even if it would satisfy the opposing side’s materialist desires. Because it would not satisfy their desires for status parity. Collectivism is largely an effort to attain status parity.

    • Secret Wars? Sure. They’re Cheaper. (And more effective.)

      Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/15shadowwar.html

      In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists. The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. The administration has worked with European allies to dismantle terrorist groups in North Africa, efforts that include a recent French strike in Algeria. And the Pentagon tapped a network of private contractors to gather intelligence about things like militant hide-outs in Pakistan and the location of an American soldier currently in Taliban hands. While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged.

      …

      Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

      Why don’t we just exit these ridiculous occupations, invest heavily in these kinds of activities, and close as many bases as possible? We don’t need to hold LAND. Just air and sea – land is useless transport for tade. We need to spy and kill people. Not wage war. War is a western technology as it is practiced today. The “raider cultures’ will never surrender to western war. They have no civilization or leadership who can surrender. Oh, that’s right. Spec ops teams have been saying this since Vietnam. Martin Van Creveld has been saying this for decades. But the military bureaucracy reigns.

    • The Properties Of Political Argument

      [table id=2 /]

      NOTES

      Forms Of Argumenta) Our Republican political system is a trade of violence for argument. Argument, consent, and majority-voting are proxies for violence. These proxies for violence were the result of the need for expensively equipped warriors to resolve disputes among a military class of necessarily meritocratic warriors, and to enfranchise additional soldiers into western battle tactics, which required individual imitative and consent. But regardless of the reason of it’s origin, we have traded violence for argument. b) The unspoken purpose of our political structure is the management of the market. A society cannot have a division of labor without a market. Nor can it decrease prices, nor generate wealth — and particular, the relative wealth needed to defend the market as it becomes more attractive and prosperous. The purpose of government in the west, since it’s inception, is to create a market, and to control the quality of goods in the market, to convert barbarians into observing market behavior in exchange for participation in the market, and frankly, for the shareholders to extract profits from the market, while providing sufficient benefit and incentives to the consumers and traders that the cost of policing property was widely distributed to all ‘enfranchised men’. In effect, soldiers were shareholders in the market and were expected to police that market. The joint stock company was not a modern innovation. It was the very structure of western civilization from it’s inception. Cities were formed as markets under the Germanic manor system, and under the Roman and Greek systems, by fraternal soldiers who defended and regulated them.The origin of this market is the egalitarian joint-stock company of fraternal soldiers who created, defended, and managed it. A ‘barbarian’ then, is a person who does not pay the fee for participating in the market: respect for the rules and regulations of that market, the first being, non-violence, the second, maintaining the quality of the market’s ability to attract and serve consumers, so that the joint shareholders could profit from the market.b) Our political system has transitioned such that it is founded upon economic arguments. It is no longer founded on moral or religious arguments. Moral and religious arguments are, in the large part, poorly articulated economic strategies. While some are better and some are worse than others, religious arguments and moral arguments are almost entirely economic in nature. Religious arguments in particular are Since IQ and Religiosity decrease together and IQ and Morality increase together, we assume incorrectly that the behavior is not the same despite the different narrative methods held by people at different positions on the scale. Reason and science can be taught but not utilized by a child who must rely instead upon simple narratives and repetition of good behavior, and an elder wise man has no need of fairy tales, and finds his juniors often tedious. c) Where our political system does not consider economic arguments it considers equality. Our politics is no longer founded upon roles and responsibilities that are necessary for the maintenance of social cooperation. Cooperation is assumed as a legal, moral, political mandate, as part of the capitalist process, and redistribution now forms the moral component of political argument, rather than role and responsibility. This structure is a result of the increase in the division of knowledge and labor in industrial, post-agrarian, society. Our political discourse emphasizes the post-productive object Money, but ignores the pre-productive object opportunity. In particular we do not include the opportunity economy as the only means of prospering now that prices are so low. We do not articulate that the barbarians ‘are paying a tax in opportunity cost’ for their citizenship simply by avoiding violence and fraud, and we rarely discuss opportunity costs, since they were a minor import to agrarians, but are the primary source of wealth in advanced societies. This error is a product of temporary irrational wealth in the west gained by the acquisition of a new continent. Government is obsessed with redistribution and insufficiently obsessed with innovation, competition, and accumulating human, intellectual, and built capital for the purpose of maintaining our quality of life.d) A political argument must contain at least one of these forms of argument. (Most political argument consists of sentiments supported by selectively applied biases that confirm the sentiments. Very few arguments are sufficiently articulated such that the underlying sentiments are expressly stated. In many cases this is because these sentiments are not understood by the person making the argument. Because of this tendency, )e) All sentiments are preferential biases, not absolute truths. Biases are not truths because humans are unequal in their abilities and wants. These different biases are expressions of preferences for uses of capital. Capital is scarce and the uses of it infinite. Therefore uses of capital are in conflict and are irreconcilable. Since they are irreconcilable, parties use a variety of techniques from overstatement, to distortion, to taking advantage of mutual ignorance, to deception, to outright fraud, to corruption, to threats, to violence in order to appropriate capital for their preferential purposes.f) Democratic Groups must rely upon sentiments in order to achieve goals and form leaders.Sentiments are goals. Goals can be agreed upon, and means cannot be agreed upon. The democratic process forces aggregation and compromise of means in order to achieve goals. Leadership must form or seize power in order to resolve conflicts over means. g) All arguments rely upon sentiments, because all arguments MUST advocate a sentiment. Since people are of different in ages, possessed of different knowledge, preferences, biases, classes, resources, and abilities, rational debate among individuals over means, is of necessity difficult, and solutions that employ complex means, and imply complex causes, are OPAQUE to the majority of participants. Only sentiments, or goals, that express common aggregate desires, are possible across a broad enough polity to enact a policy by the process of democratic violence: majority voting. h) A scientific argument contains data, assumptions categorized as proposed facts, and a theory of causality without which facts have no meaningFurthermore it must state how it can be proved false, and in the social sciences no one test is sufficient for proof of an argument – an argument in the social sciences is only possible if considering all similar studies from all similar circumstances from all similar cultures, including the opposing positions. This is the Aristotelian argument. Citation of a study is a guarantee of falsehood. Citation of the full body of studies is the only material reason for judgment. i) An economic argument should contain ALL of these forms of argument. (The primary component of an economic argument is a theory of incentives. An economic argument is supported by exhaustive application of correlative mathematics to indirectly accumulated data (economic activity that was naturally recorded, not intentionally constructed.)j) Economic arguments are the only possible arguments.They are not a preference. They are a necessity. Only an economic argument is sufficiently useful for a polity that must make capital decisions in a division of knowledge and labor whose scope both in people and time is sufficiently complex that no human can perceive that answer by other means. Conversely, the population may not consist of a sufficient number of people literate enough to communicate rational choices to each class, race, culture, and generation. This problem can be solved by fairly simple education. But such education would disadvantage numerous political groups with selfish motivations.k) All politicians represent a bias. They are not corrupt. They are not ill intentioned. They have no choice. The human mind is incapable of synthesizing the universe of outcomes. As such they will advocate any set of preferences to the maximum of their abilities. They cannot do otherwise. they are not hired by their constituents for any other reason, even if they were able to expand the scope of their understanding. However, we can hold them accountable for deceptions. And they are anthropomorphic symbols of opposing arguments for and against the use of capital. And we should see them as such. the fact that we allow the ignorant and foolish into office is a problem with our system of election.The Limits Of Social and Economic Science Unlike the physical sciences, all human economic activity is, cumulative, and correlative, not absolutely causal. Certainly, human interpersonal activity is causal, because it is observable. However, systemic data, and all non-contradictory causal derivations and deductions from narrative or factual history are correlative in the sense that they are necessarily insufficient, and open to external causality. We have markets because of our lack of perceptive ability. We have numbers, math, accounting, narrative, and reason to assist in compensating for a lack of perception. But history is constantly open to interpretation due to additional data, or because of an increase or decrease in the scope of the context of the causes and incentives we are applying in our analysis. This difference in scope of context, is the reason that scientific argument is often difficult to use in resolving political differences; due to the fact that most scopes of context are related to class, knowledge and intelligence, and are generally expressed as ‘time preferences’ – longer and shorter time horizons, as well as expressed as ‘population preferences’, – the scope of people to be affected by the outcome. That is because, while events are the same, the level of ‘noise’ in economic activity varies considerably, Pseudo-Science Survey data is a formal argument of sentiments – it is not scientifically causal. It is only scientifically descriptive. And it is open to distortion and deception to the degree that it is universally suspect.

    • “What do you think about China?” I Think You Are Confused About The Virtues Of Political Systems

      Kenneth V. asks:

      I’m curious about your opinion on China’s future. As the democratic empire collapses in the west and power shifts its balance, do you think that the Chinese people will demand more political freedom, especially since libertarian books are bestsellers? Or do you think the oligarchy will be successful in suppressing dissent? What do you think of the demographic trends there? Chinese couples do a trial-and-error with childbirth where babies who are less than perfect are killed. The massive gender imbalance of 40 million more males than females. What do you think of this kind of extreme eugenics? I personally find it abhorrent, but I’d like to ask your opinion.

      Ken, The Chinese are driven by the conflict between northern government, southern trading prosperity, interior poverty, and hostile borders. The cultural tradition is ancient and it’s purpose is to avoid civil wars at all costs, simply because civil wars were so common for them, because they are exposed to what they see as threats (their country needs the china seas open in order not to be starved into submission), and because of natural conflicts between the regions. This history is as important to china as the sense of freedom is to the west. (a sentiment which is in no small part a reaction to the middle eastern model – which westerners considered horrid.)

      [callout]I suspect that they will never achieve the middle-class society as we understand it. They will bypass that phase of development. They will go from totalitarian rural poverty to totalitarian urban poverty, and maintain their corrupt bureaucracy. The reasons for retaining that bureaucracy will simply evolve to support a different set of objectives.[/callout]

      Now, to avoid drinking our own Kool Aid, we probably should understand that the west has always had an advantage of being a society filled with craftsmen rather than laborers, not the least of which was the result of widespread metal smithing, easy river trade, and the western agrarian cycle which was very seasonal. The importance of that sentence may not be obvious to you unless you think of the 360 day a year job of a rice farmer. So Romans conquered northern europe because the ‘barbarians’ were fairly wealthy by contrast, and presided over resources. While they exploited the warmer climes for food. But western wealth over the past 500 years, has largely to do with selling off the american continent to immigrants. Not to any particular western genius. IN fact, the continental view of exploiting the continent as they had the islands, by bringing resources back home paled by comparison to the money that could be made by settling, populating, and selling consumer goods to immigrants to the north american continent. In this broader context, our political order is more dynamic, and by that I mean, flexible, and the republican model with capitalistic institutions (for cooperation) is the only one that is effective for mobilizing enough people to accomplish such a task. China by contrast is simply doing the same thing without inventing it: they are selling off apartments, electricity, water, and food to immigrants to the coastal cities. Their model is better for doing their migration under their circumstances. Our model was better for doing our migration under our circumstances. The question is, for them, for us, what will happen when that’s done. Because we are going to have very densely populated cities, and in that model FARMER ETHICS AND MORALS EVAPORATE. Traditional religious principles, ethical constructs, and the ability to manage class differences become very difficult in those environments. The difference is that the chinese have the benefits of monarchy (long term thinking), the capital concentration of totalitarianism (which is very useful) and the institutions of capitalism (banking, finance, accounting, interest and credit, western laws), and they get to profit on the implementation of western technology – without having to have had to discover it. This is a very good model for competing externally. it is not a good model when you’re the ‘winner’. It’s a very good model for when you’re a century and a half behind the rest of the world. I suspect that they will never achieve the middle-class society as we understand it. They will bypass that phase of development. They will go from totalitarian rural poverty to totalitarian urban poverty, and maintain their corrupt bureaucracy. The reasons for retaining that bureaucracy will simply evolve to support a different set of objectives. But the damage that they will cause in that transition, to the world in general, if they are faced with uprisings, is substantial. I think your question begs the wrong assumptions: political models are utilitarian goods, not absolute goods. Societies need to concentrate capital in order to compete and cooperate with other societies. Then they need internal institutions for everything else. Complex market capitalism when combined with totalitarian command of large investments, with the least corruption possible is probably the most competitive form of political order. As long as investments are competitive rather than redistributive. Redistribution is the result of competition. Not a replacement for it. There is no inherent value in political freedom on its own. It’s not a virtue. It is an acceptable risk in a homogenous society. But it is a net danger in a pluralistic society. The struggle for power must never be available to factions or minorities. Only the struggle to compete in the market. Political freedom is the freedom to usurp the market. THere is no other reason for it. The only value of political freedom is in reducing corruption, which is an impediment to trade, exchange and capital formation. The problem for a people is suppressing corruption, not obtaining political freedom. People don’t really choose their political system. It’s determined by their circumstances and they are pragmatic in adopting it. They don’t pick idealistic things, and if they do, they fail (Iran). Democracy is just slow moving communism. As Schumpeter said, Democracy will just lead to socialism. Republicanism and oligarchy are rule by the middle classes (trade). Totalitarianism is rule by the upper classes (force). Theocracy by definition, rule by the lower classes (fraud). (IQ and Atheism increase with class structure, although under capitalism moral behaviors tend to emerge with the decline in religiosity.)