Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • DENIALISM HAS NO FUTURE IN ECONOMICS (useful arguments)(libertarians should read

    http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/04/u-s-taxes-low-compared-with-other-developed-economiesMORAL DENIALISM HAS NO FUTURE IN ECONOMICS

    (useful arguments)(libertarians should read) (conservatives should read)(reactionaries should read)

    BARRY:

    We have high tax efficiency (people pay), high productivity (we work more), higher employment (more of us work, and work longer), vastly more entrepreneurship, risk taking, and innovation, and much, much higher consumption. (We also have counter-productive higher corporate taxation.)

    The left’s argument is that under a democratic government, we can tax – without equilibrating effect – a divided, heterogeneous American domestic empire, via the same means as we do small, homogenous European extended-tribal nation-states that are not responsible for policing the world system of finance and trade, nor of their seas, borders, or neighbors. It is one thing to redistribute to kin, another to redistribute to free riders, and another to redistribute to one’s kin’s competitors

    So what you mean, if stated truthfully (meaning: fully informed), is that we should exchange efficiency, productivity, employment and consumption for the production of additional redistributive commons of unequal desirability, against the wishes of the producers. Yet this would only increase the divisiveness of the heterogeneous population.

    It is true that through immigration, the left, with the support of the academy, has perpetuated a conquest of the European people’s in exchange for income and status signals. And that via this conquest, that it will shortly be possible to engage in further appropriation, and greater dependence upon redistribution, providing fewer incentives to pay, to produce, to employ and to consume.

    But it is not yet certain whether the heterogeneous polity will come to dissolution over it or not. And as we have seen from the success of the austerity movement, people will pay high personal costs to punish free riders. Yet, ignoring human instinctual morality that is necessary for the evolution of cooperation, mainstream economists – and particularly left-leaning mainstream economists – assume that democratic electorates will tolerate inter-cultural redistribution from high productivity to low productivity peoples without invoking moral demand for altruistic punishment.

    Austerity is a normal, irrepressible result of the instinctual and evolutionarily necessary requirement to suppress free-riding.

    It is anti-empirical (unscientific) to suggest (and possibly genocidal to suggest) that we should not, or under democracy that man will not, engage in the punishment of free riders.

    Just how it is. That’s the science. Or has economics evolved from anti-operational, into a full-fledged anti-empirical, anti-rational religion?

    Your opponents succeed politically because of moral intuition, even if they lack a rhetorical language to articulate those intuitions. Some of us are working on giving them that language. We just hope it is not too late to end yet another pseudoscience as we are systematically ending the rest of the progressives pseudosciences.

    Moral denialism has no future.

    Cheers 🙂

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-16 04:15:00 UTC

  • COLLEGE CERTIFIED, THEN FILTERED, NOW IT DOESN’T EVEN DO THAT And you want to te

    COLLEGE CERTIFIED, THEN FILTERED, NOW IT DOESN’T EVEN DO THAT

    And you want to tell me that every individual in the academy isn’t influenced by (top academics) or driven by (the remaining academics and the bureaucracy) malincenitves?

    As far as I can tell, a middle class (moral) upbringing, and your work ethic, determine your productivity in the workplace.

    The best universities largely just filter. The remainder are largely diploma mills. And we have now lost the generations that sought to convey 5000 years of western intellectual and cultural development in truth-telling.

    GOOGLE DATA

    –“Google is widely viewed as a bellwether of the new economy. It is noteworthy, then, that Google has found that academic success has little correlation with being productive in the workplace. Lazlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, made the following comments in an interview published by the New York Times in June 2013:

    -One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.s (grade point averages) are worthless as criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.s and test scores, but we don’t anymore. We found that they don’t predict anything. What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.-

    Signaling an ability to grind through four or five years of institutional coursework is no longer enough; the signaling needed to indicate an ability to create value must be much richer in information density and more persuasive than a factory model diploma.”–

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-16 03:03:00 UTC

  • make you a deal. Eliminate collective bargaining laws and I am in

    http://www.shakesville.com/2015/04/we-need-jobs-to-support-people-not.htmlI’ll make you a deal. Eliminate collective bargaining laws and I am in.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-14 15:25:00 UTC

  • THE NECESSITY OF PRIVILEGE (DISCOUNTS ON OPPORTUNITY COSTS) AS INFORMATION (wort

    THE NECESSITY OF PRIVILEGE (DISCOUNTS ON OPPORTUNITY COSTS) AS INFORMATION

    (worth repeating) (from elsewhere) (hayek)

    While, as I’ve written before, I agree with the general argument that women sense some things and men others (and progressives, libertarians and conservatives different things as well) I have a more complete theory of the inter-temporal division of perception, cognition, knowledge and labor than Hayek (and one that eliminates equality, and monopoly decision making). And so there is a minor error in the logic of the first paragraph, and that is that it is irrelevant that we understand others – it is only relevant that we conduct exchanges with them.

    Because their reaction to their senses are not accurate or ‘true’ in any meaningful sense other than as a reflection of the individual’s reproductive strategy – any more than any of the rest of our senses are all that accurate – they themselves are fragments.

    This single insight is the principle cause of why democracy does not work, and the market does. The market allows us to cooperate on multitudinous means even if on disparate ends, with our successes and failures informing both us and others.

    Whereas a monopoly government prevents us from learning anything of value, and the institutionalization of foolish policy by unexpriable law, and the accretion of bureaucratic self interests, prevents adaptation outside of catastrophic chains of failure.

    In fact, monopoly government (monopoly production of commons by majority rule) promotes failure because it is precisely failed policy that permits the greatest rent seeking for all involved.

    It is not that we should prohibit government (as Hayek warns) but that we should prohibit monopoly government. It is not that we should prevent taxation, it is that we should allocate our dividends from the commons we live in to the production of commons we prefer, and not to commons we do not.

    As, furthermore, so called ‘privilege’ is precious information. It is information that informs you whose behavior you should imitate in order to gain discounts on opportunity costs. Privilege is as necessary to the human information system as is status, property rights, rule of law, money and interest.

    Privilege, if it exists, is an inter-temporal store of value that informs others as to the behaviors that they should imitate in order to obtain a discount on opportunities. Likewise, hygiene, dress, manners and language are advertisements for one’s worthiness to engage in increasingly complex inter-temporal risks and returns.

    Those who accumulate such behaviors obtain opportunity at the lowest discounts. Those that fail to adapt, and ask others to ’empathize’ with them, are seeking discounts without bearing the cost of adaptation.

    In other words, they’re free riders participating in an act of fraud.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-10 16:10:00 UTC

  • IMMORAL DECEITS MUST BE CAST ASIDE. WE MUST PROVIDE PEOPLE WITH INCENTIVES TO CO

    IMMORAL DECEITS MUST BE CAST ASIDE. WE MUST PROVIDE PEOPLE WITH INCENTIVES TO CONSTRUCT THE VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION OF PRODUCTION

    (important sketch)(capitalism)(efficient uses of capital)

    There are many more empirically efficient allocations of capital at any given moment. But there are not necessarily more efficient allocations of incentives. Since the voluntary organization of production requires an efficient allocation of incentives, then the maximum efficiency of any allocation of capital, is one in which we produce the widest distribution of incentives. The reason being that the construction of the voluntary organization of production that we call capitalism is not (as libertarians fantasize) natural behavior or rational choice, whatsoever. People must be provided with incentives to voluntarily organize production.

    This means that the entire cosmopolitan fantasy promoted by Rothbard on one side, and Soros on the other, and other advocates of immorality like Walter Block, is a justification. The most efficient use of capital is that in which the population is incentivized to construct and preserve the foundation of the economy: the voluntary organization of production.

    And so we seek a Pareto optimum between incentives to produce the voluntary order, and the efficiency of capital allocation in production within that voluntary order. And any increase in capital efficiency that produces a decrease in incentives is actually destructive.

    In Propertarianism I have tried to demonstrate that if people cannot join the market for production, that we must compensate them for the work of constructing the voluntary organization of production that makes the high productivity, high trust, high velocity and low friction under the voluntary organization of production possible.

    From this perspective, most rothbardian thought, like most cosmopolitan thought, is merely an elaborate obscurant art of fraud for the purpose of declaring without cost, that which is hugely expensive: high trust, high velocity, and the voluntary organization of production.

    If you understand this you will abandon libertinism (cosmopolitan libertarianism) and revert to aristocratic libertarianism (classical liberalism). Because we had it right. We did. But the American Neo-Puritans put a dent in it, women put a hole in it, and Jews and Catholics made a fissure out of it.

    Thankfully it isn’t impossible to fix: truth telling is enough.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-08 02:38:00 UTC

  • Sophisticated People In The World Are Not Necessarily Stupid or Selfish

    [T]he USA’s budget consists roughly of 1/3 defense, 1/3 mandatory payments (Social Security and Medicaid) and 1/3 discretionary payments (everything else).

    We finance 1/3 (the military), and inflate it away. The world pays for our military through indirect taxation on the price of oil bought in dollars. This was the invention that the Nixon administration achieved with the Petro-Dollar and it was how we were able to run up the credit to defeat world communism under Reagan.

    So technically speaking, 1/2 is discretionary, 1/2 is for redistribution, and the remainder – the military – is effectively free.
    Possessing this knowledge radically alters your perception of the world.

    It is why Iran wants nuclear weapons – to control oil, and to create a bourse, and to capture that ability to tax currency for itself.

    Sophisticated people in the world are not stupid, nor necessarily selfish. They merely take advantage of stupid people.

  • Sophisticated People In The World Are Not Necessarily Stupid or Selfish

    [T]he USA’s budget consists roughly of 1/3 defense, 1/3 mandatory payments (Social Security and Medicaid) and 1/3 discretionary payments (everything else).

    We finance 1/3 (the military), and inflate it away. The world pays for our military through indirect taxation on the price of oil bought in dollars. This was the invention that the Nixon administration achieved with the Petro-Dollar and it was how we were able to run up the credit to defeat world communism under Reagan.

    So technically speaking, 1/2 is discretionary, 1/2 is for redistribution, and the remainder – the military – is effectively free.
    Possessing this knowledge radically alters your perception of the world.

    It is why Iran wants nuclear weapons – to control oil, and to create a bourse, and to capture that ability to tax currency for itself.

    Sophisticated people in the world are not stupid, nor necessarily selfish. They merely take advantage of stupid people.

  • true

    http://www.aei.org/publication/the-public-thinks-the-average-company-makes-a-36-profit-margin-which-is-about-5x-too-high/Painfully true.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-03 16:33:00 UTC

  • was right. Incentives. Hereditary monarchy is the best form of government. It’s

    http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/politics-government/erm-this-one-is-interesting/Hoppe was right.

    Incentives.

    Hereditary monarchy is the best form of government.

    It’s not rocket science.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-03-31 03:42:00 UTC

  • A SYSTEM FOR THE LOWER CLASSES? Pay them to maintain the normative and physical

    A SYSTEM FOR THE LOWER CLASSES?

    Pay them to maintain the normative and physical commons and have only one child. Stop paying them if they don’t behave well, and sterilize them if they have an additional child. Imprison them in the desert at hard labor if they commit three strikes. I am against redistribution. But I am in favor of paying people to construct the voluntary organization of production we call property rights and the commons. And people who DON”T want to pay those classes are simply trying to make those classes pay the high price of constructing the voluntary organization of production – against their own interests. Paying people isn’t redistribution. It’s compensation. And you can be fired from the job.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-03-26 07:51:00 UTC