Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • You know I couldn’t care less about social justice and equality. I despise the t

    You know I couldn’t care less about social justice and equality. I despise the terms and the feelings that inspire them. But when a young man who is willing and able to work, and work hard, to feed his family cannot find work, and the only reason that he cannot is low trust, no credit, and low economic velocity – that makes me angry.

    I know too many men here who want to work, are willing to work, at ANY work, to feed and house their families, that cannot find it. And they cannot find it while government bureaucrats seek pervasive rents and participate in pervasive corruption.

    And it makes me want to kill every living soul in that government that I can get my hands on.

    We need to bring back the guillotine.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-12 04:49:00 UTC

  • ECONOMY, BUSINESS AND STATE (h/t Andy Curzon )(edited and revised) If we look at

    ECONOMY, BUSINESS AND STATE

    (h/t Andy Curzon )(edited and revised)

    If we look at Austrian business cycle theory as merely an instance of the cycle of ‘flocking and schooling’ that follows any kind of change in knowledge that as a consequence produces an opportunity, then the century of pseudoscience was just another business process by which to exploit a market opportunity, and it played out as a series of eddies and pools, which are currently in the process of maximum exploitation and collapse.

    And so governments are just temporary corporations exploiting business opportunities. And management(government), employees(bureaucracy), customers(consumers), and investors(citizens) all compete for the maximum returns.

    This matches all political theory throughout history that suggests that people seek opportunities until it is possible to seek rents, and rents expand until the civilization collapses. It also matches the data that without private(shareholder) public(corporation) alliance no city state became economically competitive.

    I disagree with Diamond for example, since I am pretty sure the reason for these collapses is a breakdown of incentives : the information system that allows for the organization of production. I would say that civilizations collapse either due to extreme efficiency followed by shocks (1200 BC), or the equivalent of cancer: damage to the information system that eliminates the relationship between production and consumption.

    But since humans flock and school, then break off in smaller schools, to exploit opportunities, we are pretty good at a sort of fractal exploitation of every possible opportunity until it’s been exhausted.

    I suspect either an expansion of statism in order to extend the status quo, or an upcoming era of increased statist tyranny in the name of order. If not I suspect collapse of the western control of commerce and trade, and an expansive war or system of wars, to fill the vacuum; and an acceleration of civil wars to take advantage of change at home.

    It is better to study businesses than states, because the model is sufficient and the data is better.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-12 04:20:00 UTC

  • The rate at which free riding accumulates, and therefore the rate at which trust

    The rate at which free riding accumulates, and therefore the rate at which trust erodes, and economic velocity declines, is determined by the time between an innovation in free riding, and its suppression by law.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-11 10:55:00 UTC

  • Entrepreneurs innovate. Property is necessary for calculation and incentives. Tr

    Entrepreneurs innovate. Property is necessary for calculation and incentives. Trust is necessary for economic velocity (rates). As complexity expands so does the means of free riding and theft, so legal prohibitions must expand in criminal, ethical, moral, conspiratorial coverage at a marginally indifferent rate from the complexity of associations in order to maintain trust and economic velocity.

    This state of affairs is only possible in homogenous polities.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-10 08:27:00 UTC

  • THE WESTERN MISALLOCATION OF INVESTMENT IN THE WESTERN PORTFOLIO (another way of

    THE WESTERN MISALLOCATION OF INVESTMENT IN THE WESTERN PORTFOLIO

    (another way of putting it)(becoming levantines)

    We have over invested in improving the structure of production to the point at which we are causing catastrophic harm.

    We have over invested in government to the point at which we are causing catastrophic harm to the family and civilization.

    We have over-invested in the export of rule of law and democracy to the point at which we have caused harm.

    We have over-invested in the academy to the point at which it causes systemic harm on a daily basis.

    We have UNDER invested in the family, in discipline, in training, and in education.

    This over-investment is the result of fiat credit – and it is not investment at this point -it is merely burning down four thousand years of the west’s accumulated cultural capital. We are becoming Levantines.

    **Do less interference. Consume less. Spend more time on your children.**

    Cultures save because they can. Other cultures don’t save and invest, because they can’t. We created commons because we could. They didn’t because they can’t.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-09 03:59:00 UTC

  • to Austrians: recent minimum wage increases are harmful

    http://www.aei.org/publication/study-minimum-wage-hikes-made-great-recession-worse-low-skill-workers/Obvious to Austrians: recent minimum wage increases are harmful

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-08 13:04:00 UTC

  • Hugh smith on the institutionalizations of risk. Now to some degree the primary

    http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2014/11/nothing-has-changed-and-thats-problem.htmlCharles Hugh smith on the institutionalizations of risk.

    Now to some degree the primary purpose of a government is now insurer of last resort.

    But since this insurance is incalculable it is merely a vehicle for transfers.

    The privatization of commons and the socialization of losses.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-06 10:41:00 UTC

  • AMAZING WOMEN IN BUSINESS In business, in negotiations, V would eat most women t

    AMAZING WOMEN IN BUSINESS

    In business, in negotiations, V would eat most women twice her age like Pringles in a man cave on new year’s day. Not because she’s competitive. Not because she’s flirtatious or feminine. Not because of any ego. But, just because she’d just work harder, longer, and smarter.

    Women have a particular advantage at certain layers of business: they obtain their status elsewhere and so can compete for results at a discount. The women at the top tend to be outliers and other than as outliers, not terribly impressive. But I still contend that women, in the main, hold the center better than men do.

    Women seem to need a protector – perhaps men do too, but I don’t see it. And if protected they can do amazing things. Men do not need to feel safe to act. Make women feel safe. (And they will start to adopt your framing unconsciously.

    It’s weird. Women can rationalize their mate’s biases, find the best in them even if it’s not there, and find ugly, stupid, annoying, children beautiful and charming. Good thing. Someone has to. They can rationalize anything if it makes ‘peace’.

    They can gather and allocate many micro tasks at once that men cannot even imagine a mind can do.

    Politics and theory are, however, masculine talents. And while female outliers exist they are only outliers, not general rules.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-04 09:44:00 UTC

  • The Transaction Cost Theory of Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev, Ukraine.

  • The Transaction Cost Theory of Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev, Ukraine.