Curt Doolittle

Theme: Institution

  • Economy: Family Business and State Are Just Matters of Scale

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

    [I]f 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.

  • 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

  • TRADING THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX FOR THE CATHEDRAL COMPLEX Great. We trad

    TRADING THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX FOR THE CATHEDRAL COMPLEX

    Great. We traded the paranoid military industrial complex, for the faith based evangelical cathedral complex and its equivalent of acolytes in the state department.

    Military epistemology is at least factual, even if military psychology is necessarily paranoid.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-12 03:30:00 UTC

  • Only Landed People Create Monuments and Art

    UNDERSTANDING CALIFORNIAN STATISM


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


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

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

  • Adults and Institutions, Children and Beliefs

    [C]hildren talk of beliefs.  Adults talk of institutions.

    Children talk of “Want and Belief”  Adults of “Expectations and Habits”.

    The mind plans with what it has available.  We need develop means of creating habits that produce expectations.

    People then plan with those expectations – because that is what is available to them.
    As far as I know only property, homesteaded and voluntarily exchanged, allows such planning by the individual, and decidability by third parties in the case of conflict.

    And far as I know the only means of creating ‘scientific’ rules of human cooperation is the organically evolved common law, constructed upon the one rule of property and the one operation of voluntary exchange.

    Just as with mathematics we can take the concept of a single unit and simple operations we create all of mathematics, with the concept of property and the simple operation of voluntary exchange, we can create all of human cooperation in equally rich variety.

    In the logic of human cooperation that we inarticulately call moral prohibitions and ethical rules, and which we can easily embody in law, we need only one unit “property” and one operation “exchange”.

    All commons can be constructed as long as the principles of existence, calculability, and operation-ability are maintained, such that all propositions are decidable without dependence upon information external to the operation.

    The only moral society is one in which property, morality and law are synonyms.

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev Ukraine.

  • Adults and Institutions, Children and Beliefs

    [C]hildren talk of beliefs.  Adults talk of institutions.

    Children talk of “Want and Belief”  Adults of “Expectations and Habits”.

    The mind plans with what it has available.  We need develop means of creating habits that produce expectations.

    People then plan with those expectations – because that is what is available to them.
    As far as I know only property, homesteaded and voluntarily exchanged, allows such planning by the individual, and decidability by third parties in the case of conflict.

    And far as I know the only means of creating ‘scientific’ rules of human cooperation is the organically evolved common law, constructed upon the one rule of property and the one operation of voluntary exchange.

    Just as with mathematics we can take the concept of a single unit and simple operations we create all of mathematics, with the concept of property and the simple operation of voluntary exchange, we can create all of human cooperation in equally rich variety.

    In the logic of human cooperation that we inarticulately call moral prohibitions and ethical rules, and which we can easily embody in law, we need only one unit “property” and one operation “exchange”.

    All commons can be constructed as long as the principles of existence, calculability, and operation-ability are maintained, such that all propositions are decidable without dependence upon information external to the operation.

    The only moral society is one in which property, morality and law are synonyms.

    Curt Doolittle 
    The Propertarian Institute 
    Kiev Ukraine.

  • Property Rights Are Cheaper Than Slavery Or Serfdom

    CHEAPER FOR THE STRONG TO GIVE PEOPLE PROPERTY RIGHTS

    [P]roperty exists prior to codification in a constitution. So does promise, prior to the institution of contract. A constitution is merely an agreement for reciprocal insurance of the terms of property and contract.

    It so happens that allocation of property rights determines the incentives possible, and the incentives determine the degree of market participation – how many hands make the work light – and therefore the cost of providing individuals with incentives.

    It’s just cheaper for the strong to give everyone property rights – so long as none of the weak band together to extract from the strong under platonic justification via those self-same rules.

    This is the same reason that Slavery is illogical as well as immoral: assuming the prior slaves respect property rights and do not form a government of extraction, then it is merely cheaper and easier to have one’s slaves as vendors and customers.

  • Property Rights Are Cheaper Than Slavery Or Serfdom

    CHEAPER FOR THE STRONG TO GIVE PEOPLE PROPERTY RIGHTS

    [P]roperty exists prior to codification in a constitution. So does promise, prior to the institution of contract. A constitution is merely an agreement for reciprocal insurance of the terms of property and contract.

    It so happens that allocation of property rights determines the incentives possible, and the incentives determine the degree of market participation – how many hands make the work light – and therefore the cost of providing individuals with incentives.

    It’s just cheaper for the strong to give everyone property rights – so long as none of the weak band together to extract from the strong under platonic justification via those self-same rules.

    This is the same reason that Slavery is illogical as well as immoral: assuming the prior slaves respect property rights and do not form a government of extraction, then it is merely cheaper and easier to have one’s slaves as vendors and customers.

  • 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.