Curt Doolittle

Theme: Institution

  • Citizens vs Shareholders

    —“Service guarantees citizenship. – This is why I served in the US military even though I wasn’t compelled to.”—David M.

    [S]o, for use by our Corporations we have created various forms of stock: including Controlling, Various Preferred, Common, Non-Voting, and Options. These different shares roughly reflect the different value that we bring to companies. Controlling is for management and founders, preferred for professional investors (board members), common for uninformed lenders (‘pseudo-investors’ via the stock market), and non-voting (options in the event of a sale) and options (bonuses) for employees.

    When we use the term ‘citizenship’ today it carries with it the current assumption that citizenship is at best equal to a common, non-voting, or option form of stock. When democratic indo europeans use that term, they mean it as a member that the corporation of the aristocracy or church has agreed to insure. In the pre-democratic era, Citizen refers to the heads of households, families or businesses, that have demonstrated investment in the corporation. In the greek era, that was less than 10% of the population (what we would consider the oligarchy (<1%) the nobility (1%), and the upper middle class (<10%)

    I don’t really agree with Mencius’ approach, but if you told me instead, that we voted for ‘motions’, (internal contracts between shareholders), that any voting shareholder could put forward a motion, that such motions were perishable (had to collect votes in a specific period of time), that all voting was conducted publicly, entirely transparently, and recorded in the public block chain; that each share granted an individual one vote, and that all individuals were prohibited from possession of more than one share, and that a majority or supermajority of **each** class of shares had approve any vote, then I think that is a successful means of running some sort of juridical democracy under nomocratic rule (rule of law).

    This approach, direct voting. does not eliminate public intellectuals, and their propensity to overload, lie, obscure, frame and load,  but it does eliminate politicians (agents) who are subject to opaque influences. If the normative and intellectual commons is as I have stated, property that the corporation agrees to defend, and all shareholders possess standing in court in suits concerning the commons, and that we require truthful speech in all matters of the commons, because we require warranty of products, services, and public speech, then public intellectuals can be independently regulated.

    Rather than classify individuals ‘as’ something or other, we can issue (and possibly limit) shares (block chain / public-ledger accounts). Shares can be earned (purchased) through demonstrated actions, but not purchased by any material exchange, not transferred, and not awarded, granted, given, for any other reason). If one has earned a higher status share, he must trade in any existing share to redeem the new one.

    Repeat felons for example, are effectively wards of the corporation, as are children, not shareholders. I suspect that the class of wards would be fairly large, the class of non voting shares – non-contributing people – fairly large, voting -contributing- fairly large, preferred services shares (care-taking), preferred production(professional, business, and industry), and preferred aristocracy (military, militia, law) fairly large. The most interesting problem is the judiciary, because the law has managed to create a secular ‘priesthood’ (cult) over time due to the very high investment costs in rituals, and to self- manage that cult. Which I find fascinating. And as long as one can preserve that cult via military service, indoctrination, truth-telling, and propertarian calculation, then I think it only requires a small number of people, all of whom have extraordinary interests in it, to preserve liberty.

    I will cover this idea in greater depth as we go along.

  • CITIZEN SHAREHOLDERS —“Service guarantees citizenship. – This is why I served

    CITIZEN SHAREHOLDERS

    —“Service guarantees citizenship. – This is why I served in the US military even though I wasn’t compelled to.”—David M.

    Thoughts:

    So, in our Corporations we have created forms of stock: including Controlling, Various Preferred, Common, Non-Voting, and Options. These different shares roughly reflect the different value that we bring to companies. Controlling is for management and founders, preferred for professional investors (board members), common for uninformed lenders (‘pseudo-investors’ via the stock market), and non-voting (options in the event of a sale) and options (bonuses) for employees.

    When we use the term ‘citizenship’ today it carries with it the current assumption that citizenship is at best equal to a common, non-voting, or option form of stock. When democratic indo europeans use that term, they mean it as a member that the corporation of the aristocracy or church has agreed to insure. In the pre-democratic era, Citizen refers to the heads of households, families or businesses, that have demonstrated investment in the corporation. In the greek era, that was less than 10% of the population (what we would consider the oligarchy (<1%) the nobility (1%), and the upper middle class (<10%)

    I don’t really agree with Mencius’ approach, but if you told me instead, that we voted for ‘motions’, (internal contracts between shareholders), that any voting shareholder could put forward a motion, that such motions were perishable (had to collect votes in a specific period of time), that all voting was conducted publicly, entirely transparently, and recorded in the public block chain; that each share granted an individual one vote, and that all individuals were prohibited from possession of more than one share, and that a majority or supermajority of **each** class of shares had approve any vote, then I think that is a successful means of running some sort of juridical democracy under nomocratic rule (rule of law). This does not eliminate public intellectuals, but it does eliminate politicians (agents). if public the normative and intellectual commons is as I have stated, property that the corporation agrees to defend, and all shareholders possess standing in suits concerning the commons, and that we require truthful speech in all matters of the commons, because we require warranty of products, services, and public speech, then public intellectuals can be independently regulated.

    Rather than classify individuals ‘as’ something or other, we can issue (and possibly limit) shares (block chain / public-ledger accounts). Shares can be earned (purchased) through demonstrated actions, but not purchased by any material exchange, not transferred, and not awarded, granted, given, for any other reason). If one has earned a higher status share, he must trade in any existing share to redeem the new one.

    Repeat felons for example, are effectively wards of the corporation, as are children, not shareholders. I suspect that the class of wards would be fairly large, the class of non voting shares – non-contributing people – fairly large, voting -contributing- fairly large, preferred services shares (care-taking), preferred production(professional, business, and industry), and preferred aristocracy (military, militia, law) fairly large. The most interesting problem is the judiciary, because the law has managed to create a secular ‘priesthood’ (cult) over time due to the very high investment costs in rituals, and to self- manage that cult. Which I find fascinating. And as long as one can preserve that cult via military service, indoctrination, truth-telling, and propertarian calculation, then I think it only requires a small number of people, all of whom have extraordinary interests in it, to preserve liberty.

    I will cover this idea in greater depth as we go along.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-24 15:24:00 UTC

  • Answer by @curtdoolittle to What is the appropriate role and amount of governmen

    Answer by @curtdoolittle to What is the appropriate role and amount of government regulation of businesses? http://qr.ae/DTqXx

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-22 22:11:59 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/525046936362295296

  • Answer by @curtdoolittle to How much more capitalist is the US than Germany?

    Answer by @curtdoolittle to How much more capitalist is the US than Germany? http://qr.ae/DTDZg

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-22 21:35:19 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/525037710835462144

  • IS THE APPROPRIATE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT REGULATION OF BIG BUSINESS? (The word ‘app

    http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-appropriate-role-and-amount-of-government-regulation-of-businesses/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=1WHAT IS THE APPROPRIATE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT REGULATION OF BIG BUSINESS?

    (The word ‘appropriate’ is a form of linguistic dishonesty that attempts to create a moral statement where none exists.)

    Instead, the question is whether a MONOPOLY (in this case, the government), that is insulated from prosecution under the law (bureaucrats), and insulated from market pressures (competition), is superior to a POLYPOLY, in which all members are subject to prosecution under the law (citizens) and subject to market pressures (competition).

    The general theory is that monopolies are necessary to START regulation (government), but that once instituted that competing institutions subject to rule of law are superior to democratic and political influences (politicians, corruption, oligarchies), because each individual everywhere in society, if he holds legal standing under universal standing, is capable of policing the regulators.

    The problem we have in government is that we cannot police the regulators ,and the implication that voting is a proxy for lawsuits is empirically false.

    As such, removal of corporate protections and extension of liability to all employees of all organizations, and the granting of universal standing, and the requirement that anyone we would consider needing regulation be insured, allows us to construct competing insurance companies that replace corrupt monopoly bureaucracies in government as means of regulation.

    SO it is not the degree of regulation that is the question, but whether regulation should be performed by monopolies or polypolies. And the answer is that most regulations must be legally imposed by the monopoly we call government, by requiring private insurance, and that the entire population is both responsible for and capable of policing those companies AND their insurers.

    It should be fairly obvious that POLOPOLY under NOMOCRACY is a superior means of regulation because it eliminates the possibility of corruption endemic to monopolies. And equally obvious that the market will seek the level of regulation necessary for insurers and producers to defend themselves from activist citizens intent on controlling them by limiting them moral actions.

    It is less obvious that it is government sanction of corruption and government delivery of regulation that is the cause of illicit business activity, precisely because during the early industrial revolution, governments who were envious of collecting new tax revenues granted protections to private businesses and removed the public’s common law ability to regulate such businesses.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-22 18:12:00 UTC

  • MUCH MORE CAPITALIST IS AMERICA THAN GERMANY *Capitalism: the voluntary organiza

    http://www.quora.com/How-much-more-capitalist-is-the-US-than-Germany/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=1HOW MUCH MORE CAPITALIST IS AMERICA THAN GERMANY

    *Capitalism: the voluntary organization of consumer production. (Liberty)

    *Socialism: the involuntary organization of consumer production. (Totalitarianism)

    *Mixed Economy: the voluntary organization of consumer production, and the involuntary redistribution of the rewards earned by organizing consumer production. (A trade-off between liberty and totalitarianism).

    Socialism is impossible, since neither the incentives to produce, nor the means of economic calculation are possible. The only possible means of organizing production that produces surpluses is to provide both individual incentives and the means of rational calculation for pursuing those incentives.

    This means that the only possible means of organizing production that is adaptive to changes in the world (wants and scarcities) is capitalism. This is why the entire world has adopted capitalism (the voluntary organization of consumer production).

    However, the entire world has also adopted mixed economy consumer capitalism: that is, the authoritarian regulation and taking of the rewards from the voluntary organization of production, for the purpose of redistribution (By licit or illicit means, for licit or illicit purposes.)

    So the entire world practices capitalism and none of the world practices socialism. Instead, the whole world practices mixed economy capitalism by taking the maximum amount that they can extract from the organizers of production without disrupting the organization of production.

    Now, the difference between the USA and Germany is such:

    1) germans are less diverse (more homogeneous) and homogeneous societies (see scandinavia) are comfortable with redistribution (sacrifice of my family and children and subsequent generations) for the service of yours. However, diverse polities are not comfortable with sacrificing for their competitors, any more than germans are happy redistributing to Turks, or mediterranean cultures that are lazier and more corrupt. America by contrast has an old historical problem of diversity of many peoples, and self reliance. The more diverse a people the less tolerance for redistribution.

    2) America is not comparable to Germany per se, but to Europe in total. There are 50 American states, and no less than 9 or 10 american regional cultures, and just as brussels is perceived as a dictatorship the american government is perceived as a dictatorship by the central and southern peoples of the american continent, that works for the advantage of the high population centers of immigrants on the coastal areas.

    As such Germany is both more homogenous, smaller, and more likely to redistribute, (over the objections of the south), while America is larger, more diverse, and less willing to redistribute. The reason is that germans are not competitors for power with one another (mostly) but american regions are at war with one another using the government as a proxy.

    For these reasons Germany is less an advocate of a mixed economy than say California or New York, but more so than say Iowa, Georgia and Alaska.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-22 17:35:00 UTC

  • What Is The Appropriate Role And Amount Of Government Regulation Of Businesses?

    (The word ‘appropriate’ is a form of linguistic dishonesty that attempts to create a moral statement where none exists.) 

    Instead, the question is whether a MONOPOLY (in this case, the government), that is insulated from prosecution under the law (bureaucrats), and insulated from market pressures (competition), is superior to a POLYPOLY, in which all members are subject to prosecution under the law (citizens) and subject to market pressures (competition).

    The general theory is that monopolies are necessary to START regulation (government), but that once instituted that competing institutions subject to rule of law are superior to democratic and political influences (politicians, corruption, oligarchies), because each individual everywhere in society, if he holds legal standing under universal standing, is capable of policing the regulators. 

    The problem we have in government is that we cannot police the regulators ,and the implication that voting  is a proxy for lawsuits is empirically false.

    As such, removal of corporate protections and extension of liability to all employees of all organizations, and the granting of universal standing, and the requirement that anyone we would consider needing regulation be insured, allows us to construct competing insurance companies that replace corrupt monopoly bureaucracies in government as means of regulation.

    SO it is not the degree of regulation that is the question, but whether regulation should be performed by monopolies or polypolies.  And the answer is that most regulations must be legally imposed by the monopoly we call government, by requiring private insurance, and that the entire population is both responsible for and capable of policing those companies AND their insurers. 

    It should be fairly obvious that POLOPOLY under NOMOCRACY is a superior means of regulation because it eliminates the possibility of corruption endemic to monopolies.  And equally obvious that the market will seek the level of regulation necessary for insurers and producers to defend themselves from activist citizens intent on controlling them by limiting them moral actions.

    It is less obvious that it is government sanction of corruption and government delivery of regulation that is the cause of illicit business activity, precisely because during the early industrial revolution, governments who were envious of collecting new tax revenues granted protections to private businesses and removed the public’s common law ability to regulate such businesses.

    Cheers

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-appropriate-role-and-amount-of-government-regulation-of-businesses

  • What Is The Appropriate Role And Amount Of Government Regulation Of Businesses?

    (The word ‘appropriate’ is a form of linguistic dishonesty that attempts to create a moral statement where none exists.) 

    Instead, the question is whether a MONOPOLY (in this case, the government), that is insulated from prosecution under the law (bureaucrats), and insulated from market pressures (competition), is superior to a POLYPOLY, in which all members are subject to prosecution under the law (citizens) and subject to market pressures (competition).

    The general theory is that monopolies are necessary to START regulation (government), but that once instituted that competing institutions subject to rule of law are superior to democratic and political influences (politicians, corruption, oligarchies), because each individual everywhere in society, if he holds legal standing under universal standing, is capable of policing the regulators. 

    The problem we have in government is that we cannot police the regulators ,and the implication that voting  is a proxy for lawsuits is empirically false.

    As such, removal of corporate protections and extension of liability to all employees of all organizations, and the granting of universal standing, and the requirement that anyone we would consider needing regulation be insured, allows us to construct competing insurance companies that replace corrupt monopoly bureaucracies in government as means of regulation.

    SO it is not the degree of regulation that is the question, but whether regulation should be performed by monopolies or polypolies.  And the answer is that most regulations must be legally imposed by the monopoly we call government, by requiring private insurance, and that the entire population is both responsible for and capable of policing those companies AND their insurers. 

    It should be fairly obvious that POLOPOLY under NOMOCRACY is a superior means of regulation because it eliminates the possibility of corruption endemic to monopolies.  And equally obvious that the market will seek the level of regulation necessary for insurers and producers to defend themselves from activist citizens intent on controlling them by limiting them moral actions.

    It is less obvious that it is government sanction of corruption and government delivery of regulation that is the cause of illicit business activity, precisely because during the early industrial revolution, governments who were envious of collecting new tax revenues granted protections to private businesses and removed the public’s common law ability to regulate such businesses.

    Cheers

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-appropriate-role-and-amount-of-government-regulation-of-businesses

  • WRONG QUESTION? Does intellectual conservatism exist? This may be the wrong ques

    http://www.socialmatter.net/2014/06/24/whither-intellectual-conservatism/THE WRONG QUESTION?

    Does intellectual conservatism exist? This may be the wrong question.

    I’ll argue that yes, intellectual conservatism does exist. Although, when you say “intellectual” it is somewhat troublesome, because it’s not sufficiently articulate for the purpose you intend. Instead, humans demonstrate the ability to argue( persuade or justify) using a limited number of frameworks – and those frameworks constitute a spectrum of complexity from the simplistically intuitive to the ratio-empirical. The question is, what form of argument do you consider to be classifiable as intellectual, where on this spectrum to conservatives conduct their arguments, and for what reason do they fail to conduct their arguments in the manner you consider intellectual.

    ARGUMENTATIVE SPECTRUM

    1) EXPRESSIVE (emotional): a type of argument where a person expresses a positive or negative opinion based upon his emotional response to the subject. While used as an argument, it is not. It is merely an opinion or expression.

    2) SENTIMENTAL (biological): a type of argument that relies upon one of the five (or six) human sentiments, and their artifacts as captured in human traditions, morals, or other unarticulated, but nevertheless consistently and universally demonstrated preferences and behaviors.

    3) MORAL (normative) : a type of argument that relies upon a set of assumedly normative rules of whose origin is either (a)socially contractual, (b)biologically natural, (c) economically necessary, or even (d)divine.

    4) HISTORICAL (analogical / correlative):

    5) RATIONAL (internally consistent)

    6) SCIENTIFIC (correlative and directly empirical)

    7) ECONOMIC: (correlative and *indirectly* empirical)

    8) RATIO-EMPIRICAL (Comprehensive, internally consistent and externally correspondent)

    Conservatism, when discussed outside of economics, where it is almost never discussed, is almost always expressed in arational terms (moral argument). Sometimes it is expressed in legal terms – the classical liberal and constitutionalist argument). Sometimes it is expressed in what we call the Burkeian or ‘psychological’ form of argument. But rarely as an analytic, scientific, or economic argument. And never as the central propositions of conservatism – because those central propositions would be untenable to a popular democratic polity – even if they were indeed morally, economically, and politically superior. This is because the popular democratic argument is a failed one, that is in direct conflict with conservatism as a social, economic, political and legal strategy.

    So, conservatism is argued most often, “arationally”. The value of conservatism, as an *ARATIONAL* social system of myths, traditions, habits, and formal institutions, is that such a structure, much like religious faith, is impervious to fashionable changes, and in particular, verbal manipulation by Schumpeterian public intellectuals. In fact, I have argued, and I think successfully, that conservatism as practiced is demonstrably scientific: evidentiary – while progressivism is demonstrably and successfully verbalist. A fact which is somewhat humorous or ironic or depressing depending upon one’s own disposition: in effect while conservatism is arationally structured, and progressivism is rationally structured, it turns out that conservatism as practiced is scientific, and progressive is unscientific (religious). Furthermore, science itself is practiced demonstrably, not argumentatively – which only serves to lend credence to the conservative prohibition on hubris, and the mandate for demonstrated results rather than verbal hypothesis.

    THE PROBLEMS OF AN ‘INTELLECTUAL’ CONSERVATISM

    1) Just as we solved the calculus and physics, before we solved economics and social science, conservatism has been unsolved (unarticulated in ratio-scientific terms) because it is a more complicated system than we had anticipated. And such complicated systems of thought are very hard to use in argument. Worse, they are hard to use in political argument because, under a democratic polity, we require numbers, and complicated arguments are the province of a permanent minority. Until conservatism is articulated in ratio-empirical form, and until public intellectuals can reduce those complex statements to simple narratives and memes, conservatism (Anglo-European Aristocratic Egalitarianism) is an advanced form of social order that is nearly impossible for ordinary people to argumentatively defend.

    2) There doesn’t appear to be demand for intellectual argument in conservatism, precisely because conservatives are so dependent upon taught, learned and innate moral intuition. If conservatives cannot ‘feel’ it then they don’t trust it. This turns out to be fairly good when one prevents adding false ideas to conservatism, but it turns out to be fairly difficult to argue conservatism rationally. So therefore, as a majority, conservatism can function and persist in a body of people. But under democratic rule, cultural and political diversity, the need to argue rationally in order to produce laws, and the ability to use law to impose changes upon the body politic, conservative arationalism is a weakness because conservative principles are not sufficiently defensible against (dishonest) framing, loading, overloading, pseudo-rationalism, and pseudoscience. Which is why the 20th century has been so harmful to conservatism: the cosmopolitans were merely superior at using the media to broadcast and repeat as a mantra, nearly any framed, loaded, overloaded, pseudo-rational (postmodern), and pseudoscientific (marxist-socialist) program.

    3) I generally test my ideas in the libertarian (libertine) community precisely because libertarianism (libertinism) is an intellectual ideology: structured as a very rigid, very analytic, moral, legal, and economic argument. Libertarians (libertines) are wrong, which is why their argument fails universally in all political populations. But at least it is possible to conduct conservative argument in moral, legal, and economic terms, and develop one’s arguments there. Most of us find, that even if we produce, as you say ‘intellectual’ philosophy, but I would state as ‘ratio-empirical, moral, analytic, legal, and economic philosophy’, conservatives behave so anti-intellectually, that the advocacy of conservatism in ratio-empirical, analytic, moral, legal, and economic terms, is exasperating.

    SO THE QUESTION MAY BE “WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES SO ANTI-INTELLECTUAL” rather than why are no conservative philosophers extant. I’m here. A few others are. But the conservative community does not demonstrate a demand for ‘intellectual’ arguments. All things considered, that is not necessarily a criticism. It just so happens that if the academy and the state conspire rather than are separated as were church and state, and in an age of expensive consumer-driven media, financed by hedonistic consumption, conservatives face a perfect storm of destructive incentives, against which traditionalism is not a sufficiently resistant means of argument, because we lack the economic means of ostracizing bad behaviors.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-21 16:07:00 UTC

  • THE PROBLEM OF THE IS-OUGHT GAP IS ONLY TRUE UNDER THE FALLACY OF UNIVERSALISM.

    THE PROBLEM OF THE IS-OUGHT GAP IS ONLY TRUE UNDER THE FALLACY OF UNIVERSALISM.

    We ‘ought’ to develop cooperative institutions, even if we can’t know what we ‘ought’ to accomplish using them.

    —“As Hume has made abundantly clear, there can be no basis in physical nature of any values or norms. The is-ought gap is unbridgeable.”—

    Not quite sure how to say this, but the reason I disagree with Hume is that he means ‘universal theories (“is” statements) exist for physically transformational (physics – say of geology), genetically heuristic (plans and animals), and memory-heuristic (man or AI) entities.

    However (a) the arbitrary precision for any system on that spectrum decreases from the physical-transformational to the memory-heuristic. Meaning that the precision of predictability of any instance decreases as we progress – gasses are hard to predict, and humans are harder to predict than gasses. We can make general statements (theories) about man, but we cannot make specific predictions about any given human. And (b) for sentient creatures, given what “is” both in the universe, and in our physical properties, we can choose from a variety of strategies, but we cannot know which we ‘ought’ to choose, because if we claim an ‘ought’ as a universal strategy for all of man, all choices are to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others, because we are sufficiently unequal to compete on equal terms. So any universal strategy ‘harms’ some body of people.

    However (c), assuming we desire both the best competitive choices for every group AND the best overall strategy for man, we can construct institutions that allow cooperation between heterogeneous moral codes (reproductive and evolutionary strategies), such as the market, because in such institutions we can cooperate on means, if not ends, and that through diverse pursuit of ends we can still ‘advance’.

    Yes it is not possible to select which theory might be right, or which human strategy might be right – those are synonyms. But we can choose what strategy might be wrong: chaos, violence and dysgenia that forbid the accumulation of capital sufficient for our long term prosperity.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-19 02:49:00 UTC