http://romaninukraine.com/a-conversation-with-a-restaurant-manager/STRUGGLE FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN UKRAINE
Defensive lament on the predatory bureaucracy.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 12:40:00 UTC
Theme: Institution
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FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN UKRAINE Defensive lament on the predatory bureaucracy
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Read Engels Again: But There Are Better Primary Sources and The Natural State Is Plastic
Eh.. [G]ist is right. Primary sources are better. Our knowledge is better today. But we are shaking off centuries of bias about our natural state, only to discover that humans organize according to production units counterbalanced by the competition between male and female reproductive competition. Not much more to it than that. We have a lot more detail, but in the end, if our survival depends upon it, we alter our informal and formal institutions to support our economic (productive and consumptive) demands. Now, it’s certainly true that we often adopt BAD ways of doing things. And it’s certainly true that we resist adopting GOOD things when they disrupt (reorder) our existing formal and informal institutions. But cultures that adopt BAD things, or resist GOOD things are almost always “out gunned, out germ-ed, and out steeled” by cultures that make superior decisions. Temporary destructive innovations like mongol and arab mounted raiding techniques paired with lack of supporting formal institutions, or the forcible adoption of socialism by the bolsheviks, the maoists, and the Cambodians as examples of what works as a promise in the short term, but fails in actuality the long.
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READ ENGELS AGAIN: BETTER FIRST SOURCES Eh.. Gist is right. Primary sources are
READ ENGELS AGAIN: BETTER FIRST SOURCES
Eh.. Gist is right. Primary sources are better. Our knowledge is better today. But we are shaking off centuries of bias about our natural state, only to discover that humans organize according to production units counterbalanced by the competition between male and female reproductive competition. Not much more to it than that. We have a lot more detail, but in the end, if our survival depends upon it, we alter our informal and formal institutions to support our economic (productive and consumptive) demands.
Now, it’s certainly true that we often adopt BAD ways of doing things. And it’s certainly true that we resist adopting GOOD things when they disrupt (reorder) our existing formal and informal institutions. But cultures that adopt BAD things, or resist GOOD things are almost always “out gunned, out germ-ed, and out steeled” by cultures that make superior decisions.
Temporary destructive innovations like mongol and arab mounted raiding techniques paired with lack of supporting formal institutions, or the forcible adoption of socialism by the bolsheviks, the maoists, and the Cambodians as examples of what works as a promise in the short term, but fails in actuality the long.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-10 05:07:00 UTC
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VIOLATING HUMAN SCALE Human scale in architecture is deliberately violated: 1) f
VIOLATING HUMAN SCALE
Human scale in architecture is deliberately violated:
1) for monumental effect. Buildings, statues, and memorials are constructed in a scale larger than life as a social/cultural signal that the subject matter is also larger than life. The extreme example is the Rodina (Motherland) statue in Volgograd (Stalingrad).
2) for aesthetic effect. Many architects, particularly in the Modernist movement, design buildings that prioritize structural purity and clarity of form over concessions to human scale. This became the dominant American architectural style for decades. Some notable examples among many are Henry Cobb’s John Hancock Tower in Boston, much of I. M. Pei’s work including the Dallas City Hall, and Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
3) to serve automotive scale. Commercial buildings that are designed to be legible from roadways assume a radically different shape. The human eye can distinguish about 3 objects or features per second. A pedestrian steadily walking along a 100-foot (30-meter) length of department store can perceive about 68 features; a driver passing the same frontage at 30 mph (13 m/s or 44 ft/s) can perceive about six or seven features. Auto-scale buildings tend to be smooth and shallow, readable at a glance, simplified, presented outward, and with signage with bigger letters and fewer words. This urban form is traceable back to the innovations of developer A. W. Ross along Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1920.
(From Wiki)
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-05 04:01:00 UTC
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WHY DONT FIRMS IN TROUBLE RAISE PRICES? They should. But…. (Cross posted from
WHY DONT FIRMS IN TROUBLE RAISE PRICES? They should. But….
(Cross posted from reply on Econlog)
Firms rarely trade in commodities and benefit from the anonymity associated with commodities. They work in a network of established customers and distributors all of whom are more knowledgable about the relative strength of the firm in relation to its competitors than are members of the firm itself. (Yes, really.)
If your failure is an internal one ( a well known tech harware manufacturer had incentives to keep costs down which later nearly killed the company as venors started absndoning the paltform because it was too difficult to learn the many minor differences) then if your brand supports the price you can do it and use the money to correct the problem.
But the real problem is this: a very. Small number of people in any organization provide the entire marinally competitive difference, and if those people feel the company will fail they will leave. (We have pretty good data on this now. ). If knowledge of even short term failure leaks into the organization itself the consequences for quality, priductivity, retention, access to credit, will produce a deterministic result.
Firms do raise prices in duress. (Microsoft prior to Vista for example. ) I advise it all the time in order to prune unprofitable customers when companies are under duress. You just cant get away with it for that long.
Positivistic error/error of induction: assuming quantities contain sufficient information for other than commodities, when commodities are unique in this condition.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-01 07:22:00 UTC
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Cultures Are Portfolios Of Property Rights
[C]ultures are portfolios of property rights. The composition of, and distribution of those property rights, varies from culture to culture. In each culture, those rights are expressed as norms. Property rights themselves are a norm. Those property rights perpetuated by norms may be more or less beneficial than other portfolios of property rights. But any idiot who thinks that (a) formal institutions don’t matter – such as libertarians or (b) that formal institutions are sufficient – such as progressives, will have history prove him wrong to the chagrin of the people who understand (c) that norms are a form of property – conservatives. Norms are a commons that we all pay for. The tax we pay for them with is forgone opportunity to consume them, and absorbing the risk that no others will absorb them too. Aristocratic Egalitarian Culture (The West) prohibits not just fraud, theft and violence, but the more deceptive versions of fraud: profit from asymmetry of knowledge, and profit from involuntary transfer via externalities. Market competition itself, is an involuntary transfer via externality from people outside of the exchange (competitors). This is why humans naturally object to it, and must be trained to respect and practice competition. But this externality provides instruction and incentive to all in the market, such that we all seek greater variety and lower cost of production. It produces beneficial ends. But it is non-trivial to create the norm of respecting and practicing competition. That’s why so few cultures did it. [R]othbard was wrong. The market isn’t sufficient to maintain the norms against fraud theft and violence, and certainly not against externalities. The marginal impact of reputation in the market is lower than the marginal impact of fraud. That’s why only the west developed the high trust society – by out-breeding such that the entire nation to be an extended family – at least within it’s social classes. Without excessive out-breeding that destroyed the perception of extended family through common physical properties, and common normative behavior. In order to retain the sense of extended family, both physical properties and normative properties must be similiar enough that signaling is consisten within the group, and only class (selection quality) within the extended family differentiates between group members. Trust. The extension of familial trust to all possible exchange partners, by prohibitions on externality and asymmetry, when backed by warranty, is the composition that creates the high – trust society. Only AFTER these informal institutions are enforced by formal institutions, even if only the formal institution of the common law, will trust develop. And with trust, the velocity of trade that makes extraordinary marginal wealth possible for a group, because that group is more competitive than other groups.
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Statism And Corporatism vs Partnerships And The Common Law
[C]an you imagine commercial trade and the market without the abstract entity we call the corporation? Sure you can. The corporation is just a partnership that the government has granted limited liability to in order to increase tax revenues from ventures that are both expensive and high risk. THink of it as off-book investment in research and development. If you can imagine commerce without corporations, then you can imagine government without the state. The state is just a corporation – a collection of people who are insulated from liability for their actions. The common law, and the rule of law under the common law, with private property, and a government that is a contract, wherein the governors have no right to issue law, only to facilitate contracts between groups, which are then enforceable by the courts. Under such a common law system, (the anarchic system), people in corporations and in government are not protected from you suing them for violating our contracts -the most important contract being our constitution. [A]narchy as we describe it, isn’t the absence of organization, of commons, or of law. It’s the absence of the state and the state bureaucracy that through the violence of law, forces us to do what we do not wish to, and its members profit from doing so. We can have all the government we want. but we do not need the state, the bureaucracy, legislation, and majority rule to accomplish it. Our government needs only to facilitate contracts and to forbid all parties, whether parties to the contract or not, from free riding, rent seeking, privatization, socialization, corruption, theft, and violence involving those contracts.
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Reading: On Law As A Problem Of Calculation, Coordination, And Dispute Resolution, In The Face Of Necessary Ignorance And Diversity Of Interest
[T]he common law depends upon experience (scientific evidence), not logic or reason (untested theory), and is relatively impervious to authoritarian influence. In any reading list on Law, I don’t necessarily want to communicate the history of law, so much as emphasize the pervasive problems of the social cognitive biases: a) False Consensus bias, b) the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight, c) Projection Bias, d) Trait Ascription Bias, e) the Illusion of Transparency, that are largely the product of the introduction of women into the voting pool, and their alliance with, and support of, marginal male groups who can obtain power by the use of the near universalism of these female cognitive biases, because these cognitive biases suit the reproductive strategies of females in our prehistoric, pre-agrarian phase of development. 1) Bastiat’s The Law 2) Epstein’s Simple Rules For A Complex World 3) Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (as well as Hayek and Popper on knowledge) 4) Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Common Law 4) Milsen’s A Natural History of The Common Law CLUES TO ADAPTING TO THE 21ST CENTURY 1) Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (Believe it or not), my interpretation of Johnson’s Three Methods Of Coercion (see my site), and Perhaps Arnold’ Kling’s pamphlet “The Tree Languages Of Politics”. In particular I love kling’s metaphors both in the Three Languages, and in his “Recalculation” description of recessions. These are both accurate categorical descriptions but they are not sufficiently causally descriptions. Haidt solves the problem of the three languages. I think in my works I’ve sufficiently combined these different perspectives and using Haidt and property rights, I’ve unified these systems into causal relations. (Which new, and is why people have trouble understanding what I’m trying to get across at present.) 2/2) I want to add here Rothbard’s Ethics of Private Property. But since his moral code is incomplete (and therefore false), and his definition of property incomplete, because he was creating an ethic of rebellion not one of civilization, I’ll just have to wait until I finish my own work on propertarianism which corrects those errors. Without this understanding of the relationship between group size (individualism), reproductive strategy, morality, and property it is impossible to adapt the common law to the complex heterogeneous society, because it relies, at least in the arguments of Melvin Eisenberg and perhaps Holmes, relies on assumptions about society, and norms that cannot survive moral scrutiny in our heterogeneous social order. 3) Epstein’s How the Progressives Rewrote the Constitution. The canonical history of how the feminist, progressive, liberal, socialist, and communist movement was able to effectively destroy the rule of law under the constitution. 4) Barnett’s Restoring The Lost Constitution (I don’t believe that this is possible or advisable, and instead that we must create an institutional framework that supports a diversity of genetic strategies. But his analysis of what the constitution actually said, is exceptional, and therefore it is a prescription for how to articulate the rules of future institutions.) CAVEAT [I] don’t really want to spend a lot of my time with the law. I always feel that I’m slumming and need a shower afterward. But as an institution that we both require for calculative purposes, and an institution that must adapt to contemporary diversity and heterogeneity by expanding the concepts of morality and property. To do so, it’s necessary to articulate the impact on the system of common law, which shall remain the means of contract-making and dispute resolution under any more diverse propertarian model. FALURE OF CALCULATIVE INSTITUTIONS TO FACILITATE DIVERSITY OF INTERESTS, AND THEREFORE INCENTIVES AND CALCULATION Civilizations fail because their institutions can no longer calculate cooperation and the user of resources. (ie: Jarred Diamond is wrong. and I’m not so sure about Fukuyama’s and Acemoglu’s analyses have identified this problem correctly as one of property rights.) MORE DETAIL For more detail see Kinsella’s excellent list at mises.org which also addresses the historical development of the common law. In particular Tulluck’s criticism of the method of dispute resolution. A criticism I think is solved by Hoppe’s privatization and insurance model. Hopefully this was helpful to others. Cheers
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STATISM AND CORPORATISM VS PARTNERSHIPS AND THE COMMON LAW Can you imagine comme
STATISM AND CORPORATISM VS PARTNERSHIPS AND THE COMMON LAW
Can you imagine commercial trade and the market without the abstract entity we call the corporation? Sure you can. The corporation is just a partnership that the government has granted limited liability to in order to increase tax revenues from ventures that are both expensive and high risk. THink of it as off-book investment in research and development.
If you can imagine commerce without corporations, then you can imagine government without the state. The state is just a corporation – a collection of people who are insulated from liability for their actions.
The common law, and the rule of law under the common law, with private property, and a government that is a contract, wherein the governors have no right to issue law, only to facilitate contracts between groups, which are then enforceable by the courts.
Under such a common law system, (the anarchic system), people in corporations and in government are not protected from you suing them for violating our contracts -the most important contract being our constitution.
Anarchy as we describe it, isn’t the absence of organization, of commons, or of law. It’s the absence of the state and the state bureaucracy that through the violence of law, forces us to do what we do not wish to, and its members profit from doing so.
We can have all the government we want. but we do not need the state, the bureaucracy, legislation, and majority rule to accomplish it. Our government needs only to facilitate contracts and to forbid all parties, whether parties to the contract or not, from free riding, rent seeking, privatization, socialization, corruption, theft, and violence involving those contracts.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-22 08:31:00 UTC
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THE CONSTITUTION ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT RELIGION, AND HOW THE STATE HAS CREATED A S
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/13/texas-gov-rick-perry-americans-have-no-right-to-freedom-from-religion/WHAT THE CONSTITUTION ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT RELIGION, AND HOW THE STATE HAS CREATED A STATE RELIGION IN SPITE OF THE CONSTITUTION.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; “
WHAT THAT MEANS
It means what it says. It doesn’t say freedom of religion, or freedom from religion. As a libertarian of course, I would prefer that it did say what we libertarians desire it said. Just like every other faction desires it to say one thing or another. But that’s what it says and all it says. It means only that the congress may not pass a law establishing an official single monopoly religion, or inhibiting the practice of religion by those who desire to.
WHAT THE FOUNDERS INTENDED
1) The founders intended that the state not take control of the christian church as it had in France and England, because the state would abuse the church, which was the source of moral teaching, and use the church for immoral ends. However, in practice, the state has made the education system it’s ‘church’ and the source of moral teaching, thereby creating its own religion.
2) The founders intended that the church retain it’s position as the source of moral teaching. They stated repeatedly that the constitution was an inferior protector of our liberty – that the only material protection of liberty was the moral code of the citizenry itself. In practice, through public education, the state has created its own moral code against the wishes of the majority. We call this code socialism, or the more recent incarnation of socialism: “postmodernism”, or in colloquial terms “liberalism’, or in institutional and political terms ‘social democracy’. But whatever we call it, the state has adopted and sponsored a religion, and not agnosticism, and not atheism, and the state does not practice atheism or agnosticism, or even neutrality – it practices postmodernism, and an intentional attack on christianity, while supporting all other monotheistic religions.
BUT OUR CONSTITUTION DOESN’T CONSTRAIN THE STATE ANY LONGER
Political debates that rely upon some set of rights make no sense today. Thanks to the destruction of the constitution by liberals by abusing the 14th amendment as a ruse, and in particular under the threat of stacking the court imposed by FDR, the constitution no longer constrains the state, because other than by the untested principle of nullification, the federal government is now in practice a dictator to the states. WIthout state opposition to the federal government, groups of individuals have no institutional means of cooperating en masse to oppose expansion of the government.
RECOMMENDED READING (This is really all you need to know)
Nullification, by Thomas Woods. (The least expensive and least disruptive means of regaining our rights: move, and vote for nullification.)
How Liberals Rewrote the Constitution, by Richard Epstein. (A detailed history of the project to undermined the constitution so that socialism could be adopted.)
The Constitution Of Liberty, by Friedrich Hayek. (Freedom is synonymous with property rights and rule of law. That’s it.)
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-14 05:08:00 UTC
