Curt Doolittle

Theme: Institution

  • QUOTE THAT WILL RING TRUE FOR EVERY MICROSOFT PARTNER IN THE WORLD “Its latest r

    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f8630150-656d-11e2-8b03-00144feab49a.htmlA QUOTE THAT WILL RING TRUE FOR EVERY MICROSOFT PARTNER IN THE WORLD

    “Its latest round … shows an attempt by Microsoft to defend its castle. Like a feudal lord, it once milked a peaceful populace, collecting generous taxes from the industry that laboured to keep the Windows economy going. The farmers never starved, but it was Microsoft that grew fat.” – FT.COM

    I TRIED TO BUY MICROSOFT PARTNERS IN 2006-2007 AND LOOKED AT 200 OF THEM.

    I knew what would happen to the industry. I knew the change in the customer. I wanted to provide an alternative to Avanade for the marketing customer. But I couldn’t find more than single digits out of the lot who made more than six percent net, and had any scale. Why? Because Microsoft impoverished its community. They played begging small vendors for freebies they were successful enough to make requests. Then they repeated the game with someone else.

    The only way to defeat that tactic was not to depend upon them at all. To build your own (expensive) sales force.

    And what kind of partnership is that?

    It isn’t one. It’s feudalism.

    Bill understood the value of vendors. That’s when it was good to be a Partner. THe company is a ‘Rent Seeking” machine. And has been now for the better part of a decade.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-27 19:04:00 UTC

  • BANKING: CREDIT UNIONS ARE GOOD. BIG BANKS ARE BAD. AND WHY Banking is a means o

    BANKING: CREDIT UNIONS ARE GOOD. BIG BANKS ARE BAD. AND WHY

    Banking is a means of allowing people with disparate knowledge, means, goals to cooperate by concentrating their capital and cross-insuring each other. Banking is a GOOD BUSINESS for society and society as we understand it is not possible without banking.

    Now, when you get service charges, this is just charging you for the costs you put onto the bank. THis is a GOOD IDEA because otherwise people who do a lot of bank work force people who don’t to pay all oft of costs. That would be an involuntary transfer. That’s bad. It’s stealing.

    The problem occurrs when the state starts putting funny money into banks and creating a ‘hazard’ by doing so. They allow banks to make risky loans. and those risky loans increase consumption at the expense of creating a fragile economy.

    The argument that Keynesians make, is that we get more good out of that fragility than we do bad.

    And that’s not a truth. It’s a matter of preference.

    And the people who would prefer not to have booms and busts that are caused by the government, because they take risks because the cost of money is cheap, and the pricing information that they see around them is distorted. Then the rug is pulled under them by the fragility and it all comes crashing down into a recession and depression.

    Credit unions are good things.

    Use them.

    Big banks are for conducting war. That’s why we have them. thats where they came from. that’s what they do.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 07:56:00 UTC

  • IS A LIBERAL? (Seriously) 1) Liberalism: The democratic republican model of poli

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiberalismWHAT IS A LIBERAL?

    (Seriously)

    1) Liberalism: The democratic republican model of political institutions that arose out of the enlightenment – Locke ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism ) Free Markets, Private Property, Enfranchisement of the middle class. This is the pleasant definition. It could also be defined as the ideology that justified the seizure of political power, and political institutions by the middle class, as trade expanded, wealth expanded, and therefore the economic power of the landed, agrarian, aristocracy was dramatically reduced.

    HISTORY

    During the 1800’s In reaction to the industrial revolution, the lower classes became consumers, and sought and were enfranchised because of the labor, communist and socialist movements, and the introduction of women into the voting and work force.

    The ‘Liberal’ movement broke into two branches. a) “Classical Liberal”, which favored limited government, and as such was ‘conservative’ and b) “Social Democrat” which incorporated the ideas of the socialists and communists and favored a mixed economy that combined the state and private property, and as such was ‘progressive’.

    While technically speaking a ‘liberal’ means a ‘classical liberal’, and therefore a ‘conservative’ the left intellectuals intentionally adopted and promoted adoption of the term ‘liberal’ as a self-identifier in order to use a term that was more tolerable than ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ which were not acceptable in the united states. In Europe, where states are smaller and more homogenous, and where there is a history of aristocracy, these terms, especially post-war, are not seen as negatively, and “liberal’ maintains it’s original meaning – the opposite of how its used in the United States. And this is both a source of humor to intellectuals and confusion to average people.

    Today, a “liberal” means a “social democrat”. But what does a “social democrat” mean? To understand that requires we understand Aristocratic Manorialism, Liberalism, communism and socialism.

    MODELS

    1) Aristocratic Manorialism, is the ownership of property by the aristocracy, and this property is then rented out to everyone else to work on, and farm, or build shops.

    2) Liberalism is the individual ownership of property by individual farmers, craftsmen and merchants.

    3) Socialism is the ownership of property by the state, and individuals are directed by central planners to do the work that is planned for them. Of course, this led to black markets, poverty, dictatorship, and the death of 100M people. Socialism was the greatest tragedy ever to befall human beings.

    4) Communism is the theory that after enough socialism, private property will disappear because it will, supposedly, become unnecessary.

    Unfortunately what we found out is that money, prices, and private property are necessary both to make use of dispersed knowledge, to make use of it in real time, and to provide people with the abilty to make plans, and for people to possess the incentives to make plans. The whole world has adopted capitalism (private property, money, and prices) for these reasons.

    5) Social democracy is the ownership of property by the state, which is then lent out to people for use as private property. Then people are allowed to keep some portion of the income themselves, and the rest is captured by the state in the form of taxes for use by the state. This model then maintains the money, prices, incentives of classical liberal private property, and does not fall into the problem of the impossibility of planning and the impossibility of the incentive to work, but it’s still possible to take money from people after they have produced it.

    Social democracy is a solution to the necessity of capitalism in order to get people to produce, while maintaining the ability of the state to sieze and use or redistribute the profits from production. It is the dominant model in the world.

    Today, conservatives (classical liberals) and progressives (liberals) compete to determine the amount of individualism or socialism that we will have.

    But why do we hold these different opinions? That’s pretty interesting.

    WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?

    To put these political movements in perspective: Just as the classical liberal model is the ideology that justifies the seizure of power by the middle class from the aristocracy, communism and socialism are the ideologies that justify the seizure of power by the lower classes from the middle class.

    Social democracy is a means by which the clerical classes (administrative, educational) can compete for status with the entrepreneurial classes. The military class has been all but ostracized from power since the 1960’s – something unique in history. To maintain power, any set of elites, whether clerical, commercial/entrepreneurial, or military, must have widespread support of the common people.

    As we have moved from a civilization of farmers, craftsmen and merchants, all of whom are individual producers and small business people, to a world where most of us work in government bureaucracy or clerical functions in large corporations, or clerical functions in universities, the number of people who actively participate in the commercial economy by taking personal risks with their own capital, has dramatically declined. But in the aggregate, this change in what we do for a living is actually driven more by the introduction of women into the dominance of clerical labor, and the voting pool than any other factor. Women lean and vote progressive and men lean and vote conservative, and single women vote heavily progressive, and single unmarried women vote almost entirely progressively. And what has happened since 1960, is a dramatic increase in single women due to delayed marriage, and single mothers due to the dissolution of the family.

    WHY DO WE VOTE THIS WAY?

    Now, the question arises as to why affluent educated but non-entrepreneurial people appear to adopt Social Democrat values in college, and why some people positively have this progressive bias. And it turns out that there are at least three factors.

    The first appears to be genetic, in that the individual’s moral code is very narrow, and treats care-taking and protection from harm as the highest, and only moral mandate. (See Jonathan Haidt). Whereas conservatives have five or six moral mandates that they adhere to fairly equally.

    The second is signaling (demonstrating your social status), where the educated in the country, whose status comes from education, but who do not gain status as business owners, business leaders or capitalists, signal their ‘high mindedness’ as a means of gaining status.

    The third is an intellectual view of mankind that has extraordinary faith in humans and the technology of human beings, to solve all the world’s problems ‘if we just put our minds to it’. (Conservatives just see this as an illusion that is the product of ‘False Consensus Bias’. And it may be that this is the underlying cause – the female tendency to desire consensus and the male desire to be attractive to women by signaling similar concerns.)

    GENES

    We are not entirely sure which of these is more influential. But what we do know is that the political affiliations are highly dependent upon gender. And that people are highly attracted to political affiliation for both gender and genetic reasons. (See Pew Research’s excellent collection of graphs and data.)

    In simple terms, socialism and individualism reflect the mating and reproductive strategies of the genders. And it certainly appears from the data we’ve collected that people vote for their moral codes and their moral codes reflect their reproductive strategies in any given economy at any given time. And therefore the result of our political debates is driven almost entirely by our reproductive strategies. (Which to those of us in political theory, is pretty funny, or pretty frustrating.)

    It’s all demographics and our shouting is meaningless. Elections are decided by the 10-15% of people who don’t care. The rest of us are committed to our polarized ideologies. WHat whil happen over the next few decades is that protestant european culture will continue to vote conservative, while the immigrant populations, the underclasses, and single women and the educational and political sectors will continue to vote progressive.

    Conservatives breed, and liberals dont, but the less individualistic minorities breed fast enough to keep up with the decline in liberal births.

    Thanks

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 07:52:00 UTC

  • BANKING: DEATH BY COMPUTER : RESURRECTION BY CREDIT UNION My family has been in

    BANKING: DEATH BY COMPUTER : RESURRECTION BY CREDIT UNION

    My family has been in banking for generations. It is a very good business. For most of history, you could talk to a banker. A banker was like your accountant, lawyer, or priest: he gave you advice and counsel and worked with you. They were reasonably educated people with decision making authority.

    The advent of computers made it possible, and competitive to centralize banking, turn to statistics that measured and compared statistics about what you did WITHOUT the advice and help of a banker to learn about money, interest and credit, instead of PROVIDING you with the advice about what to do with money, interest and credit.

    This created a lot of asymmetry of knowledge in the population. People got more ignorant and became statistical objects rather than members of a portfolio of relationships that banks built.

    Starting in the 1970’s when the USA instituted the petro-dollar, or using the US Dollar as the world currency for buying oil, the USA has been issuing cheap credit both home and abroad.

    The impact on banking has been that the government is essentially insuring increasingly ignorant consumers with cheap credit, who increasingly get unconsciously into debt, and increasingly into default, rather than building knowledgeable consumers of credit and producers of interest.

    community banks, and in particular, credit unions, are more than just a ‘nice thing’ for consumers. They can rebuild our society by removing the asymmetry of knowledge that lets banks prey upon ignorant consumers and sell them into predatory debt.

    Community credit unions are how all consumer credit should be done, even if we have to legislate it. Because big banks are just part of the government. They are part of the century long credit scam that has made us all slaves.

    Why are we slaves? How do you become a US Citizen? You get a driver’s license, a credit card, a loan for a car, and a loan for a house, and now you are controlled by credit, not by moral code, not by cultural norms, not by laws, but by credit. You are a credit slave. And that might not be bad if it works. But for an absurd number of people, they fail at the card, or the car or the house and become indentured servants. SO it is not so much that those of us who succeed do. It’s that we are advocates for a system that creates a permanent and dependent underclass.

    Credit is citizenship and the lack of it makes you a serf.

    And only community banks can provide advice and counsel. We force people into schools so that they don’t become ‘scoundrels’ that we must support through charity. Why is it that we use credit to create a lower class of people ostracized from the system purely out of ignorance? Why is it that we put almost ten percent of our people into prison for minor drug charges, and therefore guarantee they are dependent upon the rest of us to support them, and if not, lead lives of dependence and crime?

    Now I understand that very few ordinary people can tell whether what I’m explaining here is more or less true than any other explanation that they’ve heard. And all I can do is hope that it makes more sense than some conspiracy theory does.

    We may have the best of intentions. But the road to poverty is very often paved with the best intentions. And the road to social fragmentation has been, with certainty, paved with good, but foolish intentions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-21 12:29:00 UTC

  • LIBERTARIANS MAY BE RIGHT ABOUT INSTITUTIONS. BUT CONSERVATIVES ARE RIGHT ABOUT

    LIBERTARIANS MAY BE RIGHT ABOUT INSTITUTIONS. BUT CONSERVATIVES ARE RIGHT ABOUT HUMAN CAPITAL

    “Superficial statesmen and politicians — always too plentifully represented in every Reform, Radical or Revolutionary Party — constantly make the mistake of assuming that if a well-tried and old-established institution begins to reveal serious flaws, the fault must inevitably lie with the institution itself and not with the men trying to run it.” – Anthony Ludovici

    (HT to Traditionalist)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-20 09:56:00 UTC

  • INSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN SOCIAL ORDER WE CALL

    INSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN SOCIAL ORDER WE CALL WESTERN CIVILIZATION (rough sketch)

    PROBLEM

    Faced with numerical inferiority, but capable of producing sufficient calories, how does a group successfully compete? (Whether for advancement in consumption or preservation of consumption)

    ANSWER

    Excellence, Meritocracy. Coordination, Adaptation, Speed, Technology, Concentration Of Resources. .

    STRATEGY

    I. Create a competitive organization capable of continuous improvement and which will remain competitive over the long term.

    II. Provide a means of enfranchisement by demonstrated ability to cooperate with, and to compete on behalf of, the organization.

    III. Prevent the concentration of the power to alter the egalitarian order for personal gain.

    IV. Prevent the concentration of the power to define property rights and allocate property as a means of altering the egalitarian strategy.

    Note: Human biological predisposition to constrain alphas. And this predisposition varies between genders, racial groups and classes.

    Build and encourage alphas. Constrain alphas through enfranchisement and egalitarian prohibition of power.

    TACTICS

    1) Provide a means for discouraging conflict and encouraging cooperation by providing a means for the resolution of conflict.

    Note: Independent judges under the common law.

    2) Define property and a portfolio of property rights and obligations as a means of facilitating cooperation and preventing conflict.

    Note: A constitution, oral or written, that enumerates rights, obligations and processes. And which applies equally to all enfranchised.

    3) Provide a means of imposing a monopoly on the definition of those property rights, thereby creating a market.

    Note: a competition between systems of property rights must result in the theft of either personal property, common physical property, common formal institutional property, or that form of common informal property called norms.

    4) Provide a means of concentrating capital for the production of commons for the purpose of improving the competitiveness of the market.

    Note: Governance is the concentration of capital in support of expanding the market, not lawmaking.

    5) Provide a means for preventing the privatization of the commons either directly or indirectly.

    Note: Prevent cheating, indirect involuntary transfer. Use Contractualism instead of legalism. Use contracts not laws.

    6) Provide for a means of distributing dividends to shareholders as a means of preventing involuntary transfer of shareholder value.

    Note: prevent cheating and encourage both membership and conformity by limiting dividends to the enfranchised only.

    Note: Property rights are earned by respecting them.

    =========

    Needs a lot of work. Good first sketch.

    One very interesting insight.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-18 19:20:00 UTC

  • WHATS WRONG WITH UKRAINE: TAXATION “The tax laws are amended often and sometimes

    WHATS WRONG WITH UKRAINE: TAXATION

    “The tax laws are amended often and sometimes retrospectively. They are still characterized by lack of precise policy or explanation. A number of government bodies and different levels of the State tax authorities issue their own interpretations of tax legislation which may be contradictory. Many issues still remain open for clarification. All these factors lead to the risk of a different interpretation of tax legislation by the State tax authorities and taxpayers. A

    major recent development was the adoption in December 2010 of a consolidated tax code that aims to simplify and update the taxation system.” – Chadbourne, Kiev

    The justice department has had major reforms in 2010. And they’re intelligent reforms. The tax system had the same reforms. However, corruption is so rampant is difficult to determine how meaningful they are.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-15 13:06:00 UTC

  • WRONG WITH UKRAINE : ABSENCE OF THE RULE OF LAW Absence of the rule of law, is t

    http://www.chadbourne.com/files/upload/Ukraine_GeneralLegalConsiderations_BusinessUkraine_2011.pdfWHAT’S WRONG WITH UKRAINE : ABSENCE OF THE RULE OF LAW

    Absence of the rule of law, is the absence of property rights.

    “In short, Ukraine, like other former Soviet countries, suffers not only from a lack of suitable legislation and regulation and from considerable doubt as to how the courts will interpret the existing laws and rules, but from the concomitant absence of a belief in and respect for a “rule of law.” – Chadbourne, Kiev.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-15 12:53:00 UTC

  • A DEFINITION OF ANARCHO CAPITALISM: ANARCHO CAPITALISM: “A research program whic

    A DEFINITION OF ANARCHO CAPITALISM:

    ANARCHO CAPITALISM: “A research program which seeks to provide public services assumed to be necessary functions of a bureaucratic state, without the need for the artifices of state: politicians and bureaucrats in an organization with a monopoly on the definition of property and the means of violence with which to redefine property at will. This program has so far been successful in defining the first testable ethics (See Rothbard), and the first solution to the problem of small scale institutions in a homogenous state. (See Hoppe).” – Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-15 09:36:00 UTC

  • THE VIRTUE OF MONARCHIES Monarchies, or “private governments” denied access to p

    THE VIRTUE OF MONARCHIES

    Monarchies, or “private governments” denied access to political status to all but the family, and those few hired by the family.

    The remainder of the population sought status signals in the market, and within their identity groups. These societies were ‘diverse’. Sections of each city were dedicated to the cultural expression of their members, and signals within those sections served to convey status without the need for political power to convey such status.

    Under representative democracy, heterogeneous societies compete for the political power necessary to alter their status in relation to other groups. Instead of using the market, and market behavior to signal status. IN other words, we harm cultures by giving them access to political power.

    The answer is not how we share power. It is how we have no ability to use the violence of the state to create signals that are only mutually beneficial if they are manufactured do to the most important community service we can deliver: market participation.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-13 18:18:00 UTC