THE COMMONS: USE OF THE ORGANIZATION TO CONSTRUCT DISCOUNTS ON TIME, MATERIAL, TRANSACTION AND OPPORTUNITY COSTS. AND… MORE.
BASELINE: Laws Of Organization
1) Man acquires because he must. He organizes to acquire because the returns on cooperation disproportionately outweigh those of individual productivity. The utility of an organization (a business, a market, a society, a polity) is in the construction of commons from which we construct the abstract categories of knowledge, division of labor, market, norm, infrastructure, institutions, and territory – which in turn drastically reduce material, transaction and opportunity costs.
This voluntary organization of production assists in the voluntary organization of reproduction – which is the purpose of our existence(or we would not be here, and will not be here). ie: the intergenerational production of reproduction is competitively improved by the production of goods and services via the division of labor, which in turn is improved by the production of commons.
THE PURPOSE OF HUMAN ORGANIZATION: OPPORTUNITIES
2) We all benefit from seizing OPPORTUNITIES created by the production of commons, since that is the purpose of producing commons: reducing material, transaction, and opportunity costs.
We tolerate competition because it consists of seizing opportunities produced by the construction of the commons – in other words, commons create incentives to produce in the form of discounted opportunities that can be seized. We do not tolerate violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, theft by externality, free riding, and conspiracy, because rather than seizing opportunity produced by the commons, one imposes costs upon that which others have acted to construct: property. That is what separates property from opportunity. It may be true that opportunities belong to the shareholders that have constructed the commons through their efforts and sacrifices, but property belongs to those who seize opportunity and thereby *compress time*.
This concept of compressing time is fundamental. The division of labor which reduces time, interest that allows us to shift production times, increases in opportunities and decreases in transaction costs that reduce time costs, are the source of our ‘wealth’. It is this compression of time with which man outwits the pace of the universe and allows him to capture energy for his own use. We are not necessarily wealthier than cave men, we have just made everything in the universe infinitely cheaper through cooperation.
One of the inventions that Rothbard (immorally) inserted into western thought was the substitution of property for productivity. In western thought,
property is the result of productivity, and we prohibit one another from imposing costs upon the results of our production. (He did this because of his background in jewish law and culture – hence his positions on usury, blackmail, lifeboats, etc. ) But western man in a high trust society with all members in the militia, led by a chosen chieftain, prohibits imposition of costs on one’s production, and uses property as evidence of production in dispute resolution. Hence the western ethic vs the ethic of the bazaar and ghetto: western man does nothing to cause retaliation. Ghetto, Bazaar, Steppe, and Desert man happily causes retaliation because he needs not other men to defend fixed assets necessary for production, and can run to his tribe’s quarter or pastoralist tent.
Most of convoluted rothbardian logic is an attempt to justify ghetto/bazaar/steppe/desert ethics of diasporic jews, rather than seek to understand the success of western aristocratic/martial/agrarian/landed/market ethics. This is normal. All enlightenment ‘tribes’ (nations) attempted to generalize their specific group evolutionary strategy as a universal good – but none of them succeeded (other than partly smith, hume, and hayek) in discovering the general rules of human cooperation (ethics, morality, law, politics, economics), and then identifying the variations that each group had implemented as an evolutionary strategy.
3) EXTERNALITIES: Costs or Opportunities
—“Externalities are the norm in society rather than the exception.”—
Positive externalities contribute to individuals and the commons, negative imposed costs upon individuals and commons.
3) THE QUESTION OF ASYMMETRY
—“In the presence of positive externalities, goods get underproduced from s social perspective.”—
Most people do not recognize that this is deceptive language. Stated scientifically it is: “Despite the voluntary organization of production constructed by communal construction of lower costs of production (distribution and trade), transaction costs, and opportunity costs, some goods and services cannot be produced by the voluntary organization of production since the incentives to organize to produce them cannot be constructed. In other words, individuals have no reason to act to produce a good or service that others WANT.
However we are stuck with two issues.
First: WANTING and DEMONSTRATING are very different things. Stated wants are irrelevant. For example, we know that people prefer to spend money on entertainment over health care. So do they in fact ‘want’ health care? They will not exchange other things for it, so apparently they want it less than what they currently spend it on.
Second: while a person who commits no crime and imposes no costs upon others is not harming the construction of the voluntary organization of production’s discount on production, transaction cost, and opportunity cost, that individual is not PRODUCING sufficiently to fulfill his wants by voluntary exchange. In other words, he is unable to satisfy others, and desires satisfaction despite this. Now, the balance of society (commons producers) is better off if this person is outcast like a bum from a shopping mall, as a parasite. But we insure others in case we are reduced by accident tot he same circumstance – hence why those men nearer the bottom are more concerned about insurance, and women are almost always so given their genetic necessity of sensitivity and nurture. So the question is, at what point are we insuring, and at what point are we subsidizing parasitism and dysgenia, parasitism and eventual erosion of the commons we work together to construct?
This is the central question that separates progressive r-selection from conservative k-selection: we are in competition and we cooperate, but we are in competition for the future of mankind: between r-selected consumption and dysgenia of quantity, and k-selected saving and eugenia of quality. As libertarians we are statistical outliers – mere riders on the r/k selection journey. Intellectual hermaphrodites, negotiating transactions between the two reproductive strategies.
But assuming that we want to produce goods and services for those unable produce for others sufficiently to earn them, we can ask them to trade. My suggestion has been that we trade (a) one-child limit, (b) maintenance of the commons (c) a stipend based upon % of revenues independent of whether they work or not, (d) elimination of minimum wage so that they can collect both stipend (e) elimination of immigration by other than highly skilled labor for permanent citizenship. In other words, we can conduct an exchange with them: do no harm to us through crime and reproduction and you will be insured against the vicissitudes of life. Break this deal and you will lose all and if necessary be sterilized and put in a labor prison in the desert for the rest of your life.
4) TAXES
Assuming taxes are limited to commissions on the increased productivity of the commons (sales tax), and dispensations of taxes are not put to destructive ends (violations of property), it is in no way immoral for the shareholders of the organization (citizens) to both pay commissions (taxes) for their exchanges, and to receive dividends (commons). If we possess a court of universal standing there is no reason that you could not take the gov’t to court over an unjust fee.
(I tend to feel that in general, most taxes in america are not irrational, it is that they are put to uses we disagree with for the benefit of the advancement of the state, bureaucracy, deep state, and special interests. We also encounter the problem that the more disenfranchised individuals feel from the community the less willing to pay taxes they are. and libertarians are all too often demonstrating this behavior rather than any terribly thoughtful reason.)
5) SUMMARY
I think I’ve tried to answer the bulk of your questions. The net is that we compromise in a market. No one gets his ideal, not conservative, libertarian or progressive. We are, at each point in the spectrum, specialists in the intertemporal division of reproductive labor, and each biased by the necessity of our function to perceive and judge the world according to our evolutionary strategy. It is somewhat comforting to me to know that Conservatives have broader senses and so they are more accurate, and that females and progressives the least, and libertarians a bridge. This hleps understand individual intransigence. But it tells us that epistemologically, the only way to ‘know’ anything is indeed ‘good’ for man is when all through groups are conducting voluntary exchanges without the imposition of costs upon one another. If this is true, then man works as a vast successful machine computing a future out of existential reality by millions of different interactions and every moment, and it’s a beautiful and magical thing.
6) COMMONS: DEMOCRATIC ASSENT VS LEGAL DISSENT
I tend to deal with all of these subjects as simple legal problems.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
POST-NOTES:
(The reason is that we must balance stresses with rewards, and entertainment and food balance those, while boredom and delayed satisfaction increase them. Hence humans spend on current satisfaction at the expense of future risk.)
(I tend to say that the past century, has consisted of a war by shitty families against good families – individualism eliminates the empirical evidence that some families are better than others and should reproduce more than others, and their opposite, less.)