Curt Doolittle

Theme: Property

  • TRUISM —“If you won’t put a wall around your country, state, or city, you have

    TRUISM

    —“If you won’t put a wall around your country, state, or city, you have to put walls around everything inside it.”— John Rollins

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-07 18:10:00 UTC

  • SOME ‘ANARCHO PROPERTARIANISM’ AND FREE RIDING ON THE BRAND. Well, um. Some Ques

    SOME ‘ANARCHO PROPERTARIANISM’ AND FREE RIDING ON THE BRAND.

    Well, um.

    Some Questions:

    1) How does anarcho-propertarianism differ from Hoppe’s anarcho capitalism? Hoppe and rothbard use anarcho capitalism. The Propertarians disagree with Hoppe and define the scope of property concretely. Yet I see nothing in your discourse that differs from Anarcho Capitalism.

    2) Define property, since this is the test of whether someone has an understanding of what he speaks. The failure of the ancap movement over the past 40 years has been because of the inability to define the scope of property, and the fact that the majority runs away from the philosophy once it is defined.

    3) What will people use violence and fight over that is not covered by your definition of property? Given what people will fight over, wont people generate demand for an ‘insurer’ or what we call a ‘state’ in order to insure that which they will fight for, if it is not covered by your definition of property?

    4) Here are some good examples:

    a – Lets take slander, libel, or ridicule for example.

    b – Lets take blackmail for example.

    c – Lets take interference in a marriage for example.

    People all over the world kill over these matters. So are they addressed by your definition of property?

    5) Now if given a choice between living in a social democracy and living in your ideal polity, why would people rationally choose to live there versus the social democracy? Why don’t all sorts of libertarians move to remote regions and form new societies there? What has happened to all groups that have tried to live by anarcho capitalist ethics or law in the past? Where are they today? What have the more regulated societies done to those polities that HAVE tried to enact ancap-style lifestyles? Why? Who actually moved there other than criminals?

    Now, if you can’t answer these questions, or you answer them dishonestly, or incompetently, then how can you make a claim to hold to a philosophy that is possible rather than a cult or religion that is not possible?

    Source date (UTC): 2017-05-30 22:28:00 UTC

  • IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LIBERTY AND CAPITALISM. um…. you know. Pick one or

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-liberty-and-capitalism/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=ae621cfcWHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LIBERTY AND CAPITALISM.

    um…. you know. Pick one or the other and don’t conflate them.

    **Sovereignty** in fact exists or it does not. One has sufficient force in himself or his reciprocally insured allies to prevent his subjugation or not.

    **Liberty** is given by permission of the Sovereign, and refers to those who are self sufficient but whose rights can be imposed upon. Although liberty originally referred to the right of a people to preserve local law and custom in their own matters, and is therefore a political grant from the sovereigns, we tend to conflate it with Freedom.

    **Freedom** is given by permission of someone or some people capable of depriving you of it, and refers to those who might have been candidates for slavery, but have earned their freedom by some means, or at least, not lost it by other means. The common libertarian advocacy of a cuneiform term, says literally ‘return to the mother’, which means that one’s required service to the ruler for the term has been fulfilled.

    **Capitalism** refers to the use of contract, money, prices, and accounts, the elimination of rents on territorial resources, by its allocation to individuals, along with the distribution to individuals of discretion on the use of one’s physical energy, time, and possessions obtained by voluntary exchange. In other words, the voluntary organization of production, distribution, and trade using incentives made possible by individual calculation of the most beneficial options available to him. What is usually lost in this discourse is that the individualization of property prohibits local rents, allowing the centralization of rents that we consider taxation, and that this centralization of rents is one of the primary causes of the reduction of opportunity and transaction costs that makes a voluntarily organized economy possible at the expense of those who would live parasitically of the local collection of rents. In other words, capitalism converts subservience to ‘mafia’ at various local scales which impede production, to subservience to a single central ‘mafia’ in exchange for eliminating those rents that impeded production.

    **Liberty AND Capitalism**

    1. Therefore the relationship between **capitalism** and **liberty** is, precisely, that the sovereign will not interfere in the voluntary organization of production other than to create it in the first place, resolve conflicts as they arise by demand for reciprocity of obligation and rights in the contracts between parties, and to prevent the externalization of costs to the commons or the privatization of commons in the course of private transactions.

    2. However the problem of the degree of taxation (commission), the maximum calculation of which is the favorite hobby of economists, is not answered by this question. Nor is the use of those taxes (commissions), to produce commons within or without of the private economy.

    3. Therefore we **colloquially** use the term ‘**capitalism**’, to refer to the policy bias in favor of minimum taxation, competition, and interference in the market, and we use social democracy or the more pejorative ‘socialism’ to refer to the policy bias in favor of maximum taxation, egalitarianism, and interference in the market for the production of goods, services and information. The central conflcit being that the state does not insure the risk of capital and its losses but takes income regardless of that risk and those losses. And on the other hand, the combination of scale, wealth (capital), and credit, is such a more powerful competitive advantage that those with mere labor can compete with or even seek to participate in.

    4. Therefore liberty and capitalism can only exist when political questions are decidable because costs and returns are calculable, because coincidences of want are marginal, and consequences are perceivable. (Yeah, I know but once you read that a few times you’ll get it, and its important.)

    The net of this is that unless you possess sovereignty the best you can possess is liberty, and both liberty and property exist only as matters of degree in the balance between the impossibility of pure capitalism except between powerful states, and the impossibility of pure communism except within the family. And instead the useful point of demarcation between more capitalism less capitalism and least capitalism, depending upon whether we are in a mode of territorial or economic expansion requiring private risk(capitalism), a mode of relative calm requiring the production of commons (mixed economy), or at war (nationalized and centralized economy).

    Source date (UTC): 2017-05-30 21:56:00 UTC

  • THE NATURAL LAW REGARDING TRADEMARKS, COPYRIGHTS, AND PATENTS Abstract, or so ca

    THE NATURAL LAW REGARDING TRADEMARKS, COPYRIGHTS, AND PATENTS

    Abstract, or so called, “Intellectual Property”.

    There are three forms of ‘abstract property’ if we speak operationally:

    1) Trademarks. A trademark serves as a weight and measure preventing fraud, as well as seizing and unearned opportunity, by fraudulent representation. The test of trademark is quite simple. If in three seconds a randomly selected group of jurors can confuse the two, it is a trademark violation. Otherwise not. This is simply empirical. Trademarks are necessary for the prevention of fraud, and violation of the requirement for productive fully informed warrantied exchange. (BTW: lots of research on this subject from different disciplines.)

    2) Copyrights. A copyright serves as a means of preventing the unearned profits from the works of others, and the taxes earned from it to pay for enforcement. Copyright both violates natural law by providing subsidy rather than just preventing unearned gains (violation of reciprocity for productivity), and by externality violates natural law, through the creation of moral hazard, and the financing of literature that violates natural law. For this reason, the Copyright can and should be replaced by trademark, which will not prevent copying for personal use, but will prevent unreciprocated earnings. Ergo, the current Creative Commons license serves as a trademark that must be licensed in order to perform reciprocity. As a side benefit, when combined with the requirement for testimonial truth in the commons (market), this will defund the entertainment industry, the advertising industry, the publishing industry, the privatization of research performed via public funds.

    3) Patents. Assuming a patent is applied for and issued as a means of producing goods that cannot be produced by market means otherwise, an exclusive license to recoup investments and produce multiples of returns is a useful means by which the population can encourage research and development using off-book financing. However, production in the normal course of business, and research and development are very different things. Therefore patents should only be granted in exchange for shares in the product producing returns for the population. And patents should be granted only for those goods that have some such public function. And a patent cannot be used to deny a product or service or information from the market, nor to control the prices of products and services and information on the market.

    In other words, a trademark functions as a weight and measure. A copyright as a trademark. and a few patents as contracts with the common people for assisting in the research and development of those goods, services, and information, that cannot be produced because of great expense and low chances of success.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-05-30 19:39:00 UTC

  • What Is The Relationship Between Liberty And Capitalism?

    Sovereignty in fact exists or it does not. One has sufficient force in himself or his reciprocally insured allies to prevent his subjugation or not.

    Liberty is given by permission of the Sovereign, and refers to those who are self sufficient but whose rights can be imposed upon. Although liberty originally referred to the right of a people to preserve local law and custom in their own matters, and is therefore a political grant from the sovereigns, we tend to conflate it with Freedom.

    Freedom is given by permission of someone or some people capable of depriving you of it, and refers to those who might have been candidates for slavery, but have earned their freedom by some means, or at least, not lost it by other means. The common libertarian advocacy of a cuneiform term, says literally ‘return to the mother’, which means that one’s required service to the ruler for the term has been fulfilled.

    Capitalism refers to the use of contract, money, prices, and accounts, the elimination of rents on territorial resources, by its allocation to individuals, along with the distribution to individuals of discretion on the use of one’s physical energy, time, and possessions obtained by voluntary exchange. In other words, the voluntary organization of production, distribution, and trade using incentives made possible by individual calculation of the most beneficial options available to him. What is usually lost in this discourse is that the individualization of property prohibits local rents, allowing the centralization of rents that we consider taxation, and that this centralization of rents is one of the primary causes of the reduction of opportunity and transaction costs that makes a voluntarily organized economy possible at the expense of those who would live parasitically of the local collection of rents. In other words, capitalism converts subservience to ‘mafia’ at various local scales which impede production, to subservience to a single central ‘mafia’ in exchange for eliminating those rents that impeded production.

    Liberty AND Capitalism

    1. Therefore the relationship between capitalism and liberty is, precisely, that the sovereign will not interfere in the voluntary organization of production other than to create it in the first place, resolve conflicts as they arise by demand for reciprocity of obligation and rights in the contracts between parties, and to prevent the externalization of costs to the commons or the privatization of commons in the course of private transactions.
    2. However the problem of the degree of taxation (commission), the maximum calculation of which is the favorite hobby of economists, is not answered by this question. Nor is the use of those taxes (commissions), to produce commons within or without of the private economy.
    3. Therefore we colloquially use the term ‘capitalism’, to refer to the policy bias in favor of minimum taxation, competition, and interference in the market, and we use social democracy or the more pejorative ‘socialism’ to refer to the policy bias in favor of maximum taxation, egalitarianism, and interference in the market for the production of goods, services and information. The central conflcit being that the state does not insure the risk of capital and its losses but takes income regardless of that risk and those losses. And on the other hand, the combination of scale, wealth (capital), and credit, is such a more powerful competitive advantage that those with mere labor can compete with or even seek to participate in.
    4. Therefore liberty and capitalism can only exist when political questions are decidable because costs and returns are calculable, because coincidences of want are marginal, and consequences are perceivable. (Yeah, I know but once you read that a few times you’ll get it, and its important.)

    The net of this is that unless you possess sovereignty the best you can possess is liberty, and both liberty and property exist only as matters of degree in the balance between the impossibility of pure capitalism except between powerful states, and the impossibility of pure communism except within the family. And instead the useful point of demarcation between more capitalism less capitalism and least capitalism, depending upon whether we are in a mode of territorial or economic expansion requiring private risk(capitalism), a mode of relative calm requiring the production of commons (mixed economy), or at war (nationalized and centralized economy).

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-liberty-and-capitalism

  • What Is The Relationship Between Liberty And Capitalism?

    Sovereignty in fact exists or it does not. One has sufficient force in himself or his reciprocally insured allies to prevent his subjugation or not.

    Liberty is given by permission of the Sovereign, and refers to those who are self sufficient but whose rights can be imposed upon. Although liberty originally referred to the right of a people to preserve local law and custom in their own matters, and is therefore a political grant from the sovereigns, we tend to conflate it with Freedom.

    Freedom is given by permission of someone or some people capable of depriving you of it, and refers to those who might have been candidates for slavery, but have earned their freedom by some means, or at least, not lost it by other means. The common libertarian advocacy of a cuneiform term, says literally ‘return to the mother’, which means that one’s required service to the ruler for the term has been fulfilled.

    Capitalism refers to the use of contract, money, prices, and accounts, the elimination of rents on territorial resources, by its allocation to individuals, along with the distribution to individuals of discretion on the use of one’s physical energy, time, and possessions obtained by voluntary exchange. In other words, the voluntary organization of production, distribution, and trade using incentives made possible by individual calculation of the most beneficial options available to him. What is usually lost in this discourse is that the individualization of property prohibits local rents, allowing the centralization of rents that we consider taxation, and that this centralization of rents is one of the primary causes of the reduction of opportunity and transaction costs that makes a voluntarily organized economy possible at the expense of those who would live parasitically of the local collection of rents. In other words, capitalism converts subservience to ‘mafia’ at various local scales which impede production, to subservience to a single central ‘mafia’ in exchange for eliminating those rents that impeded production.

    Liberty AND Capitalism

    1. Therefore the relationship between capitalism and liberty is, precisely, that the sovereign will not interfere in the voluntary organization of production other than to create it in the first place, resolve conflicts as they arise by demand for reciprocity of obligation and rights in the contracts between parties, and to prevent the externalization of costs to the commons or the privatization of commons in the course of private transactions.
    2. However the problem of the degree of taxation (commission), the maximum calculation of which is the favorite hobby of economists, is not answered by this question. Nor is the use of those taxes (commissions), to produce commons within or without of the private economy.
    3. Therefore we colloquially use the term ‘capitalism’, to refer to the policy bias in favor of minimum taxation, competition, and interference in the market, and we use social democracy or the more pejorative ‘socialism’ to refer to the policy bias in favor of maximum taxation, egalitarianism, and interference in the market for the production of goods, services and information. The central conflcit being that the state does not insure the risk of capital and its losses but takes income regardless of that risk and those losses. And on the other hand, the combination of scale, wealth (capital), and credit, is such a more powerful competitive advantage that those with mere labor can compete with or even seek to participate in.
    4. Therefore liberty and capitalism can only exist when political questions are decidable because costs and returns are calculable, because coincidences of want are marginal, and consequences are perceivable. (Yeah, I know but once you read that a few times you’ll get it, and its important.)

    The net of this is that unless you possess sovereignty the best you can possess is liberty, and both liberty and property exist only as matters of degree in the balance between the impossibility of pure capitalism except between powerful states, and the impossibility of pure communism except within the family. And instead the useful point of demarcation between more capitalism less capitalism and least capitalism, depending upon whether we are in a mode of territorial or economic expansion requiring private risk(capitalism), a mode of relative calm requiring the production of commons (mixed economy), or at war (nationalized and centralized economy).

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-liberty-and-capitalism

  • AMERICAN ‘NEVER AGAIN’ We must never have another presidential election. We must

    AMERICAN ‘NEVER AGAIN’

    We must never have another presidential election. We must restore natural law and extend protection of goods and services to information, by extending the demand for due diligence. Our revolution will take place in one of the next two election cycles. The sooner the better, and the more violent and decisive the better.

    (We will the nationalize FB/Google and end the game.)

    Source date (UTC): 2017-05-29 11:28:00 UTC

  • Natural law says “people retaliate everywhere and always even at high personal c

    Natural law says “people retaliate everywhere and always even at high personal cost, against imposition of costs against that which they have invested in. The record of torts in all cultures, and all civilization, across all time, regardless of legal systems, consists of tests of reciprocity given the portfolio of interests in the current division of labor and norms. The existential record international law, like international law throughout history is always and everywhere reducible to tests of reciprocity. Logically, no organism can both cooperate and survive competition, without developing reciprocity. Moreover, all organisms capable of cooperation demonstrate preservation of ‘cheating’ as a means of preserving the test of reciprocity such that the test of reciprocity is not lost through genetic or habitual optimism. In fact, we can find no evidence of altruism anywhere within the species that is not either kin selection, or altruistic PUNISHMENT. Furthermore, researchers cannot find a better game theory strategy than tit for tat, and increasing tolerance for cheating given the noise (error) possible in the exchanges.’

    I don’t make ‘should’ or ‘good’ arguments. I search for decidability in matters of dispute. I argue against bads and leave goods up to market choice.

    Reciprocity cannot rationally or logically be defeated that I know of, nor can it be empirically defeated that I know of. As far as I know all conflcits are decidable by tests of reciprocity against imposition of costs aginst property in toto, that has been gained by discovery and conversino (homesteading), conversion from prior states of one’s inventory, or obtained in productive, fully informed, voluntary exchange, free of imposition of costs by externality.

    cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2017-05-28 14:25:00 UTC

  • Will Future Economies Depend On Socialist Governments, As Technology Makes Human Labour Redundant?

    GOOD QUESTION, BUT YOU MIGHT NOT LIKE THE ANSWER

    1. socialism means central management of property and production. Socialism is dead. It cannot exist, ever, any more than communism or anarchism can exist – for obivous reasons, that I won’t go into here.
    2. Almost the entire world works on a mixed economy. A mixed economy means that private property, money, and prices are used to provide calculability, planning, and incentives for individuals, yet the proceeds of their unequal productivity are captured, and redistributed.
    3. The means of this redistribution varies from the investment in research, in industry, and infrastructure, to the subsidy of retirement, unemployment, general income, and the provision of health care and justice, military and defense.
    4. the uncomfortable truth is that the lower classes (dumber, more impulsive people, with lower industriousness) are far more costly than people who are intelligent, thoughtful, and industrious can compensate for, so the countries that are the most advanced and have the highest redistribution are those that have eliminated their underclasses through attrition during the middle and late middle and early modern ages. In other words, the best way to increase your wealth and unemployment is to force one or zero children to people who require redistribution.
    5. Moreover: There are limits to energy consumption available on the planet.
    6. Moreover: There are limits to productivity using energy available on the planet.
    7. Moreover: Humans are *extremely* expensive organisms.

    SO:

    THE OPTIMISTIC VERSION:
    We impose worldwide one or zero child policy on those people who cannot engage in fruitful employment and over about four generations raise the median ability of humanity about one standard deviation, eliminating most demand. Meanwhile we impose a law that says that any job that CAN be done by a human without repetitive stress injury, shall be done by a human. And that would solve most of the problems.

    THE STATUS QUO VERSION
    Since that would be untenable for the third world the vast majority of their populations being ‘surplus humans’, and impolitic for the first world, given that the state is empowered by women and the lower classes through voting I expect what will occur is no change, until the existing system of credit collapses (which should occur somewhere in the next generation if not this one.) And we will

    THE SCARY VERSION
    The vast importing of underclasses into the civilized world in order to attempt to compensate for the impossibility of maintaining these levels of redistribution in a world that is no longer economically and institutionally backward, nor pervasively superstitious and illiterate, will reverse 3500 years of reduction of the underclasses, and reduce all but say the japanese and Han chinese to worldwide malthusian poverty, since it is DIFFERENCES that make productivity possible.

    Regardless of what economists like to promote the carrying capacity of the planet looks as if the current standards of living cannot be extended to the full population extant.

    That’s my understanding of the choices.

    https://www.quora.com/Will-future-economies-depend-on-socialist-governments-as-technology-makes-human-labour-redundant

  • Will Future Economies Depend On Socialist Governments, As Technology Makes Human Labour Redundant?

    GOOD QUESTION, BUT YOU MIGHT NOT LIKE THE ANSWER

    1. socialism means central management of property and production. Socialism is dead. It cannot exist, ever, any more than communism or anarchism can exist – for obivous reasons, that I won’t go into here.
    2. Almost the entire world works on a mixed economy. A mixed economy means that private property, money, and prices are used to provide calculability, planning, and incentives for individuals, yet the proceeds of their unequal productivity are captured, and redistributed.
    3. The means of this redistribution varies from the investment in research, in industry, and infrastructure, to the subsidy of retirement, unemployment, general income, and the provision of health care and justice, military and defense.
    4. the uncomfortable truth is that the lower classes (dumber, more impulsive people, with lower industriousness) are far more costly than people who are intelligent, thoughtful, and industrious can compensate for, so the countries that are the most advanced and have the highest redistribution are those that have eliminated their underclasses through attrition during the middle and late middle and early modern ages. In other words, the best way to increase your wealth and unemployment is to force one or zero children to people who require redistribution.
    5. Moreover: There are limits to energy consumption available on the planet.
    6. Moreover: There are limits to productivity using energy available on the planet.
    7. Moreover: Humans are *extremely* expensive organisms.

    SO:

    THE OPTIMISTIC VERSION:
    We impose worldwide one or zero child policy on those people who cannot engage in fruitful employment and over about four generations raise the median ability of humanity about one standard deviation, eliminating most demand. Meanwhile we impose a law that says that any job that CAN be done by a human without repetitive stress injury, shall be done by a human. And that would solve most of the problems.

    THE STATUS QUO VERSION
    Since that would be untenable for the third world the vast majority of their populations being ‘surplus humans’, and impolitic for the first world, given that the state is empowered by women and the lower classes through voting I expect what will occur is no change, until the existing system of credit collapses (which should occur somewhere in the next generation if not this one.) And we will

    THE SCARY VERSION
    The vast importing of underclasses into the civilized world in order to attempt to compensate for the impossibility of maintaining these levels of redistribution in a world that is no longer economically and institutionally backward, nor pervasively superstitious and illiterate, will reverse 3500 years of reduction of the underclasses, and reduce all but say the japanese and Han chinese to worldwide malthusian poverty, since it is DIFFERENCES that make productivity possible.

    Regardless of what economists like to promote the carrying capacity of the planet looks as if the current standards of living cannot be extended to the full population extant.

    That’s my understanding of the choices.

    https://www.quora.com/Will-future-economies-depend-on-socialist-governments-as-technology-makes-human-labour-redundant