Curt Doolittle

Theme: Property

  • CONFUSIONS (CRITICISM) [QUOTE]It is not, as you claim a “competing theory of jus

    http://vulgarlibertarians.com/against-the-basic-income-guarantee-2/MATT’S CONFUSIONS (CRITICISM)

    [QUOTE]It is not, as you claim a “competing theory of justice” to the libertarian one. It is a theory of human welfare. I invoke it not to challenge the libertarian theory of justice, but as way of providing some content to the idea that the government should ensure that nobody is so harmed by its acts of injustice that they are unable to live a minimally decent life. There’s no dishonesty here on my part. Just an apparent confusion on yours. – Matt Zwolinski [/QUOTE]

    MATT’S CONFUSIONS

    1. Yes it is Matt. Your Rawlsian restatement is precisely a competing theory of justice. The libertarian theory of justice expressly PROHIBITS statements on ends, stating that the ONLY justice is voluntary exchange.

    2. There is only one POSSIBLE universal moral statement : voluntary cooperation for mutual gain in that which can be acquired – from the most concrete to the most experiential. And its corollary: the prohibition on parasitism in all it’s forms (criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial action) the most common of which is free riding.

    3. Therefore the ONLY POSSIBLE moral institutions that we can create are those that extend the opportunities for voluntary exchange – constantly expanding our cooperation on means, and letting catallaxy determine SCIENTIFICALLY through EXPERIMENTAL TRIAL AND ERROR, the most desirable ends.

    [QUOTE]There is no “issue of collective obligations” here. A criminal never gains the right to rob others to pay his debts. That would only create more victims who must then be compensated. Calling such further theft “morally required” is just amazing.– JesseForgoine[/QUOTE]

    MATTS CONFUSIONS

    1. No. A corporation that we shall call ‘the government’ can never incur debts on the actions of individuals in its employ – especially if there are no individuals in its employ.

    2. Yes. A corporation that we shall call ‘the government’ can incur debts on the actions of the polity as collectively exercised by vote.

    3. Even if exercised by vote (of shareholder/citizens), the fees should be paid exclusively by those who mandated it (voted in favor of or against, the action). This eliminates moral hazard.

    4. The libertarian solution to this problem is to require prosecutors to carry malfeasance insurance. This insurance would be very high. And the insurance companies would do a far better job of policing justice than does justice itself – (spoken as a one-time justice department employee.)

    So, no, MATT IS CONFUSED as we can see from his initial proposition that some arbitrary statement of welfare determined by some arbitrary person or group, rather than scientifically determined by the market, under the assumption that liberty and voluntary cooperation – cooperation on means – is the optimum human welfare, versus the involuntary, forcible extraction of rents to achieve a messianic, unscientific (foolhardy) ‘end’ defined spuriously as ‘welfare’.

    SOLVING MATT’S CONFUSION

    I’ve argued elsewhere that the (rothbardian) libertarian assumption that individuals should pay the high cost of respecting property rights, forgoing free riding, and forgoing demand for state intervention, and forgoing rents, is a violation of property rights.

    When our aristocratic egalitarian ethic (liberty) evolved in prehistory, it was because we have almost all been private property owners, and heads of families. We were marginally indifferent in our production. Heroism (raiding and trading) were the only ways of dramatically increasing one’s wealth relative to the productivity of the land that bound all others.

    But under industrial consumer capitalism, our labors are no longer of much value to the organization of production. In fact, increasingly, smaller numbers of people will be required to organize production. The current trend will continue, and we can’t think of a logical reason why it wouldn’t.

    Therefore at present, more than a third of people are either present in the work force, or available to the work force, but unskilled and incapable of using the tools necessary to participate in the art of the production of goods and services.

    So Keynesian models that attempt to reach full employment are little more than a logical error.

    However, we are still equally capable of performing the work of constructing the normative commons that makes organizing, executing and distributing production, possible at low transaction cost.

    As such, it is only right and just that we compensate people for respect of property rights, and policing the prohibition on parasitism i all its forms that creates the high trust necessary for us to conduct highly productive efforts in every niche possible.

    So my argument, in Propertarianism, is that among the logical errors of the enlightenment were (a) that we were equally capable of participation in production (b) that labor was the primary problem of production when in fact, voluntarily organizing production through natural incentives was the primary problem (c) that because of these errors we assumed that there was no cost to respecting prohibitions on parasitism – when logically it is a very high cost for the unproductive to respect prohibitions on parasitism (free riding, criminal, unethical, immoral and conspiratorial behavior.).

    So it is a violation of property rights NOT to pay people to police the normative commons (and physical commons for that matter) and yet expect them to refrain from engaging in parasitism – the most dangerous parasitism being their natural demand for the state as a vehicle for extracting rents.

    The question is whether participation in the market itself is sufficient compensation for that respect. Whereas that’s non logical since those without a way to obtain money cannot participate in the market.

    DESTROY THE STATE

    Pay people to respect property rights. Dont’ pay people who don’t. If you are ‘hired’ to respect property rights you get paid to do it, and you lose your job if you don’t. If you’re hired for this job you can get an employment contract. Pay unproductive people to share the interests of the productive people in eliminating immoral conspiratorial activity (the state), in favor of moral cooperative activity (property rights).

    It is better to fight for the attention of consumers than it is to fight the state.

    MATT ZWOLINSKI

    Matt is, unfortunately, a product of his environment. And he is confused about the cause of moral sentiments. Actually he’s confused about a lot of things. But that is why we have the BHL’s – because they have no rational arguments, only moral sentiments defended by weak attempts at amateurish emotional, non rational, unscientific

    WHY HOSTILITY

    The source of liberty is the organized application of violence by a diligent minority to suppress parasitic free riding so that only voluntary cooperation remains.

    If we want our liberty we must not only provide institutional solutions, but we must continue the long term fight against unscientific nonsense in various pseudo-moral, pseudo-rational and pseudo-scientific forms.

    And the BHL’s are yet another form of emotional mysticism, distracting us from discovering and obtaining the liberty that our ancestors created, and that we have incrementally lost.

    Nice people are a nice thing to share space with. However, nice people who are merely nice, but also WRONG, are just damaging to mankind. Rawls was damaging. And the BHL’s are just adding artificial flavoring to the mix.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-01 08:25:00 UTC

  • THE LOGIC OF LIBERTY AND PROPERTY INVERTED Instead of defining liberty as a stat

    THE LOGIC OF LIBERTY AND PROPERTY INVERTED

    Instead of defining liberty as a statement of victimhood – as rebellion by the weak: rights to property, we can state liberty as a positive – assertions by the strong: rights if exclusion and prohibitions on parasitism.

    NECESSARY RIGHTS

    1) Right of Private Property (right of exclusion from use)

    2) Right of Boycott (right of exclusion from trade)

    3) Right of Secession (right of exclusion from governance)

    Unless you have these three rights of exclusion, you are not free. You merely have permission.

    All rights are rights of exclusion. A fact which is missing from the logic of ethics.

    Freedom is the right to exclude, and that exclusion is what makes voluntary cooperation the only possible moral action we can take.

    By exclusion we boycott cooperation with those who do not engage in equally moral suppression of free riding.

    By the promise of violence we insure our boycott.

    This is the logic of aristocracy vs the logic of bourgeoisie and proletarian.

    The weak beg. The strong demand.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-27 08:12:00 UTC

  • THE ALTERNATIVE TO PSEUDOSCIENCE The natural state of man is to adapt his family

    THE ALTERNATIVE TO PSEUDOSCIENCE

    The natural state of man is to adapt his family (reproductive organization), and his rules of cooperation (property rights, norms, rituals and myths) to the continuous changes in the structure of production made possible by his technical advancements.

    There exists no natural state of man, only natural PROPERTIES of man. Two of those properties are the necessity of voluntary cooperation and the problem of free riding that emerges from it.

    Any cooperative organism must solve the problem as it evolves: creating incentives both in favor of production and against free riding and parasitism.

    Expansion of production in a division of knowledge and labor increases the opportunity for free riding and parasitism because of increasing anonymity of the participants the structure of production.

    Expansion of production requires increases in the complexity of the tools of cooperation: those that assist in transforming the imperceptible to analogy to experience, such that increasing complexity is open to calculation; and such that information distribution expands as well.

    Each major advancement in human cooperation has been achieved by increasing the information processing capacity of the population such that not only actions are open to voluntary coordination, but also such that free riding is increasingly suppressed.

    When we invented government we traded pervasive high transaction costs from violence fraud and deception, for systemic free riding and corruption. Thanks to Hoppe we know how to construct some necessary institutions that will make it more difficult to conduct free riding and corruption.

    But the answer ‘no government’ is actually admission of failure. It is still necessary for groups to coordinate their interests in a commons that produces beneficial common goods. Just as it is beneficial for shopping mall owners and market owners to produce investments that are beneficial to both vendors and customers as well as owners. Just as it is beneficial for all of us to construct norms that prohibit all forms of free riding, discounting, cheating and stealing.

    Competing government do not solve the problem of high local transaction costs. So the argument in favor of heterogeneous competing polities works if and only if there is some monarch that profits from all equally and polices all equally. (Which is where ROthbard and Mises got their ideas from: the ghetto.) For people to grand one another property rights voluntarily without a superior state or empire, they will require universally low transaction costs – at least locally. People demonstrate this everywhere and anywhere in history.

    So we are left with a large number of private monarchies as the compromise between the minimum homogeneity required, and the maximum size wherein a polity maintains a commonality of interest.

    At present, large city states with homogenous polities (the nordics) that are able to create reasonable amounts of liberty.. Even heavy redistribution is often tolerable to homogenous polities. Landed heterogeneous polities are notoriously intolerant of redistribution because it’s actually bad for the productive classes.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 13:29:00 UTC

  • SCIENTIFIC FAILURE VS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE (good piece) While I’d have to ag

    SCIENTIFIC FAILURE VS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE

    (good piece)

    While I’d have to agree with Hoppe that Hayek didn’t focus enough on property rights, and did focus too much on psychology (like all good classical liberals), his study of the institutions of law are decidedly NOT pseudoscientific.

    Hayek’s work is hard to describe as failure, because it certainly was an improvement in intellectual history, even if he didn’t identify the causal properties of cooperation. But he did give us the arguments for necessity of the common law and the constitution.

    There is a very great difference between SCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Weber, Hayek, Kronecker, Poincaré, Brouwer and PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Marx, Freud, Cantor, Russell, Keynes, Mises, Popper and Rothbard.

    What does it say about us that we don’t remember those scientific failures but we are attracted to pseudoscientific arguments like moths to the sociological flame?

    Is that because it is more comforting to rely upon the promise of the pseudoscientific and non falsifiable, than the promise of the scientific that is demonstrable as failure?

    A study of our history knowledge doesn’t tell us that. It tells us the opposite. That when we prove something is false that is when we know something that is true – that our idea was false. When we obtain new explanatory power we love to make use of it like a child with a new toy – rarely testing it. We love our pseudosciences.

    Hayek didn’t give us pseudoscience. Like Newton he was accurate but imprecise.

    Curt Doolittle

    Kiev.

    — notes for later —

    Weber was right that the advancement of civilization requires multiple special disciplines of ‘calculation’ such that

    Mises was right that a fundamental problem was economic calculation.

    Hayek was right that a fundamental problem is information.

    Hayek was right that simple rules are necessary

    Hayek was right that the common law and the constitution are required rules and rule systems.

    Rothbard I think was just plain wrong outside of his history.

    Hoppe was right as far as he took his arguments – which was pretty far. (Although I really wish he’d give up on argumentation.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 13:28:00 UTC

  • MISES WAS JUST WRONG : APRIORI VS FALSIFICATION Mises was a victim of the Jewish

    MISES WAS JUST WRONG : APRIORI VS FALSIFICATION

    Mises was a victim of the Jewish enlightenment (just as Hayek suggested) and could not escape pseudoscientific text and verbalism endemic to Jewish culture. He failed to give us the logic he ‘sensed’ that describes human action by attempting to suggest that, like jewish fanaticism, it was possible to conduct deduction from first principles. It is not.

    It is however possible for all humans to TEST statements reduced to some analogy to experience by way of logics or instrumentation. This “universal-ness”: the marginal indifference in human incentives – is the source of logic: reduction to perception.

    So we can either reform praxeology by correcting it through inversion from a form of deduction to an empirical method of testing the rationality of incentives, or we can discard praxeology as a failed attempt at creating logic of cooperation that underlies all economic activity.

    My preference is to give Mises credit by REFORMING praxeology, which would have the benefit of undermining the remaining body of pseudoscientific libertarian dogma that, because it is actually immoral in content, HINDERS the progress of liberty by providing the same false hope that ALL scriptural pseudo rational, pseudoscientific methods of inquiry do. We must remember that ratio-scientific investigation, meritocratic evolution norms, meritocratic evolution of common laws, and meritocratic circulation of elites, are slow and expensive methods of change. And that pseudoscience and pseudo-rational arguments are simply attempts to obtain some end at a discount on the expenditure of effort necessary to achieve that end empirically (by empirically, I mean “demonstrably”).

    I would also prefer to discredit all of Rothbard’s pseudoscientific ghetto pseudo scientific while preserving his historical contributions to the history of fiat money and credit. His critique of the State, as that of Mises’ is a significant contribution to the criticism of political thought. However neither Mises nor Rothbard contributed what did Hoppe: a solution to the problem of formal institutions. The three men, Mises, rothbard and Hoppe, did manage to give us our first attempt at the formal logic of cooperation. Albeit, like all Continentals they failed to provide it in anglo-empirical and therefore scientific terms.

    So my preference is to reform libertarianism and give credit to their contributions – contributions I have obviously made use of.

    And that is my objective.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 09:44:00 UTC

  • THE NATURAL STATE OF MAN (callout) (gem) –“The natural state of man is to adapt

    THE NATURAL STATE OF MAN

    (callout) (gem)

    –“The natural state of man is to adapt his family (reproductive organization), and his rules of cooperation (property rights, norms, rituals and myths) to the continuous changes in the structure of production made possible by his technical advancements.”–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 09:04:00 UTC

  • WESTERN (ANGLO) POLICY IN FOUR RULES 1) Secular Christianity (“Human Rights Wors

    WESTERN (ANGLO) POLICY IN FOUR RULES

    1) Secular Christianity (“Human Rights Worship”)

    Individuals have property rights including to the self, that states may not violate. (This is ‘rule of law’ or ‘natural law’ that constrains the state – any state and all states.) Property rights, (human rights), science and Reason therefore determine the validity of any discourse, and no other values ever, take precedence over them.

    2) Commercial Prosperity (“mutually beneficial voluntary exchange”)

    Principle: Adam Smith. The wealthier we are the more choices we have, the better lives that we have. (This actually appears to have limits.)

    3) Good Commercial World Citizenship (“”)

    You have the obligation to conduct your competition through trade, and that is the only competition that you may conduct – because it is mutually beneficial. If you conduct any other kind of competition then we will also engage in that competition to protect the pattern of trade.

    4) Self Determination – You may choose your own government. However, you and your government will be held responsible for 1,2 and 3 above. You will be allowed to select any self determination that does not violate 1,2 and 3.

    UNFORTUNATELY THE WEST ONLY TALKS ABOUT SELF DETERMINATION. WHICH CONFUSES THE “DEVELOPING” WORLD.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-22 06:41:00 UTC

  • SKASKIW : A CONVERSATION WITH GENGHIS KHAN (important) (new development) (Proper

    http://dailyanarchist.com/2014/02/16/a-conversation-with-genghis-khanROMAN SKASKIW : A CONVERSATION WITH GENGHIS KHAN

    (important) (new development) (Propertarianism)

    Roman is a gifted writer. And in this short piece he has produced the first literary application of Propertarianism’s additions to ethics.

    Moved. Awed. Inspired.

    (PLEASE SHARE!)

    Roman Skaskiw

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-17 03:25:00 UTC

  • WHAT DO WE VIOLATE? –“…I’ve come to think of violence as amoral. The rapist,

    WHAT DO WE VIOLATE?

    –“…I’ve come to think of violence as amoral. The rapist, and the victim who kills him in self defense… one is immoral, the other moral. Nothing to do with the violence itself, but the violation of rights.”–

    One can produce property without rights — all living creatures do.

    But one cannot produce a right except via contractual exchange.

    So then, do property rights have any meaning outside of the context of a state or polity with whom one ostensibly holds a contract?

    What is the point of using this term “rights”? Its meaningless except in the context of some contract or other – a contract libertarians would almost always refuse to enter.

    You create your property by your own actions. If people try to appropriate you property against your wishes, then that is not a violation of your magical rights – its just an attack against your property. Period.

    In fact, the only reason to define morality any differently is to logically excuse parasitism.

    Then the only limit to your property is your own parasitism : free riding on others who produce benefits that you consume but that you fail to pay for.

    We need no rights whatsoever. We need only recognize property is the result of our actions. Nothing more.

    All platonism is false.

    We are supposed to be the smart people. We should try to demonstrate it. Libertarian shouldn’t mean “stupid”. Too often it does.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-16 11:14:00 UTC

  • VIOLENCE IS A VIRTUE NOT A VICE **If you will not fight for property rights, you

    VIOLENCE IS A VIRTUE NOT A VICE

    **If you will not fight for property rights, you have not earned those rights in exchange from those who DO fight for them. Instead, you’re just another beggar trying to get them at a discount. Just another free rider on the backs of others. Just another parasite.**

    The source of liberty is the organize use of violence to suppress criminal, unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial behavior.

    Violence is a virtue, not a vice.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-16 04:21:00 UTC