Curt Doolittle

Theme: Property

  • WAR War is the means by which one set of property rights and allocations within

    WAR

    War is the means by which one set of property rights and allocations within a geography is replaced by the application of violence with another set of property rights and allocations.

    I don’t write much about war because it’s emotionally loaded, and I don’t see it as any different from any other form of human activity – it’s just a really expensive activity, a really risky activity, and unfortunately, a necessary and pervasive activity.

    I don’t view war as good or bad. It is either necessary to obtain, restore, or implement, property rights of one set or another. My only concern is whether those rights are higher trust, more individualist or lower trust tyrannical rights.

    (Thanks to Brian Anderson for the reminder.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-06 16:25:00 UTC

  • Do Convicted Criminals Deserve Human Rights Since They Willingly Deprived Someone Else Of Theirs?

    When someone violates NATURAL RIGHTS (life, liberty, property, by fraud, theft or violence) we punish them by removing their NATURAL RIGHTS, by  imprisoning them.   Natural rights are NECESSARY RIGHTS to engage in cooperation via exchanges within society: life, liberty, and property.

    We pay for our natural rights by forgoing our opportunity for fraud, theft and violence. 

    We also pay for access to opportunities to interact with others by paying the cost of effort to deonstrate manners, and the cost of forgone opportunities for stealing from others by respecting ethics and morals. 

    For violations of normative laws, we are ostracized from opportunity (boycotted) rather than punished or incarcerated. But we retain our natural rights as long as we can find someone to voluntarily exchange with us who does not refuse to boycott us because of our manners, ethics and morals.

    However, we do not remove anyone’s HUMAN RIGHTS any longer for any reason.  This is in no small part, because we are wealthy enough that deprivation from society and consumption alone are enough to coerce people into respecting both natural laws, and for normative laws.

    The international declaration of human rights was created in no small part to control the abuse of individuals by communist countries. It is a DESIRED list of rights.  This DESIRED list of rights is a CONTRACT between GOVERNMENTS. This contract is a TREATY.  This treaty demands that member countries hold governments accountable for the treatment of individuals, and to sanction those countries if they do not. Even to the point of replacing a government for their abuses of their individuals.

    It is important that we understad that this charter is a treaty by governments that like a treaty for the promise of mutual defense, binds other countries such that they are required to use legal, financial and economic sanctions against countries that violate the rights that the charter agrees all people in all countries, regardless of government, possess.

    In effect, as a worldwide treaty, it is a worldwide constitution for that limits the powers of governemnts.  This is waht RULE OF LAW means: it means that governemtns, and the people in them,  are limited to the actions that are allowed in their constitutions.  Rule of law does not mean that there are laws. It means that the government itself is bound by law.

    The Charter of human rights is a very simple document. It is vaguely divided into sections. The first few are restatements of NATURAL LAW. After that there are a variety of prohibitions against the government, that require that all people in society must be treated equally before the law.  That they have the right to live ordinary lives, marry,  have a family, make friends, earn a living, 

    Articles 23, 24, 25, and 26, were necessary to gain the support of the socialist and communist countries, in the same way that the north was required to allow slavery in order to gain the signatures of the south during the american civil war.  This is the primary problem with the declaration of human rights: is that these are not possible, not testable, and not achievable except in rare circumstances and for short periods of time – and they create a moral hazard as well as perverse incentives.  These are POSITIVE rights. And positive rights can only exist as preferences, not rights. 

    Article 29 specifies how you PAY FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, and that is by granting them to other people equally.  Rights require exchange. Without exchange the term ‘rights’ is meaningless.  One does not HAVE human rights as if they fall from heavens. One is granted them by others, and pays for them over one’s lifetime by granting the same rights to others.

    Otherwise the document is not terribly different from the American Bill of Rights.

    What I hope to get accross here is that these are not divine rights, nor necesary and therefore natural rights, they are human rights, and human rights are those that we choose to require, by threat of force and economic punishment, that all governments must hold to.

    https://www.quora.com/Do-convicted-criminals-deserve-human-rights-since-they-willingly-deprived-someone-else-of-theirs

  • CAN ANYONE EDIT MY LATIN? “Proprietas est scriptura nobilitate, violentia est os

    CAN ANYONE EDIT MY LATIN?

    “Proprietas est scriptura nobilitate, violentia est os atramentum”

    “Property is the scripture of nobility, and violence is its ink”

    It’s not right. “os” isn’t right I don’t think.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-31 11:15:00 UTC

  • DEFINITIONS OF: LIBERTY, LIBERTARIAN, LIBERTARIANISM, ANARCHO CAPITALISM. Hopefu

    DEFINITIONS OF: LIBERTY, LIBERTARIAN, LIBERTARIANISM, ANARCHO CAPITALISM.

    Hopefully I will do this subject justice.

    (Although I might piss a few people off as well.)

    First draft.

    HISTORY:

    Konkin’s History of the Libertarian Movement Is an accurate record of libertarianism. But there are many terms that derive from the root word ‘liberty’ and the preference for liberty. This is an attempt to reduce confusion by adding clarity.

    DEFINITIONS:

    ———–

    LIBERTY:

    (1) Liberty as an instinctual preference:

    A biological predisposition in favor of new stimuli expressed as freedom from constraint in obtaining new stimuli.

    (2) Liberty as a stated preference:

    All other things being equal, a preference for private property rights, and the grant of reciprocal freedom from coercion – of the body, actions and property.

    (3) Liberty as a Political Philosophy commonly called Classical Liberalism or Constitutionalism, or the cult of the Founding Fathers. And more commonly referred to by the now appropriated and abused term “freedom”. See glossary for “appropriated term”.

    An institutional model where all legal processes are fully articulated and powers balanced such that the egalitarian dependence on shared responsibility for enforcement of property rights would be perpetuated inside a government that was given the powers necessary to provide for defense of the multiple new states.

    The system of ethics that they sought to embody in its enforcing political institutions is based upon the early indo-european ethics of the ritualistic enfranchisement of heroic warriors by granting them in the egalitarian rights as equals to the dispensation of violence: more accurately stated as private property rights of fellow warriors and the obligation to enforce them.

    In practical terms, enfranchisement is the extension of peerage to others, in exchange for respect from others for, and the requirement to enforce, the property rights of all shareholders. This practice evolved because of early military tactics of the indo european cattle herders. It’s fascinating because this egalitarianism leads to the need to conduct debate rather than issue commands, and eventually led to logic, science, and western civilization as we know it. Small things in large numbers have vast consequences. Others in history would not likely articulate it this way but that is the contemporary translation devoid of antique sentimental loading.

    As participation in the market increases, and as economies increase, and as commerce increases in value, this martial tradition, for status signal reasons, and utilitarian reasons, was adopted by and granted to, the merchant classes – many of whom were also landed classes. The english created an organizational model that we call a ‘government’ that evolved incrementally, and which provided for preservation of these rights despite great differences in power, as enfranchisement was incrementally expanded.

    When the landed classes would not readily grant the new craftsman, small shop, commercial and banking classes equal protection and property rights, and instead sought rents on the merchants in the economy, as if they were still labor outside the economy, the merchants were incrementally added in order to preserve the dependence upon norms. But when, after the Thirty Years War, it became apparent that increases in wealth were both squandered and damaging to Europe as a whole, the intellectuals sought out a new order, which would justify the taking of power from the nobility and spreading it to the more ‘responsible’ classes that were productive. And from this we get the enlightenment – the english empirical version which led to positive ends, and the french moral and despotic version that had precisely the opposite ends.

    This same argumentative and ideological request for power would be played out in different language when, under the new courage given intellectuals by Darwin, the church could have its vast holdings appropriated to fund the new secular states, and the equal freedom given to intellectuals by Kant and Hegel, would lead Marx to create his new secularly stated religion, as a means by which the labor classes, newly able to participate in the market, sought enfranchisement as well.

    LIBERTARIAN:

    1) A moral sentiment:

    A moral bias giving higher preference to liberty than competing moral sentiments, the most dominant of which are (a) Harm/Care and (b) Loyalty, Respect, Proportionality and Purity. Left (communalists) are singularly biased toward (a), and right (aristocratic egalitarians) toward (a+b), and libertarians toward (c) Liberty and Proportionality. Although Proportionality is considered differently by right (paternalistic – earned) and left (maternalistic – innate) factions. (This left right divide is only a difference of where the innate ends and earned begins. In paternal societies innate is a property of the family where, and earned one of the polity. In maternal societies the family extends to the polity. This is generally a description of right and left instinctual biases – reproductive strategies. Males desiring strong tribe and females desiring their offspring get the greatest opportunity within the tribe.)

    2) Libertarian as a statement of Political Preference:

    A preference for the least government intervention in the economy as possible. There are many thinkers and groups that fall into this category, including most conservatives, as well as classical liberals.

    The points of demarcation between social conservatives (religious right), economic conservatives (classical liberals), and institutional conservatives (libertarians) are, in no particular order:

    (a) Whether we consider the written constitution, and the multi-house form of government adequate to preserve liberty, if observed, taught, and enforced by ostracization as a norm.

    (b) Whether it is necessary to enforce norms by threat of law, or (as libertarians argue) the market is a sufficient means of enforcing normative ethics.)

    (c) Whether we possess rights of exclusion and ostracization from a territory because of demonstrated, or stated, failure to adhere to norms.

    (d) Whether we consider religion an arbitrary or required norm, and therefore membership or exclusion from the market and territory.

    These are not arbitary statemetns, but estimations about the general aggregate behavior of man. The curious one is (a), since it is a demonstrated failure. It is not so much that the system of government could not be corrected, but failure to ascribe original intent, the war between north and south over the political control that would result from the expanded western territory, the failure of the south to succeed in secession, the failure to adequately constrain the judiciary when modifying the constitution, to proscribed processes, the failure to adequately protect against abuse of the 14th amendment, and perhaps, most importantly, the failure to create a house of proletarians with necessary rights in anticipation of the destruction of the family as a common reproductive interest, was such that this model as conceived resulted in a failure to protect liberty from incremental tyranny and return to the matrilineal and tyrannically homogenous society under total enfranchisement.

    ALSO: Libertarians are empirically wrong on the subject of norms, and conservatives simply lack a means of articulating the conditions under which it is permissible to altern norms – such as homosexuality, now that we know it is a biological factor not a choice. They have no exit, even if they would adapt if they could. So the libertarian and conservative groups remain divided. (Which I am admittedly trying to change.)

    Furthermore, the right uses an ancient, well-known and well-understood tactic of rebellion against oppression: religion, and the use of metahorical rather than secular rational language. It is the same religion that the simple people used to resist roman norms and culture while finding community in the newly mobile mediterranean world created by Rome. It is the same technique used by the germans to free themselves from mediterranean trade, tax, government and morals.

    This is also the strategy in use by the Religion of Postmodernism and the institution of the Democratic Socialist State. Having demonized mystical religion in favor of the religion of ‘scientific socialism’, when Communism and Socialism were demonstrated to be failures in both theory and practice it became necessary to resort to Chomskyian ‘framing’ in order to replace religious mysticism with contra-rational falsehoods and contra-factual impossibilities that can be constantly repeatedin contradictory contexts thereby creating an alternate reality of non-rational but contextual associations by way of chanting – just as islam does through daily repetition, christianity and judaism do through rituals and prayer.

    All religous systems bring people into groups to evoke the sense of spirituality, which is our pre-human desire to surrender our minds and wills to the elation of the running pack (yes, that is what spirituality is caused by), and then to repeat mantras and narratives in this circumstance.

    Tribal peoples in the tropical belt do the same thing by chanting and dancing – it’s all the same process.

    Western heroicism was accomplished by repeating some variation of either the prehistoric Indo-european, Homeric, Roman, Carolingian, or Arthurian legends around the feast’s fire pits. Americans repeated the narrative of the Cult of the Revolution around hearths, churches and schools, and in books, pamphlets and speeches.

    It is the same process in every human society. It works. We evolved to run down game together. That is why we look different from apes, and act like wolves. We are very efficient at running and dissipating heat. We can run down any animal on earth. We do not have to fight them. Just chase them as a pack until they are exhausted. Watch a video of Masai crossing a plain. That is human biological advantage.

    The process of repeating ideas within a context allows us to create intuitive associations and therefore intuitive responses, instead of depending upon our demonstrably frail reason. It is our pre-rational system of learning. We use it still today.

    And because nearly all of our decisions are made intuitively. So these intuitions end up with greater expression than those of our reason. In the case of postmodernism (progressivism), and christianity (social conservatism), these narratives are irrational by false logic and fact (progressivism) or arational by mystical allegory (conservatism).

    LIBERTARIANISM

    1) Libertarianism as a Political Philosophy:

    As articulated by Rothbard, libertarianism it is a rigorous, analytically stated ethical and political philosophy originating with natural law. The ethical system is based on very simple rules: your body and those things that you obtain by voluntary exchange or ‘homesteading’, are yours, and you have a monopoly on the use of them. Don’t steal, dont commit fraud, and don’t initiate violence, and respect the same of others.

    His criticism is that the state is a corporation of shareholders who we call politicians and bureaucrats, who farm the populace by extract unwilling fees from hard working people, in order to fund their own indolence rather than do the equally hard work of taking risks in the market for goods, services and labor. Further, enforcement of norms is unnecessary because the market for competition and reputation will instill the proper commercial normative respect for property without the intervention of a government (something privately owned), or a state(something abstractly owned).

    Libertarianism was designed to create an opposition religion to the Marxist, Socialist, and Postmodernist religions. It is an ideological system based upon the Jewish resistance ethics of the ghetto. The primary content of this ethical system is a very limited concept of property rights, where those property rights are absent the prohibitions on involuntary transfer by asymmetry and externality, that are necessary to fund investments in the commons of high trust norms. It is the ethics of the low trust society. This is why it is a demonstrated failure outside of a narrow niche of americans. Because the rest of americans, while they cannot articulate these ideas in rational terms, correctly intuit that rothbardian libertarianism is immoral. Because it is. It is a means of rebellion. It is a religion. And its ethics are immoral in the broader context of the western aristocratic social order, which expressly prohibits (a) profit by asymmetry – and even requires warranty to prove it, (b) profit by externality, (c) profit without contributory action, (d) profit by free-riding. (As well as other permutations outside the scope of this essay.)

    2) Libertarianism as a Political Ideology : Having observed the methodology of Marxists in propagating ideas, Libertarianism has been promoted by the Mises institute into an ideology. An ideology is a set of memes that attempt to obtain power for a body of people in a political system. Ideology is different from philosophy in that the larger community relies upon representatives (intellectuals, priests, symbolic individuals) and argues by analogy, rather than making use of the precise arguments of their philosophy, if they oculd rationally master and articulate it. That these short narratives are the equivlaent of mythic narratives is not material since the purpose is to motivate people emotionally to action, not intellectually to agreement. If you understand this then you will understand the purpose of most political ideology: motivation to act.

    ANARCHO-CAPITALISM

    1) Anarcho-capitalist branch of libertarianism: Anarcho Capitalism is one of a number of monikers representing different factoins within the libertarian political, moral, sentimental movements. This moniker was necessary in order to distinguish those followers of rothbard and mises, from those who also used the term libertarian, and had other rationales and arguments – and leadership.

    Anarcho-Capitalism is a more specific, and very thoroughly articulated, extension of libertarian philosophy to include the works of additional thinkers, the most important of which is Hans Hoppe. Hoppe’s insight was technical: that we could solve the problem of the natural behavior of monopolistic bureaucracies by replacing mandatory bureaucracies with private insurance companies, provide for defense, justice, and policing with private organizations. Since there is only one ‘law’ in anarcho capitalism – private property – then the constitution doesn’t need to be written, or modified. The common law practiced by judges is sufficient means of adapting to change.

    Some intellectuals (myself included) consider Anarcho Capitalism one of the most interesting and successful political research programs. It may be the only valuable research program in the last century, if we consider economics to be outside of politics (wrongly). Others treat it like an exetension of libertarian philosophy, and others practice it as an ideology. But this is a description of the different rhetorical abilities of practitioners and little else.

    – Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-31 10:47:00 UTC

  • Libertarianism: In A Stateless Society Based On Private Property Rights, How Would You Avoid Imprisonment By Another Individual Purchasing All The Property Surrounding Your Property?

    A stateless society based upon property rights is a broader definition than Rothbardian Libertarianism, which would argue that you must compete via price for access to your land.

    But that is a relatively silly thing to say given the logic at hand:

    The questoin is, if you have property and it’s capable of being locked, then how did you get there? Were  you stealing access already?   Did you sell your land to someone without thinking of preserving that access?  Or lastly, did someone buy your access somehow and now desire to charge you for it?

    The problem is, that this circumstance actually doesn’t arise, unless you were committing an act of theft or rent in the first place.  And if that is the case, then you have obtained access to your property at a discount and as such must now pay full price for access, and pay the cost of your discount.

    I am not really sure this is a libertarian argument. it’s pretty ancient common law. Generally speaking most societies allow free passage on land boundaries just to avoid this problem.

    The libertarian argument doesn’t make instinctual moral sense to people because it sounds like an involuntary transfer without added value or compensation.  But the truth is that the circumstance can’t really occur unless you were obtaining access at a discount in the first place.

    https://www.quora.com/Libertarianism-In-a-stateless-society-based-on-private-property-rights-how-would-you-avoid-imprisonment-by-another-individual-purchasing-all-the-property-surrounding-your-property

  • Can Socialism/marxism/communism Work Without The Forced Coercion Of The Productive And The Abrogation Of Private Property?

    You are getting terrible answers here, and your question is a bit confusing. So lets clarify terms a bit first, and see if we can get you a decent response:

    1) Socialism is defined as the state ownership of property, and central management of production and distribution.

    2) Communism is the absence of private property.

    Which is why your question seems odd. Instead I think  you mean ‘socialistic’ which is what we have in westen democracies today:

    3) Democratic redistributive socialism is private control of property with heavy progressive taxation of profits. This is what we do in most countries today. It preserves both the ability of individuals to conduct economic calculation and the incentives necessary for them to act in concert to fulfill the desires of others for purely selfish reasons.  THe general argument is predicated on the idea of Pareto Efficiency: that you can take something from someone and give it to something else, as long as it does not make him worse off.  Which in political terms means that the individual does not lose his incentive to produce at the same level as he does prior to the theft of his property by the government for redistribution to others.   The logic of this is that for businesses to grow and expand, consumers must have money to spend and that more additional money is made when they spend it, and so, at least in the end result, everyone is always getting better over time.  … I will not follow the entire economic cycle here but in theory and practice, to a limited extent, it is not a bad idea even if it feels immoral to many of us.

    WHY THE SOCIALIST NON-ECONOMY DOES NOT WORK

    1) Prices are an information system that tells people what they need to do to satisfy the needs of others.

    2) Without prices it is impossible for humans to plan the production of complex goods.

    3) Without prices people cannot have the information needed to have the incentives to engage in productive activity.

    4) any attempt to use computers and static means of production would be forced in to autarkic production (a need to be totally self sustaining) by relative decrease in productivity, followed by constant impoverishment (See Cuba).

    It does not work outside of the family, and only works within the family, because of parental dictatorship, and our instincts for consanguineous cooperation and care-taking.

    The world has abandoned both communism and socialism, and has assumed highly redistributive consumer capitalism   Which is ‘socialistic’ but not technically socialist.  This maintains prices, and incentives, and the ability to plan complex production while taking as much profit as possible from producers without destroying incentives.

    It appears that outside of the west, most countries have or will, adopt totalitarian consumer capitalism, which in practice, in China for example, is an oligarchy running major state industries and finance, and redistribution in the form of easy credit and public services to ‘everyone else’.   This seems to be the pattern. It is not any different from what we have in the USA,  it’s just more obvious.

    But no, since communism is the abandonment of private property, no it is not possible, ever, under any circumstance, which is why it’s been abandoned.

    Socialism cannot exist either because it is not possible for people to operate an economy without money, prices and property, becasue neigher economic calculation nor incentives can exist.

    But that has not stopped the desire for it.  Any more than people have stopped the desire for the absurdity of divinities and afterlife.  These ideas are a religious need, a spiritual need, in many people.  SO this is why they have turned to the religion of Postmodernism as the newest reformation of socialism.

    POSTMODERNISM

    In response to the total failure of the Communist and Socialist agendas, both in theory and in practice, most of the left intellectuals have adopted Postmodernism which is where the idea that

    Forgive the long quote here in exchange for its value:

    “In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims.

    1) On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.

    2) On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.

    3) Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil.

    4) Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.

    5) Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.

    There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next.  Postmodernists are well aware of the contradictions—especially since their opponents relish pointing them out at every opportunity.

    They say that the West is deeply sexist, but they know very well that Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without.

    They say that Western capitalist countries are cruel to their poorer members, subjugating them and getting rich off them, but they know very well that the poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.

    Postmodernism is therefore first a political movement, and a brand of politics that has only lately come to relativism.” – Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism (2004)


    COMMUNISM->SOCIALISM ->POSTMODERNISM ARE RELIGIONS

    “Both religion and socialism started with a comprehensive vision that they believed to be true but not based on reason (various prophets; Rousseau Both visions were then challenged by visions based on rational epistemologies (early naturalist critics of religion; early liberal critics of socialism). Both religion and socialism responded by saying that they could satisfy the criteria of reason (natural theology; scientific socialism). Both religion and socialism then ran into serious problems of logic and evidence (Hume’s attacks on natural theology; Mises’s and Hayek’s attacks on socialist calculation). Both then responded in turn by attacking reality and reason (Kant and Kierkegaard; postmodernists).” – Hicks.

    CHOMSKY IS THE ONLY LEFT PHILOSOPHER
    Because he has mastered the art of using untrue language.  That is his contribution to the new religion of Postmodernism. He invented linguistic tricks that could deceive human beings.

    Cheers
    Curt.

    https://www.quora.com/Can-Socialism-Marxism-Communism-work-without-the-forced-coercion-of-the-productive-and-the-abrogation-of-private-property

  • Is Libertarianism The Same As Anarcho-capitalism?

    The other answers are not quite correct.  Hopefully I will do this subject justice.

    Konkin’s History of the Libertarian Movement Is an accurate record of libertarianism.  But there are many terms that derive from the root word ‘liberty’ and the preference for liberty.

    DEFINITIONS.

    LIBERTY: all other things being equal, a preference for private property rights, and the grant of reciprocal freedom from coercion  – of the body, actions and property.

    LIBERTARIAN:

    1) Libertarian as an instinctual desire. A biological predisposition in favor of new stimuli expressed as freedom from constraint in obtaining new stimuli.

    2) A moral sentiment: A moral bias giving higher preference to liberty than competing moral sentiments, the most dominant of which are (a) Harm/Care and (b) Loyalty, Respect, Proportionality and Purity.  Left (communalists) is singularly biased toward (a), and right (aristocratic egalitarians) toward (a+b), and libertarians toward (c) Liberty and Proportionality.  Although Proportionality is considered differently by right (paternalistic) and left (maternalistic) factions.

    3) Libertarian as a Political Preference: A preference for the least government intervention in the economy as possible.  There are many thinkers and groups that fall into this category, including most conservatives, as well as classical liberals. The point of demarcation between social conservatives (conservatism) and economic conservatives (libertarians) is whether it is necessary to enforce norms by threat of law, or (as libertarians argue) the market is a sufficient means of enforcing normative ethics.)  

    BTW: Libertarians are empirically wrong on this subject, and conservatives simply lack a means of articulating the conditions under which it is permissible to altern norms – such as homosexuality, now that we know it is a biological factor not a choice. They  have no exit, even if they would adapt if they could.  So the libertarian and conservative groups remain divided. (Which I am admittedly trying to change.)

    Furthermore, the right uses an ancient, well-known and well-understood tactic of rebellion against oppression: religion, and the use of metahorical rather than secular rational language. It is the same religion that the simple people used to resist roman norms and culture while finding community in the newly mobile mediterranean world created by Rome.  It is the same technique used by the germans to free themselves from mediterranean trade, tax, government and morals.

    This is also the strategy in use by the Religion of Postmodernism and the institution of the Democratic Socialist State. Having demonized mystical religion in favor of the religion of ‘scientific socialism’, when Communism and Socialism were demonstrated to be failures in both theory and practice it  became necessary to resort to Chomskyian ‘framing’ in order to replace religious mysticism with contra-rational falsehoods and contra-factual impossibilities that can be constantly repeatedin contradictory contexts thereby creating an alternate reality of non-rational but contextual associations by way of chanting – just as islam does through daily repetition, christianity and judaism do through rituals and prayer.

    All religous systems bring people into groups to evoke the sense of spirituality, which is our pre-human desire to surrender our minds and wills to the elation of the running pack (yes, that is what spirituality is caused by),  and then to repeat mantras and narratives in this circumstance. 

    Tribal peoples in the tropical belt do the same thing by chanting and dancing – its’ all the same process.

    Western heroicism was accomplished by repeating some variation of either the prehistoric Indo-european, Homeric, Roman, Carolingian, or Arthurian legends around the feast’s fire pits. Americans repeated the narrative of the Cult of the Revolution around hearths, churches and schools, and in books, pamphlets and speeches.

    It is the same process in every human society. It works. We evolved to run down game together. That is why we look different from apes, and act like wolves. We are very efficient at running and dissipating heat. We can run down any animal on earth. We do not have to fight them. Just chase them as a pack until they are exhausted.  Watch a video of Masai crossing a plain. That is human biological advantage.

    The process of repeating ideas within a context allows us to create intuitive associations and therefore intuitive responses, instead of depending upon our demonstrably frail reason.  It is our pre-rational system of learning. We use it still today.

    And because nearly all of our decisions are made intuitively. So these intuitions end up with greater expression than those of our reason.  In the case of postmodernism (progressivism), and christianity  (social conservatism), these narratives are irrational by false logic and fact (progressivism) or arational by mystical allegory (conservatism).

    4) Libertarianism as a Political Philosophy:
    As articulated by Rothbard, libertarianism it is a rigorous, analytically stated ethical and political philosophy originating with natural law. The ethical system is based on very smple rules: your body and those things that you obtain by voluntary exchange, are yours, and you have a monopoly on the use of them. Don’t steal, dont commit fraud, and don’t initiate violence, and you have respected the same of others.

    The state is a corporation of shareholders who we call bureaucrats, who extract unwilling fees from hard working people, in order to fund their own indolence rather than do the equally hard work of taking risks in the market. Norms are unnecessary because the market for competition and reputation will instill the proper commercial normative respect for property without the intervention of a government (something privately owned), or a state(something abstractly owned).

    Libertarianism was designed to create an opposition religion to the marxist, socialist, and postmodernist religions. It is an ideological system based upon the jewish rebellious ethic of the ghetto. The primary content of this ethical system is a very limited concept of  property rights, where those property rights are absent the prohibitions on involuntary transfer by asymmetry and externality, that are necessary to fund investments in the commons of high trust norms.  It is the ethics of the low trust society. This is why it is a demonstrated failure outside of a narrow niche of americans.  Because the rest of americans, while they cannot articulate these ideas in rational terms, correctly intuit that rothbardian libertarianism is immoral.  Because it is. It is a means of rebellion. It is a religion.  And its ethics are immoral. 

    5) Libertarianism as a Political Ideology : Having observed the methodology of Marxists in propagating ideas,  Libertarianism has been promoted by the Mises institute into an ideology. An ideology is a set of memes that attempt to obtain power for a body of people in a political system.  Ideology is  different from philosophy in that the larger community relies upon representatives (intellectuals, priests, symbolic individuals) and argues by analogy, rather than making use of the precise arguments of their philosophy, if they oculd rationally master and articulate it.   That these short narratives are the equivlaent of mythic narratives is not material since the purpose is to motivate people emotionally to action, not intellectually to agreement. If you understand this then you will understand the purpose of most political ideology: motivation to act.

    ANARCHO-CAPITALISM
    6) Anarcho-capitalist branch of libertarianism:  Anarcho Capitalism is one of a number of monikers representing different factoins within the libertarian political, moral, sentimental movements.  This moniker was necessary in order to distinguish those followers of rothbard and mises, from those who also used the term libertarian, and had other rationales and arguments – and leadership.

    Anarcho-Capitalism is a more specific, and very thoroughly articulated, extension of libertarian philosophy to include the works of additional thinkers, the most important of which is Hans Hoppe. Hoppe’s insight was technical: that we could solve the problem of the natural behavior of monopolistic bureaucracies by replacing mandatory bureaucracies with private insurance companies, provide for defense, justice, and policing with private organizations.  Since there is only one ‘law’ in anarcho capitalism – private property – then the constitution doesn’t need to be written, or modified.  Intellectuals (myself included) consider Anarcho Capitalism one of the most interesting and successful political research programs.  Others treat it like an exetension of libertarian philosophy, and others practice it as an ideology.  But this is a description of the different rhetorical abilities of practitioners and little else.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-libertarianism-the-same-as-anarcho-capitalism

  • Are There Any Absolute Unrestricted Rights?

    RIGHT
    A right is a universal, contractual obligation, reciprocally granted to others by voluntary consent to the agreement of all parties.

    NATURAL RIGHT
    A natural right is a NECESSARY right that we must have in order to form a cooperative division of labor – largely by avoiding violence, fraud, and theft.  The only natural right is property and all other rights derive from that one. Because the only possible rights you can reciprocally grant regardless of circumstances are those that do not require material resources from you:

    1) property rights (safety and freedom of your body, your children, your spouse and your things),

    2) Charity under temporary duress (mutual insurance to the extend of your capacity) 

    3) kindness without material cost (manners that signal safety and that you will respect both 1, and 2.) 

    Since these require no resources from you other than those at your disposal in a temporary emergency, then these are the only rights that all people regardless of condition can grant to others, and they are the only necessary rights in a division of knowledge and labor.

    HUMAN RIGHTS
    A Human RIght as we use the term, a statement of moral ambition.  They are aspirations, because very few things can be both necessary and reciprocally granted.  We call these aspirations rights in an effort to pursuade all governments to implement these aspiration with the force of law, thereby making the aspirations into contractual rights for all people within a polity. 

    The universal declaration of human rights consists almost entirely of derivations of property rights.   Where they do not, they suggest that we must work together to raise people out of poverty (but we cannot stop them from breeding – which is what would achieve it.)

    SUMMARY
    There is a very great difference between what is possible to possess as rights that are guaranteed by others, and those that we desire to have guaranteed by others. If it requires others act, then that is very difficult. If it requires others refrain from acting, that is somewhat easier. In current western governments we ask people to refrain from consumption by taxing them so that others may consume. So far this is the only possible way we have found to solve the problem of inequality of ability and circumstance in solving material disparities, even if immaterial disparities (no fraud theft or violence) are possible without material cost.


    PART II – ANSWERING ALL QUESTIONS ON RIGHTS
    (Added in response to the question: “Yes or No?”

    The problem is the wording of the question. It is either dishonest, misleading or erroneous.  But it is so common that it is worth answering:

    “Are there” is a play on words – a deception.  Are there where? Where are they? if they exist, where are they? If you cannot find them, then how do they exist? How do they come into being? If you can ACT to create  them, then you can make them exist by your actions. If many people act the same way, for some reason, and they require others to act the same way or they will ignore, ostracize or punish them, then that action is called a ‘norm’.

    So, if you say that some rights are required for us to cooperate, or at least, avoid violence, then if we want to cooperate we must act to create those rights. And by our actions, create a habit, that is a norm.

    One of the ways to create a habit is force (law). But most laws are the contractual codification of norms, in order to justify, and clarify, and create equal punishments for, violation of those norms.

    All rights are contract rights.  That contract can be temporary and conditional mutual consent. It can be habit within the group. It can be norm within society. It can be codified with the force of law.

    That some set of normative contract rights are NECESSARY for human life, in order to make cooperation POSSIBLE, is true.  Without some portfolio of property rights it is not possible to develop a division of knowledge and labor. It is not even possible for people to live together in tribes or families.

    That some OTHER set of normative contract rights is ADDITIONALLY necessary if we want to achieve other things in society, we need only develop the means of communicating and enforcing them.

    So, again, the original question is an erroneous play on words. A contract right cannot exist without someone else’s participation in an exchange of rights.  And normative contract rights require most people grant them and that they somehow punish offenders.  And legal rights require that most people have hired specialists (politicians and judges) to specialize in enforcing their legal rights.

    As such, there are  normative contractual rights that are necessary for human life in a polity EVEN IF there is no force of law.  These rights are commonly called NATURAL RIGHTS. Living in the natural world requires that we have them.

    Beyond necessary (natural) contract rights, there are PREFERRED normative contract rights that become possible ONLY because a market society is generating enough excess production through the division of knowledge labor and capital, that it becomes possible to MAINTAIN the norm of natural rights, while granting, conditionally, assuming the resources exist, those PREFERRED contractual rights.  In this case, these PREFERRED rights are not necessarily granted by individuals directly, but through the corporation we call the government, and its members – the bureaucracy. Thus creating a third party, albiet an organizational party, to the contract.

    Pareto efficiency is the idea that you can take some amount of taxes from group A and distribute those funds either directly (good) or via services (bad), to group B, without causing the producers of taxes in group A to stop working, or to slow their working, thereby making the act of taxation counter productive.  And, when, above, I say, that we can gant additional, not necessary, but preferred, contract rights to people, if we can, we are limited in their willingness to maintain the norm of NATURAL contract rights.

    Human (contract) Rights, in the sense that they have been written as a document called the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights,  include both NECESSARY and PREFERRED contract rights.  The additional rights that are preferred, are preferred because conditions must exist to make them possible, and those conditions are greater than any individual can grant to any other individual. Therefore human rights are a political, governmental, and legal contract right.

    The only necessary rights are property rights: Life, body, action, time, and property. Which means avoiding theft and violence.

    The necessary rights for the high trust society also appear to include (a) prohibition against fraud (fraud by misrepresentation), (b) requirement for fully informed symmetry of information in any exchange (fraud by omission) (c) warranty as a defense against fraud and asymmetry, (d) requirement of action to earn profit, (e) prohibition against free-riding, privatization (corruption), profit by impediment.  The net of these rules is that all exchanges are voluntary and that all competition takes place only in the market for goods and services.

    I believe that this answers all questions on the cause and difference between rights as contract rights, (necessary) natural rights,  and (preferred) human rights, and how they can be used as temporary (truce), normative (culture), and legal (political), and economic (positive) contractual rights.

    I could edit this a bit. But it is very close to the final word on rights as we understand them.

    https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-absolute-unrestricted-rights

  • Can Socialism/marxism/communism Work Without The Forced Coercion Of The Productive And The Abrogation Of Private Property?

    You are getting terrible answers here, and your question is a bit confusing. So lets clarify terms a bit first, and see if we can get you a decent response:

    1) Socialism is defined as the state ownership of property, and central management of production and distribution.

    2) Communism is the absence of private property.

    Which is why your question seems odd. Instead I think  you mean ‘socialistic’ which is what we have in westen democracies today:

    3) Democratic redistributive socialism is private control of property with heavy progressive taxation of profits. This is what we do in most countries today. It preserves both the ability of individuals to conduct economic calculation and the incentives necessary for them to act in concert to fulfill the desires of others for purely selfish reasons.  THe general argument is predicated on the idea of Pareto Efficiency: that you can take something from someone and give it to something else, as long as it does not make him worse off.  Which in political terms means that the individual does not lose his incentive to produce at the same level as he does prior to the theft of his property by the government for redistribution to others.   The logic of this is that for businesses to grow and expand, consumers must have money to spend and that more additional money is made when they spend it, and so, at least in the end result, everyone is always getting better over time.  … I will not follow the entire economic cycle here but in theory and practice, to a limited extent, it is not a bad idea even if it feels immoral to many of us.

    WHY THE SOCIALIST NON-ECONOMY DOES NOT WORK

    1) Prices are an information system that tells people what they need to do to satisfy the needs of others.

    2) Without prices it is impossible for humans to plan the production of complex goods.

    3) Without prices people cannot have the information needed to have the incentives to engage in productive activity.

    4) any attempt to use computers and static means of production would be forced in to autarkic production (a need to be totally self sustaining) by relative decrease in productivity, followed by constant impoverishment (See Cuba).

    It does not work outside of the family, and only works within the family, because of parental dictatorship, and our instincts for consanguineous cooperation and care-taking.

    The world has abandoned both communism and socialism, and has assumed highly redistributive consumer capitalism   Which is ‘socialistic’ but not technically socialist.  This maintains prices, and incentives, and the ability to plan complex production while taking as much profit as possible from producers without destroying incentives.

    It appears that outside of the west, most countries have or will, adopt totalitarian consumer capitalism, which in practice, in China for example, is an oligarchy running major state industries and finance, and redistribution in the form of easy credit and public services to ‘everyone else’.   This seems to be the pattern. It is not any different from what we have in the USA,  it’s just more obvious.

    But no, since communism is the abandonment of private property, no it is not possible, ever, under any circumstance, which is why it’s been abandoned.

    Socialism cannot exist either because it is not possible for people to operate an economy without money, prices and property, becasue neigher economic calculation nor incentives can exist.

    But that has not stopped the desire for it.  Any more than people have stopped the desire for the absurdity of divinities and afterlife.  These ideas are a religious need, a spiritual need, in many people.  SO this is why they have turned to the religion of Postmodernism as the newest reformation of socialism.

    POSTMODERNISM

    In response to the total failure of the Communist and Socialist agendas, both in theory and in practice, most of the left intellectuals have adopted Postmodernism which is where the idea that

    Forgive the long quote here in exchange for its value:

    “In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims.

    1) On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.

    2) On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.

    3) Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil.

    4) Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.

    5) Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.

    There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next.  Postmodernists are well aware of the contradictions—especially since their opponents relish pointing them out at every opportunity.

    They say that the West is deeply sexist, but they know very well that Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without.

    They say that Western capitalist countries are cruel to their poorer members, subjugating them and getting rich off them, but they know very well that the poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.

    Postmodernism is therefore first a political movement, and a brand of politics that has only lately come to relativism.” – Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism (2004)


    COMMUNISM->SOCIALISM ->POSTMODERNISM ARE RELIGIONS

    “Both religion and socialism started with a comprehensive vision that they believed to be true but not based on reason (various prophets; Rousseau Both visions were then challenged by visions based on rational epistemologies (early naturalist critics of religion; early liberal critics of socialism). Both religion and socialism responded by saying that they could satisfy the criteria of reason (natural theology; scientific socialism). Both religion and socialism then ran into serious problems of logic and evidence (Hume’s attacks on natural theology; Mises’s and Hayek’s attacks on socialist calculation). Both then responded in turn by attacking reality and reason (Kant and Kierkegaard; postmodernists).” – Hicks.

    CHOMSKY IS THE ONLY LEFT PHILOSOPHER
    Because he has mastered the art of using untrue language.  That is his contribution to the new religion of Postmodernism. He invented linguistic tricks that could deceive human beings.

    Cheers
    Curt.

    https://www.quora.com/Can-Socialism-Marxism-Communism-work-without-the-forced-coercion-of-the-productive-and-the-abrogation-of-private-property

  • If Democracy Is Forcefully Enforced In A Country By Another, Wouldn’t It Be Called Dictatorship On The Enforcer’s Part?

    It is not dictatorship it is conquest.  Conquest is any alteration of the current allocation of property rights, property allocation  and norms, by force, whether that force be direct (violence and theft) or indirect (the promise of violence or theft in the event of non-compliance.)

    The justifying argument is generally that all other forms of government are even more corrupt that democracy.  This is questionable in practice as democracy seems to be a peculiarity of western civlization, and doesn’t seem to work very well elsewhere.  In india for example, corruption is so pervasive that the country stagnates. Whereas in China where the government is very strong, and now an oligarchy, the government managed to make everyone literate and move the economy much faster than India.

    Consumer capitalism and property rights are meaningful exports. THe tradition of democracy looks as though it has proven to be a failure outside of western Europe – where corruption is simply very naturally low due to ancient cultural reasons.

    https://www.quora.com/If-democracy-is-forcefully-enforced-in-a-country-by-another-wouldnt-it-be-called-dictatorship-on-the-enforcers-part