Curt Doolittle

Theme: Property

  • What does free speech have to do with copyright law?

    An interesting question from Mises.org:

    ” What does free speech have to do with copyright law?”

    It’s fascinating how this fairly simple set of ideas can exist in the public discourse without understanding the rational foundation upon which the concepts of free speech and copyright are based. a) Books, magazines, movies, plays, music (at least, in theory, music with lyrics), advertising, speeches, lectures, photographs, works of art, are products that market ideas (largely narratives.) Copyright law attempts to protect narratives from theft just as patents protect manufactured goods, from profiteering by copying and redistributing other people’s inventions. b) Any of these ‘narrative product’ may contain political speech.(content) c) Determination of political content is extremely difficult. Harmful or beneficial political content is hard to judge (pornography for example), and therefore the law (as a profession) seeks to avoid having to make those decisions. d) Free speech as a practical constitutional concept rests on two assumptions: d.i – that the admitted harm that comes to society from free speech is offset by the protections we obtain from free speech. d.ii — And to narrow these protections to just those that are overtly political is extremely difficult to the point of practical impossibility. e) Some products are political by definition, and copyright can be used to deny political works to the market, and especially intellectual products that are purely social and political in nature. f) copyrights (like patents) should not allow a product to be held from the market, for the purpose of increasing it’s price. (Granted a monopoly.) So, speech and copyright law are effectively tied-concepts because they are mutually dependent. One cannot have copyright without speech, because all copyright is dependent upon speech. We would have far less speech (content) and experimentation (innovation) without copyrights. The scope of speech that needs protection is untestable, and perhaps unknowable, and it is therefore impossible to regulate by content. The argument from the Anarchist position is that copyrights AS THEY ARE CONSTRUCTED create a host of reasons for abusive government, regardless of the attempts of the creators of copyright law to prevent just such abuses. But the practical, measurable empirical evidence is that copyrights do improve innovation, wihc in turn, improves competitiveness, which in turn, reduces prices. The Hoppian/Rothbardian solution, even if they would not advocate it, would be to privatize copyright protections, so that we are not burdened by abusive government, or the costs of administering other people’s works. Again, the fundamental problem here is that it is very difficult to develop criteria by which one thing is equal to another thing, for the purposes of copyright. It is very difficult and expensive to regulate and jury. THe other is that artificially increasing prices of easily reproduced goods is counter to the premise on which the market is based. I think that the solution, as others have said above, is that reproduction for commercial or self use is different from reproduction for the purpose of distribution and sale. I think personal reproduction, even if it deprives the author of profits is within the speech and copyright objectives. I do not see that there is an argument wherein the authors have the right to prevent you from doing whatever it is once you’ve purchased a commercial product from within the market. I do see that someone concentrating capital for the purpose of profiteering from activity in the market, based upon the innovations of others, without paying a commission for doing so, is simply theft, and is not beneficial. The market political theory requires us to innovate, even if innovation is simply opening up new markets.. I do not see the value in copying. That’s just parasitism. Markets exist and function because of enfranchisement, not parasitism. I do not think that the market philosophy (even in libertarianism) supports parasitism. I know libertarians do not support rent seeking (parasitism) by the use of organs of the state. Why should we tolerate parasitism in absence of the state? Or is it that we care more about the state than we do about the very market society which we hope to entrust with our social order? That is the incongruity in Anarchist thought. Government exists to improve the competitiveness of the market for the purposes of decreasing prices and increasing choices. Without a market, there can be no government. There can be slavery, but no government. We pay for the market by forgone opportunities for violence, for theft. Violence and theft are epistemologically simple tasks. However, markets invite fraud BECAUSE they prohibit violence (retribution for theft). And as far as I can tell, copyright law is simply fraud protection. Others are welcome to debate me on this. But I doubt efforts will result in success.

  • An Analysis Of Freedom #2: The Economy Of Freedom

    A Little History For Context

    The term ‘Freedom’, and its near relation ‘Liberty’, have a long heritage.   The babylonian words “ama-gi”, meaning “Return To The Mother”, written in cuneiform, are often cited by Libertarians as the first written use of ‘freedom’. That usage literally refers to giving a slave back to his mother — an analogy to the more precisely stated ‘freeing him from slavery’ – owners gave a slave back to his mother when freeing him.  In practice, the word “ama-gi” was used to grant exceptions from the dictator’s obligations or taxes.  So the term meant freedom from obligations to the government. These special dispensations were used as a reward – freedom from requirements. The most simplistic use of Freedom described the opposite of slavery. It was not an abstraction, but a direct analogy to the deprivation of one’s choices under the threat of violence. Slavery to contemporary ears is a horrid system, but under barbarism it was universal. ( Barbarism refers to those people not members of one’s market  system ) (( DEFINITION of “BARBARIAN”: Those persons who do not pay the set of costs of forgone opportunity, employed within a social order that cooperatively manages a market and territory. )) Most farm labor required a great deal of physical effort — hard work easily avoided with slaves. People often sold themselves into slavery simply because it was a reliable way to be fed and sheltered in a world where starvation and hunger were common. Wars and raids were conducted to obtain slaves – forced laborers. And escape was dangerous in that ancient world – without a tribe to take care of you, starvation was almost guaranteed. Later, ‘Freedom’ was the term used to describe a Free Man. A ‘Citizen’. A ‘non-barbarian’. This means quite literally, in a world consisting largely of either barbarians, competing warrior states, or eastern dictatorships, ‘an investor in the city and market’. As an investor, or rather It is hard for us to to imagine a world of barbarians. It is not so hard to imagine a world filled with conquerors. Today’s barbarians are immigrants who do not conform. And nation states that seek power in order to obtain resources and trade routes. Liberty by contrast, refers, not to constraint of, and control of, individual actions under threat of violence such as under the institution of slavery, but to the more general absence of coercion by a government, of those people who are not slaves, and not barbarians, and therefore citizens.  In particular, in the west, it implies and egalitarian relationship between all those who are responsible for society: refraining from imposing conditions other than those one places on one’s self, or are required in order to maintain the property definitions (( DEFINITION of “PROPERTY DEFINITIONS”: A set of forgone opportunities that require one refrain from using objects of utility, or refrain from seizing or creating opportunities for gain – ie: self enforced self deprivations – usually described as property both individual and shareholder, manners, ethics, morals )) that constitute the social order. ((DEFINITION of “SOCIAL ORDER”: A social order is a collection of property definitions, and the required forgone opportunities required of members of the society in order to allow non-violent cooperation, and the establishment of a division of labor, and peaceful trade and exchange. And if a landed culture, also including the visible material contributions needed to maintain the physical viability of the territory, its built capital, its resources, and most importantly its market – without which escape from poverty is impossible. )) But in response to increases in the complexity of social order due to increases in population and the resulting increases in the division of knowledge and labor, both of the terms of “Freedom” and “Liberty” have been subject to political framing by public intellectuals and politicians, and their followers in the pragmatic public who use the extraordinary and uncommon freedom of speech ‘discount’ under democratic government to redefine these terms.  This redefinition of the Social Order’s Property Definitions, and restatement of the material costs and  the forgone opportunity costs of that system, has effectively constituted a legitimization of fraud, theft and redistribution. This restatement consequently led to a gradual usurpation of the social accounting system of opportunity costs, material costs, that make the market society possible. This distortion and confusion of meaning begs analysis, so that we, as members of a society under a democratic government, can tell the difference between those commonly held properties of freedom and liberty that are necessary and possible, from those that are either forms logically and physically impossible, from those that are intentionally obscure or distorted for the purpose of committing fraud and theft — or both. While frequent increases or decreases in redistribution of the PROFITS from the market are not only justifiable and beneficial, but warranted as a return on on the investment to shareholders (( DEFINITION of “SHAREHOLDER”: Synonym to “CITIZEN”: individuals who contribute forgone opportunity costs expressed as property definitions and thereby pay for the social order. ))  (“Citizens”) as the division of knowledge and labor increases, the redefinition of the accounting system of property definitions, and forgone opportunity costs is simply a complex form of corruption, theft and fraud.  Corruption theft and fraud  made possible by the obscurity of the causal processes employed to create the Social Order, due to the fact that they are evolutionary in origin, unarticulated, expressed almost entirely as sentiments, and understood only as habits, superstitions, traditions, or exploitations, rather than as a system of precise and material accounting and costs, that materially effect economic calculation and human cooperation as the size of the population and the resultant division of knowledge and labor increases.

    A Society Is Its Market : The Agrarian Society, Built Capital, Trade, And The Division Of Knowledge And Labor

    (UNDONE)

    The West And The Fraternal Order Of Market Making Soldiers

    The Great Transformations: In Europe, Asia, The Middle East, and Africa Converting From Barbarism To City And Market – Europe Converting From Barbarism To Irrigating The Alluvial Plain – Middle East Converting From Barbarism By Combat – Asia Remaining in Barbarism – Sub Saharan Africa

    The Behavioral Properties Of Freedom

    The Desire For Freedom Versus Security.

    Endless Want And Acquisitiveness, and The Role Of Imitation, Envy  Status, And The Status Economy.

    (UNDONE)

    Property Is Defined Universally, But  Shareholder Rights Are Open To Corruption

    (UNDONE) The Oddity Of The Cognitive Bias In The Consensus And Equality Sentiments (UNDONE) Consensus Is Limited, On Means, and On Ends To Small Numbers Of People With Similar Objectives, Abilities, and Resources (UNDONE)

    Freedom And The Status Economy

    Almost Universally, Humans Don’t Like Status That Is Not Given as a reward for redistribution. All cultures, all humans, sense and express resentment at ‘excessive returns’ on any type of investment. Under heroic cultural systems, the hero is granted status and access to opportunity in exchange for his efforts on behalf of the group.  As population increases, classes form because enough people exist in each class that they form group status hierarchies, and trade opportunities, and contribute to sustaining the group’s advantages.  In effect, a class becomes an organization or bureaucracy whose members attempt to preserve it’s network of opportunities – it’s binding principles. At this point, exchange between classes must form some sort of trade network, and as this happens, classes, as organizations,  compete against other classes for status.

    The Freedom Seeking Minority Versus The Equality Seeking Majority

    The Vast Majority of people to not want freedom, because freedom requires responsibility and risk.  When people come to free societies, they either desire the standard of living, or access to opportunity. But they rarely, if ever, desire to contribute to the maintenence of the market order by forgoing opportunities, .  In fact, they desire to gain the most using the least contribution. Likewise, (equality) So the contemporary use of the word freedom is the opposite of the contemporary use of the word equality

    Property Is The Human Accounting System And Money And Numbers Increase Our Capacity for Perception, Comparison and Calculation Of Property

    (UNDONE) The Economic Function Of Freedom In a division of labor, freedom increases consumption, decreases cost of maintaining the behavior of paying opportunity  costs to create the  market and contribute to property definitions, but most importantly, increases the process of trial and error – the process of entrepreneurship. Increases in trial and error lead to increases in the division of knowledge and labor, and increases in consumer choice, and decreases in prices.

    The Limited Use Of Freedom As A Competitive Strategy Between Groups

    If we define freedom as freedom from coercion, then there are only so many strategies that work for different groups with different abilities and resources.  Total freedom, which means barbarism,  Religion (resistance), Trade, and Force.

    Freedom As Return On Investment In The Market, And The Market Is The Social Order

    Freedom obtained in exchange for one’s return on one’s investment of forgone opportunities in the property definitions that constitute the local market. This contribution of forgone opportunity costs, is the cost of entry into the market, and the means by which one has access to the market.  One can only be as free as the granularity of the property definitions. Profits are signals that convey rewards from the market participants that you have been rewarded for fulfilling their wants and desires. Redistribution is a form of return on the market, but only so long as (only so long as what?) Freedom is only relevant in a market society.  Market societies are superior to alternative societies.

    The Economy Of Freedom

    We are all born free, so to speak, and able to use perception, memory, thought, action, force and violence to get whatever we want, if we choose to. Cooperation is not a necessity, at least for the strong. It is a compromise. It is a trade off. So lets look at the scope of actions human beings can take, and start from there, so that we can understand cooperation and freedom, and the compromises, costs and benefits that cooperation requires of us. Scope Of Individual Human Action If we eliminate the nearly infinite complexity that comes along with cooperation, we are left with only this scope of human actions.

      • A.0) Thought
      • A.1) Motion
      • A.2) Consumption
      • A.3) Transformation
      • A.4) Violence
      • A.5) Mating

      The Five Freedoms

      Given the possible scope of human actions listed above, there are only five possible non-contradictory freedoms available to human beings. Non-contradictory means that they can be granted to others equally without coercing them.

        To grant these rights we only need to refrain from violence. In libertarian philosophy this is the principle of non-violence.

        By refraining from violence we enforce cooperation.  In other words, we coerce cooperation by depriving people of their natural ability to use violence.  Furthermore, by depriving people of violence we make them more equal, by redistributing opportunities from the strong to the weak.

        All other freedoms or rights, are derivatives of those five listed above. The remaining freedoms people commonly refer to are technologies of coercion for the purpose of cooperation, or of opposition for the purpose of competing with or avoiding the coercion.

        To say that they are forms of coercion, is not to demean them. Many coercions are a proxy for violence. Property itself is a coercion.

        We defend property. (talk about property and memory here)

        there is a limit to cooperatino because of a limit to perception. Imagine for a moment that you could know the wants and desires of all people on the planet at once, and you could also know, all the resources that could be put to use by each person, all the skills that could be put to use by each person, all the tools available to each person, all the relationships that each person has, and the geography that each person has access to. Imagine trying to organize it all. Now, imagine that each person is trying to at least maintain his or her respect, or status. And that all these people are of different ages, and of differentI. Cooperative Organization – The Production Economy

        Cooperative freedoms permit the division of knowledge and labor, which decrease everyone’s costs, or the concentration of effort to increase both the likelihood of success, and decrease the individual costs. Many people use subjective analysis, expressing these cost reductions as emotions. But our emotions exist to assist us in identifying cost reductions. Emotions describe changes in state. They inform us. They inform us in particular about changes in the state of our costs. Human aesthetics may be wounded by this fact, but all group emotional sensitivities are to costs and discounts.

          • Coercion: Norms under threat of violence.
            Opposition: Violence, Fraud, Theft, Coercion, Physical Restraint, Enslavement
            Cost: Forgone Opportunity costs of Coercion, Fraud, Theft and Violence. The cost of not stealing.
            Perception and Calculation: Property and prices allow us to percieve beyond our senses. To cooperate in large numbers. Property IS calculation.
            • Key Concept:
            • P.1) Life, Movement and Action:
            • P.2) Property (Exclusive Use. Inventory)
            • P.3) Exchange (Trade)
            • P.4) Freedom of Cooperation:
            • P.5) Freedom Of Assertion

            II. Cultural Organization: Manners, Ethics, Morals, Religion  – The Conformity Economy (Inclusion / Ostracization)

            Ethics: The Invisible Cost Economy Freedom to attempt to establish a network of norms: restraints on action enforced by inclusion or exclusion in the group. Inclusion in the group reduces risk and increases opportunity.

            Manners, Ethics and Morals are terms for different segments of a spectrum for controlling costs of a group. Manners reduce friction and demonstrate predictability, class and quality. Display of good manners means access to more people who may grant one more opportunities. Each use of good manners requires some form of discipline. Each act of discipline is a cost to the individual, and a contribution to the cultural institutions. Each abuse of manners is a lack of discipline and a withdrawal from the cultural institutions. Manners must have a witness who can observe the demonstration of one’s discipline. In a demonstration of manners, there is no asymmetry of information. Each equally can observe the other.

            Ethics on the other hand is a study in asymmetry. An action is ethical or not, because of shared lack of knowledge of the future, and asymmetry of knowledge between individuals. If one person has deep knowledge and the other shallow of the same exchange, ethical treatment requires that the person with greater knowledge act as if the other person is possessed of the same knowledge, and each is responsible for protecting the other from harm.

            Ethical systems generally occupy some portion of a spectrum from the criminal to the charitable. a) The Criminal Ethic: I take what I can, without consent. a) The Bazaar Ethic: whatever I can get away with in voluntary exchange. b) The Warrior Ethic: whatever will not make the other or unhappy. c) The Christian Ethic: What is equally beneficial for both parties. d) The Charitable Ethic: As long as the other person prospers, I do not care what my outcome is. Then most ethical systems generally consist of intra-group and extra-group criteria, that might not be the same. Within and across family, clan, tribe, culture, religion, race, each culture varies in its adherence to its ethical standards. Furthermore,

            Moral systems imply total asymmetry of knowledge. Actions fall under moral criteria whenever the cost of seizing an opportunity for one’s benefit either risks, or places an external cost, and a high cost, on others, and in particular, others with no recourse.

                • Coercion:
                  Opposition:
                  Cost:
                  Perception and Calculation:
                • C.1) Cultural Freedom: (Choice and Opposition)
                • C.2) Freedom of Norms (Competition and Choice) Participate in sets of norms, to select norms.
                • C.3)
                • Religion (Cultural Law And Institutionalized Conformity)

                • R.1) Religious Freedom: Freedom to create institutions, rituals, and codes for the purpose of establishing the criteria of inclusion and exclusion (ostracization). Including Freedom to choose to participate in religious factions, and freedom to evade participation in factions. Religions create opportunity monopolies and attempt to disallow competition of forgone opportunity costs. Competing religions are competitions of opportunities and opportunity costs. Evading participation is an attempt to obtain opportunities at a discount.

                III. Regulatory Organization: Law(organized violence and coercion)

                P.1) Political Freedom (Choice and Opposition): speech, assembly, leadership, concentration of wealth. (The right to cooperate against others who have a similar right) The right of opposition. Political freedom is the freedom to cooperate for GROUP ends, by pooling resources, and establishing an organization, or association for the purpose of advancing those ends.

                  • L.1) Legislative Freedom:
                  • L.2) Institutional Freedom:
                  • L.3) National freedom:

                  IIII. Credit Organization (Anonymous, Non-Territorial Law)

                  • CL.1)

                  VI. Capitalist Freedom

                  (organizatoins to concentrate real capital) (abstract property definitions)

                    V. Redistributive Organization

                    • R.1) Redistributive Freedom

                  • The Reality Of Freedom #1: Freedom Requires Coercion

                    Whenever something is scarce,  some concept of property (the exclusive use of a resource)  is necessary for the development of incentives, coordination, and production — even if the difference between ‘several property’ and ‘shareholder property’, is defined differently by different groups — therefore all societies include and sanction some form of coercion.  No society can exist without coercion. This applies to tribal hunter gatherers, nomads, village agrarians, market city dwellers, and vast urban and rural empires in a complex division of knowledge and labor. We can equally forgo the opportunity for violence theft, fraud, corruption.  For the poorest, this means refraining from theft, fraud, deception and violence in exchange for access to the market society and it’s prices. For the middle class, it means refraining from fraud and deception in exchange for participating in the market society and profiting from it.  For the wealthiest, it means refraining from manipulation of market prices or and participating in corruption of the rules of the market, and corruption, in exchange for status and choice.  For the most powerful it means refraining from corruption, and refraining from laziness, incompetence, and maintaining disciplined efforts to serve the marketplace in exchange for freedom from participation in the marketplace. Each of these forgone opportunities for profit is a cost to the individual.  Cumulatively, for each individual, and for any society, these are very, very high costs, because opportunities for violence, theft, fraud, deception, market manipulation, and corruption are more frequent than opportunities for fair exchange of goods and services due to asymmetries of knowledge and resources — even if the type of cost is different along the spectrum: theft and violence are easiest for the bottom and corruption is most easy for the top.

                    [callout=’Freedom’]There is no social order that is free of coercion as long as there is scarcity. Property itself is a form of coercion. It must be or we would not have to invent it and enforce it.[/callout]

                    There is no social order that is free of coercion as long as there is scarcity.  Property itself is a form of coercion. It must be or we would not have to invent it and enforce it. The coercion that people object to, and classify as corruption, is profiteering by the political class.  Or financial coercion, which means the taking of their time, opportunity, effort, property, or most importantly, status, and to some degree their very attention,  and distributing it to people with whom they disagree, or using it for purposes with which they disagree.  They see this as corruption: obtaining political office and favors by taking from one group and giving to another whom they disfavor. All societies concentrate and redistribute wealth. All societies participate in coercion – or else they could not have property and production.  But whenever a society consists of people with dissimilar interests, by definition there must be negative coercion. Almost all members of any society will tolerate any commonly accepted set of property definitions, even if the scope of individual property is severely limited.  They may form black markets if that scope is too severely limited.  They may form tax avoidance schemes if taxes are too expansive.  But if those definitions remain constant, and they do not have to feel that their plans, and efforts at gain were frustrated, then they will not see the state as coercive. Freedom is defined as freedom from coercion. Meaning freedom from all but equal coercions. And the only freedom we can equally coerce each other with is respect for property. And even then, respecting property is a higher cost for some, and lower for others.

                  • China And Defining Freedom – Easterly VS National Review

                    In William Easterly’s post “Why can’t leading conservative magazine understand freedom?” he refers to a National Review article “China Teaches US Lessons About Economic Freedom“. I replied in the comments: William, I’ve read this post four times, and it’s still not very clear what you’re arguing for and against. I think you’re reading far too much into a what are simple, broad analogies that express a sentiment not a formula. All he’s saying is that small increases in freedom produced a great impact on china. And he’s implying that small decreases in freedom here in the USA, will have as grand a set of effects. I think you’re both confused and you both overrate government, overrate individuals, and underrate demographic migration and change. Growth was easy for the USA during the 1800’s: buy half a continent from Napoleon and import millions of Europeans into it. Sell them all sorts of consumer goods so that they fill up the territory, and so that you can collect profit and create capitalist barons doing so. Use the cheap land and labor to produce commodity goods and sell them to europe. Cause a price catastrophe in europe. Let them have a horrendous civil war and inherit their intellectuals and england’s naval empire. Now, take a country like china, forcibly held back in ignorance and poverty by Mao who decided it was better to have everyone poor and suffering than a wealthy south and a poor north and west — fragmenting the chinese empire. Now, import vast amounts of western technology, western banking and accounting technology in particular, and use your inexpensive labor to produce goods based on that technology cheaply and sell back to the westerners. China’s growth is largely in the form of construction: moving people from hovels in the rural areas, to apartments in urban areas. The country is vastly poor. And it’s per-capita GDP is horrid. They used totalitarianism and capitalism to manage their expansion, we used republicanism and capitalism to do the same thing. There is nothing interesting about china. Nothing. There is nothing interesting about america, either, which is why you’re both confused. What’s interesting is how Europe in general, and England in particular, created so much innovation, how Americans capitalized on it, and how we can use that tradition and culture of innovation to compete in a world where we are no longer the one making money from a huge demographic change. Once cheap labor stops, and marginal differences in knowledge are exhausted, what remains is a nation’s ability to dynamically reorganize production in real time, and to competitively innovate in real time. The question is, whether Americans will maintain their innovative risk taking speculative culture without the military and economic dominance they possessed in the last century, and the resulting control over the international banking and trade system.

                    William Easterly wrote: Curt and Sam, thanks for your comment. I was making a simple point: the article had a double standard for the Negative Changes in Economic Freedom in China and the US. And, 2nd, in giving so much general credit to Deng Xiao Ping vs. America’s leaders, it ignored Deng’s despicable actions against individual freedom in Tien An Men Square, and continued violence against and imprisonment of dissidents in China.

                    William, thank you for replying. Let’s define Freedom. Because unless we define it, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Let’s see: Freedom: absence of external constraint.

                      The only form of ‘freedom’ you can have, that is non-contradictory (you can equally grant it to others and they to you) is personal, individual freedom. And even then, the only form of political freedom you can have is to DENY others the right to their political freedom. And at that point you are stuck with the problem of either getting to the point where you can convert the barbarians into paying the opportunity cost of becoming property holders in the first place, (establishing the system of property definitions) and without that need for coercion, you’re stuck in poverty even if you want to change the established order. But the only freedom you can have is individual freedom – the freedom of constraint. We can grant it to others equally. The rest of the freedoms are not ‘freedom’. They’re rights to take from others. All political freedoms are rights to take from others. They are rights of coercion, oppression. But then one cannot have a division of labor, a complex society, economic calculation, and the incentive to participate in productive activities unless you apply the ‘coercion’ of private property – at least to some degree. Confucianism is a high-opporunity-cost social order. It is very conservative. It requires respect for hierarchy and authority (opportunity costs). It requires consensus (opportunity costs but with risk reduction). It is an almost entirely shareholder-property society with low rates of creativity, low risk, slow moving social and economic model. But if it is BIG enough that people cannot sense external competition from OTHER social orders then internal status symbols can be preserved by way of nationalism or culturalism and the social order can work. (it doesn’t: the south is a competitor with the north of china, which is their whole cultural problem – that’s what Mao did. He destroyed the country economically to keep the south from outpacing the north.) This is not necessarily ‘bad’ in Confucian society. It may bear understanding that Confucius failed to solve the political problem (it is somewhat evident that he understands this) and directed everyone to hierarchy and family. So the Confucian model is not republican at it’s base. It is not tribal. It is hierarchical, and familial. The entire nation operates as a family. This is not a bad strategy unless you are competing with a group of high-risk, highly-innovative, fast moving westerners, for whom individual heroism, innovation and achievement are viewed as ‘keeping the group strong’. Competition and individualism are a ‘group good’ in the west. They are not in the asian societies. we are free to copy the innovators, and in doing so, everyone has the opportunity to be ‘better’. The west is an innovation and adaptation society. Freedom as we understand it, is not possible, and probably not necessary under Confucianism. Economically speaking, a nation that does NOT participate in heavy research and development will eventually fall behind, and governments can concentrate more wealth than the private sector on Research and Development. (What would the impact be of 200 new nuclear power plants in the USA? We have people feeling good about not wasting energy but manufacturing is the greatest energy consumer, and we need more manufacturing. Economizing is a spiritual act, not a material one.) China is making productive investments. We are making redistributive expenses, and spending trillions defending oil and trade routes, and our primary export – the dollar. And we will not get anywhere thinking that some very small minority of a Confucian population, or our odd obsession with the religion of Universal Democratic Secular Humanism will have any long term effect on the Sinic culture. The rest of the world is clearly condemning it. There isn’t even any evidence yet that our UDSH values will persist in the west without the Militial and Commercial balance to it, that is the foundation of western civilization. The calculative institutions of capitalism, which provide incentives in the form of pricing, sensory information in the form of objects defined as property, expressed and manipulated quantitatively, and the technologies of intertemporal collaboration and coordination in the form of money, interest, banking, fiat money and the technologies of dispute resolution in the form of contract and law, have little or nothing to do with the technologies of redistribution, and the methods of capital concentration, as well as the ‘forgone opportunity costs’ which citizens pay for participation in society and market’. Political freedom is not economic freedom. Political freedom exists either to defend ones self against a predatory state, or to use the violence of the state to put extra-market pressure on competing groups with competing interests. The reason for the western matrix of freedoms is to promote innovation, competition and wealth, so that the nobility, the upper middle class, and therefore prosperity will be maintained, and management elites, will rotate keeping the society competitive. At least, that’s the implied theory: meritocratic rotation of the elites – a thematic value system inherited from western heroic competitive militarism. ie: it’s a knowledge production engine. China values stability and security, not change and innovation. It is a culture where conflict is a sin. Where the individual is subordinate to the state. Where virtue is not heroic excellence, but duty. (At least, until the middle class is large enough.) Conservatives are in large part, whether knowingly or not, subscribers to ‘natural law’ theory, which states that human behavior is what it is, always has been and always will be. They do not subscribe to the philosophy that all men would work happily for the common good, nor, if given the opportunity, that they would do some common good in political power, or even know what such a good would be, simply because of the number of trade offs and secondary causes. Nor, that we are capable of implementing any designed change in our social orders without horrific consequences. And under that view, they would say that you are making a moral equivalency where there is none. Moral statements are economic actions, and either economic payments or theft. Ethical statements are economic actions, and either economic payments or theft. Manners are economic demonstrations, contributions, and payments. But these payments are made against a vast, habitual, rather than written set of legal, cultural and class body of accounts – and vastly different concepts of property definition, and they exist largely to ‘pay for the social order’ by reducing opportunity for friction and conflict. In the west, we have a very different payment system. We are all trying to be noblemen or priests. In the east, they are all trying to be Confucian – to hold their place. More like the German model prior to ww1. Our anglo model, is very rare. And it may simply be the artifact of a thousand years of wealth generated by expansion under the reformation. So before I get too far into this (I already have gotten way too far into it) I think you are being literal with conservative (allegorical) language. Conservative language is allegorical because conservatives have failed (especially during the 1870’s and 1930’s) to articulate a causally sufficient social science. (Myself and two or three rather off the wall libertarians, excluded perhaps.) Where the social democratic method can rely on the coincidence and correlation between easily collected monetary transaction information the Dynamic Stochastic Equilibrium model, and christian egalitarian sentiments, and Jewish anti-western-militial sentiments. But that does not mean that conservatives sentiments, expressed in allegorical language are false. It means they are insufficiently articulated. (and worse -foolishly wrong as in the case of many libertarians.) It simply means that they don’t yet know how to do otherwise. I think furthermore, that a) China is simply importing knowledge at very low cost. It is not producing it. Wealth may make knowledge production possible. But we have seen the Asian model is great for incremental improvement and the western model is better for radical innovation. b) cultures do not change. There is a high cost of changing norms. And Sinic civilization is very resistant to change. It is highly racist and highly culturist. (And it has a huge chip on it’s shoulder.) c) Their entire obligation structure (morals, ethics, property rights, manners) is a set of established costs. Our values are antithetical to them. d) their identity ( the means by which they judge the world) and their status signals (the human natural intuitive economy of events and consequences) will continue to force them in their native direction. And lastly, (why am I just getting to this now?) all the conservative writer was saying is that ‘a little momentum made a big difference’, and that ‘even if we make a little momentum in the wrong direction it will make as big a difference’. He is not comparing statements, he is comparing trajectories in time. And that’s what it means to be conservative: taking the long view.

                    • Straight Dope: Would Communal Ownership Result In Fewer Oil Spills?

                      No. But increased liability would. I found the Straight Dope forums and they’re full of fairly good libertarian thinking. So I’m going to add them to my crawler’s roundtable. This is the second or third posting I”ve made there. And in it I’m making a bold claim in response to this statement:

                      And I think you’ll find it makes a difference to the wider community, too. It’s hard to imagine a worker-owned oil company, with broad shopfloor participation in decisionmaking, making the kind of decisions that led to the BP oil spill — and got several BP workers killed.

                      That’s an interesting statement. The problem is, that such an organization would never be able to exist at any size in order to make that kind of decision, and without that size could not concentrate enough capital to create and combine sufficient technologies to get into the position in the first place.

                      [callout]**In general there will be no case that you can contrive of where the above sequence of logic does not apply.**[/callout]

                      Why? Because of the very reason we have markets, corporations, organizations, political systems: because while people can agree upon the sentimental ends, they cannot agree upon the requisite means, cannot do so in time to sieze opportunities, and they cannot do so in large numbers, and as the complexity of the division of labor increases, necessary ignorance intervenes on the part of all people involved such that additional opinions actually REGRESS back to the mean. This fact in turns results in the “Iron Law Of Oligarchy” wherein decisions making is delegated in every form of voluntary organization to an elite, which upon attaining the ability to make decisions, always seeks to preserve it, expand it, and to expand it to the point of their necessary ignorance and incompetence.

                      [callout] while people can agree upon the sentimental ends, they cannot agree upon the requisite means, cannot do so in time to sieze opportunities, and they cannot do so in large numbers, and as the complexity of the division of labor increases, necessary ignorance intervenes on the part of all people involved such that additional opinions actually REGRESS back to the mean. This fact in turns results in the “Iron Law Of Oligarchy” wherein decisions making is delegated in every form of voluntary organization to an elite, which upon attaining the ability to make decisions, always seeks to preserve it, expand it, and to expand it to the point of their necessary ignorance and incompetence.[/callout]

                      The problem isn’t the corporation’s size, or the worker interest, it’s the limits of liability granted to the executives, and the limit of liability given to the insurers. These limits were GIVEN by GOVERNMENT with KNOWING INTENT to these companies precisely to avoid the principle of responsibility inherent in Capitalism, to ensure that we would have oil supplies. In other words, the state became the insurer, and did a bad job of quality control, and the insurer, the state (the people) have to pay for taking that risk. WHen they should have maintained liability of all involved. This would have dramatically increased the costs, and made the drilling unprofitable, and it would not have occurred. We transfer risk all over society. Between age groups, between classes, between races. IN fact, that has become the purpose of 20th century government. Transfer. We grant people all sorts of special rights as a means of mutual insurance. THe most controversial is free speech. Much free speech is theft of abstract forms from one person or another (libel and slander). Much of it is erroneous, deceptive, ignorant or intentionally harmful, for the purpose of transferring property from one group to another (Political). We allow one group rights of expression but deny another group the same expression. (Political) Most news opinion for example, upon analysis, is patently false. (Profitable) Most advertising is targeted at the proletariat and middle class, for the purpose of selling the consumer fantasy by appealing to human status senses. We have not (as an absurd example) sued the Bank Of Sweden for awarding Nobel prizes to purveyors of the use of probabilistic Gaussian mathematics in economic theory, which in turn was used to create this debacle of an economy over the past half century or more. So the Nobel Prize was issued and used as a political lever and caused vast harm. The Academy ‘insured’ these theories, and then marketed them. Yet we do not hold them accountable for this damage to society, as we do any other product like hot coffee or ladders. Because we grant them the freedom to err, under the assumption that we are better off this way than the opposite. Capitalism and markets exist to provide calculative capacity to the mediocrity of human minds. Socialist should focus on redistribution and avoid the fallacy of believing their own opinion. Ignorance is mandatory for all human beings. And it is nothing but a childish vanity to think otherwise, and is demonstrable in all fields of human activity. it is even MEASURABLE in most fields of human activity. (in particular, the horrid errors in academic research.) Property rights allow for accountability, because they require risk in order to obtain the rewards from the use of them. It is when we do not respect those rights and their liabilities, and grant limits to the liability for those rights that we have oil spills. **In general there will be no case that you can contrive of where the above sequence of logic does not apply.** That is why the world has adopted capitalism. TOtalitarian capitalism. But capitalism none the less. It’s democracy that’s being abandoned as a goal. Worldwide.

                    • Question: “Can you be anti-capitalist and pro market?”

                      On Straight Dope, there is a thread on whether one can be anti-capitalist but pro-market. I’ve captured my response below. DEFINITIONS 1) Capitalism (distributed planning and control using the technologies of property and the pricing system). Or politically: a bias toward letting the market solve problems of production. 2) Socialism (centralized planning and control in the necessary absence of the pricing system). Or politically: a bias toward political centralization of solving problems of production. 3) Mixed Economy ( distributed planning and control using property and pricing system, with redistribution of wealth through taxation). Or politically, letting the market solve problems of production, while centralizing some amount of the wealth generated for redistribution and investment in outcomes where the market process is unable to concentrate capital. 4) Market: the voluntary production of property for the purpose of speculating on it’s voluntary trade. The speculative pricing assigned to the goods or services. The reliance upon prices to determine the products to be produced, and the factors of production to be consumed. Implies the regulation of products into the market. and implies the defense of property rights and conflict resolution within the market of goods and services by a third party. 5) Trade: the voluntary transfer of property from one individual to another. (which implies knowledge of the purchaser, and the irrelevance of third parties) DISCUSSION Early Leftist were traditional luddites who confused the necessity of ownership of the means of production (property) with the ability to redistribute the results of that system of ownership: It is not necessary to control the means of production in order to redistribute wealth. While property and prices are necessary for complex production, and incentives are necessary to encourage people to produce, it appears that we can determine rules of property use, and we can determine some level of redistribution while maintaining sufficient incentives to produce. At least, that has been the general course of events over the past century. Contrarily, unstated but implied in that statement, such a redistribution will affect the ability to consume, but not ‘organized control over’ what is produced. This may disappoint some. However, since all groups are led by elites and elites must make decisions on production, the such centralized control creates only the illusion of proletariat control over what is produced. You cannot have a market (speculative production in anticipation of trade wherein prices communicate relative demand) without prices and property. This is logically impossible. While communists have forever posited the opposite, people will not produce excess for market purposes without the incentive to do so (and will resort to black markets, and therefore recreate the market). If what you define as “anti-capitalist” (i suspect) is having a number of people with knowledge and relationships and control of property concentrate resources toward productive ends that you disagree with, then you can indeed be “anti-capitalist”. If you define anti-capitalist as a status-criticism, wherein you dislike the fact that you are most likely a permanent member of the proletariat, which decreases your access to mates and opportunity, then you indeed can be an ant-capitalist. Those are sentimental objections. (Despite the fact that our society is largely run by the middle class and upper proletariat.) But if you mean that you dislike the nature of prices and property, then you’re just illogical, and the result of your beliefs would result in destitute poverty, murder and war. The market evolved because of the limitation of the human mind. We cannot replace it without making the human mind far better than it is. And perhaps far better than it can be. Redistribution is a biological sentiment in the human animal that evolved because it is necessary for group-persistence: to retain competitive ability against other groups, and to insure the group’s survival. Universal egalitarian equality, which is a member of the set of leftist sentiment of “harm/care/nurture” or the sentiment of eliminating the sensation of status differences, or the sentiment eliminating the material differences between people’s access to resources, is simply an illogical construct regardless of which sentiment is being applied: Because we need incentives to produce, and we must over produce and divide our labor to reduce prices. (“We are not wealthier than cave men, everything is just infinitely cheaper due to the division of labor”) Because people will always seek status differences even under socialism. Because the iron law of oligarchy mandates that elites and leaders emerge, and once they emerge they form a self-serving bureaucracy. Because it is impossible for more than a family sized group of people to agree on both the means and ends of doing anything meaningful in a division of labor sufficient to produce low prices. (this last, is the virtue of what we call the market). Participating in the market is also voluntary. One can consume the goods of the market without participating in the market one’s self. Some people, in fact, a majority of people, are not sufficiently competitive in any form of production that they can conceive of, or afford to speculate in the market. So they TRADE their productivity rather than SPECULATE on by producing goods or services for the market. To be a member of a market economy, one only needs to refrain from theft. To be a ‘good’ member of a market economy, once needs additionally to refrain from fraud and deception. But these are the means by which we obtain citizenship in the market, not participate in the market. To enter the market itself, means that you risk capital and compete in the arena that is the market, and are willing and able to accept losses. The problem for the proletariat is that their value-system is predicated on self-production for consumption purposes, and trading for goods that cannot be self produced. People only a century ago would put to market only their over-production, and purchase from the market only for goods that they could not produce themselves. Except there is precious little in modern society that a person can produce himself, let alone, produce for market consumption himself. This necessitates an uncomfortable uncertainty for those people who must speculate in order to survive in the market. Hence leftist sentiments of the family, epistemology of the family, organization of the family, production of the family must compete with rightist sentiments of the market.

                      [callout]It is quite likely that the right and left will both fail. That we will instead of succeeding in incorporating all people into the market (the error of the right) or incorporating all people into the luddite familial structure (the error of the left) that we will adopt the european and south american models of a wealthy urban and rural groups, and a ring of abject destitute hyper-breeding poverty around the urban cores, wherein the upper and middle classes pay the permanent proletariat just enough to subsist, and we emerge with a tiered society both geographically, genetically, and materially. [/callout]

                      It is quite likely that the right and left will both fail. That we will instead of succeeding in incorporating all people into the market (the error of the right) or incorporating all people into the luddite familial structure (the error of the left) that we will adopt the european and south american models of a wealthy urban and rural groups, and a ring of abject destitute hyper-breeding poverty around the urban cores, wherein the upper and middle classes pay the permanent proletariat just enough to subsist, and we emerge with a tiered society both geographically, genetically, and materially. And this end result will in no small part be due to the christian error of egalitarianism sentiments that deny the productive differences of human beings in the real and material world – the majority of which differences derive from the ability and rate at which one can learn and apply abstractions (IQ) in a dynamic and rapidly moving economy. While neither left or right can achieve it’s idealistic ends, leftism is an attempt to enslave the productive (innovative) class’s attempt to increase production and increase prices for the purpose of status enhancement. But by that restraint doom all people to poverty. This is the strategy behind all monotheistic religions. They are resistance movements that attempt to make status among the proletariat a spiritual rather than material construct. Capitalism (or right-ism) on the other hand is an attempt to keep sufficient productive resources in the hands of market producers that all society benefits, despite the fact that the proletariat feels increasingly left behind and deprived of status because of the accelerating rate at which the productive classes (those who take speculative risks and thereby increase choices and decrease prices) seemingly depart from the lower classes, despite the fact that in all but the rarest circumstances (catastrophic health care) that the difference between the quintiles is one of symbolic status and diversity of forms of entertainment, rather than differences in material well being. As it stands Quantitative Keynesianism is the socialist research program, and Anarcho capitalism is the capitalist research program. The difference between these methods lies in both their ambitions and their methods. By applying 19th century advances in the mathematics of the natural world (closed probabilism) to the aggregate symbols of production of the economy (monetary values), it became possible to try to fulfill some methods of the socialist program by using capitalism for socialistic ends. The problem for the capitalists, and the reason for the failure of the Austrian (qualitative) program’s emphasis on micro-economic behavior, is that they do not have a method of mathematics to provide sufficient explanatory power equal to the left’s program, despite knowing, with absolute certainty, that the Keynesian program must fail. This is because despite the efforts of Poincare, Mandelbrot, Hayek, Popper, Mises, and Parsons, more recently Taleb, and a host of others, there appears to be no symbolic language that can represent the plasticity and organic behavior of the property-pricing system and how it reacts to human knowledge. (This is typically called ‘Hume’s Problem’ of Induction.) It appears, at least at this point in time, that we will need a vast amount of data, on the order of many times that of the Google indexes, to provide us with enough of a basis from which to derive the patterns in that symbolic information. Even if we could find that information, we could find the patterns, and develop a mathematics of economics and the social sciences, the question would remain whether these innovations would have any material impact on the fact that humans are of pedagogical NECESSITY, epistemic status seekers, and that there are those who lead that pack of humanity and those who are forever followers in it, and the envy of the followers, and the arrogance of the leaders mandate that we will remain competitive, and that the problem of human difference is both permanent and valuable to the division of knowledge and labor.

                    • A Tiff : Hoppe and Tom Fleming and My Response

                      Hans Hoppe posted what I thought was a sentimental statement on the five year history of his movement on the libertarian web site VDARE. It’s titled The Property And Freedom Society—Reflections After Five Years In this article, he gives us his interpretation of the history of his organization, the Property And Freedom Society. (of which I am a member.) It describes, as all members of these political groups tend to, the reason why the conservative and liberal wings broke up at The John Randolph Club: they were based upon a relationship between Murray Rothbard, a libertarian, and Tom Fleming, a conservative. And after Rothbard’s death, the society broke apart because there was no replacement for Rothbard that could work comfortably with Fleming. There is no mystery here. This is how the partnership process works. When one partner dies, the remaining partner tends to hold onto the previous set of commitments, and the new partners want to be seen as new peers, and to write new commitments.

                      [callout] I care that my waiter is pleasant. I care that my intellectuals are either correct or insightful. [/callout]

                      However, Hoppe states that Tom Fleming is ‘a difficult person’. Which is not just hoppe’s opinion, but pretty much everyone else I’ve mets opinion. And I’m not sure it’s an insult. I know I’m considered difficult by plenty of people. Intellectuals are rare, and for them, the unsophisticated are often a lot of work to deal with – it’s just frustrating. Coming to terms with people who have different metaphysics from you, is awfully hard work, and very painful at times. It’s just irritating. And these petty realities are just part of the problem of being a human being. I think Tom has done good work. I think a lot of people think he’s difficult. I think a lot of people are put off by Hoppe. That doesn’t matter to me. I just want to know if they’re right or not. I care that my waiter is pleasant. I care that my intellectuals are either correct or insightful. Their manners are immaterial to me. Tom’s response only served to confirm Hoppe’s statement. The title says it all Hans Hoppe Welcomes You to his Fantasy Island Now I’ve only met Tom I think once, and I’m not sure where it was. And he seemed an intelligent and civil guy. But, I was kind of thrown by his response. You should read it. Myself, I am over-reactive on purpose. I found that as a rhetorical device, false-hostility will give your opponent incentive to invest in, and stay with a complex argument — and that when you’re done, and get to agreement it’s more satisfying. I learned it from watching Friedman, who never gave in. And I supposed I picked up some of it from Hoppe.

                      [callout]false-hostility will give your opponent incentive to invest in, and stay with a complex argument[/callout]

                      The comments, per usual, are more interesting than the author’s post. My Response below is visible at Chronicles Magazine here. This is a very interesting series of posts to read. I’m a supporter of both LVMI and PFS. (I have given them money.) I’m probably one of the most literate members of the faction in the private sector. And I agree that it’s a tough crowd to spend time with. Yes, it was extremely difficult to get past the doctrinal attitude and Randian cultishness that you are complaining about in order to understand and make use of the philosophical content that’s in their line of thinking. What made it worthwhile was the number of answers provided by them, and the vast amount of effort they put into educating people of all stripes that made it easy to become involved in this branch of the history of ideas.

                      [callout]I have never found Hoppe’s theatre anything other than entertaining[/callout]

                      First, I don’t really care about someone’s rhetorical posture. I have never found Hoppe’s theatre anything other than entertaining, and have found him helpful and a good mentor if you’re worth his time – which I can count on having received in seconds or minutes at best. And if you accepted praxeology (I don’t for technical reasons having to do with closed systems of logic – and praxeology is a subset of behavior and so it’s a falsely closed system) you’d also look at the world as Hoppe does: if you disagree you’re just wrong because it’s logically impossible to disagree. I am pretty certain he actually believes it. And I have never pressured him on any point and found anything other than honesty underneath his posture. This posture is an incredibly effective, controversial, and therefore valuable, rhetorical device. But it’s important to understand that it’s a rhetorical device. Every single TV Producer understands this, or we wouldn’t have talking-head shows to entertain ourselves with. Part of his knowledge base, (as was Friedmans and Rothbards) is this somewhat intentionally antagonistic posture. It undermines the opposite posture: opting out of the argument. Again, this is an ancient rhetorical technique in the european model. In fact, I suspect that the members of this blog, who have left comments above, do not understand the emotive rhetorical device they themselves are using. Or rather, that Hoppe is baiting in order to obtain engagement, and most of the comments above are attempting to force methodological conformity derived from assumptions of equality under the civic republican tradition – the presupposition of majority sentiment rather than superiority of ones argument. While I’m not certain, Hoppe’s method may in fact, be the only device possible to use against the method that you’re using. And I think you’re relying upon that sentiment rather than the veracity of any argument you possess. I don’t think that needs to be the case. I think that your method lacks an analytical foundation and you’re stuck between a desire for positivist solutions to unarticulated moral problems, and relying upon majority sentiment and tradition as an argument. (WHich is the default human position in any field of endeavor.)

                      [callout]Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises have fallen into, or intentionally embraced, a logical Godelian trap in an effort to find a pseudo-scientific device with which to fight the pseudo-scientific positivism underlying the rationalizations of democratic socialism.[/callout]

                      Unlike your majority position, I think Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises have fallen into, or intentionally embraced, a logical Godelian trap in an effort to find a pseudo-scientific device with which to fight the pseudo-scientific positivism underlying the rationalizations of democratic socialism. So while they have advanced the body of thought, they have failed to date. Hayek failed as well, at least, to make a strong enough argument, because he relied too much upon psychology rather than calculation — and the two wings of theorists failed, (Along with Talcott Parsons) to actually uncover the problem. Despite these failings, as a research program the Anarchists have proved very fruitful. While Rothbardianism is flawed, for technical reasons this group members would not understand without quite a bit of unwilling-and-skeptically-expended effort, the structure of Misesian, Rothbardian and Hoppian argument is a strong analytical foundation for discussing what have been, for all of the history of thought, undefinable abstractions. [callout]Hoppian argument is a strong analytical foundation for discussing what have been, for all of the history of thought, undefinable abstractions.[/callout] They haves provided an alternative framework (property and calculation) to the process of balance-of-powers-through-debate, which is the technology of republican government. Or rather, they have show that WITHOUT reliance on a calculative framework, that rhetorical debate devolves into either error or fraud. They see property as a moral argument rather than necessary argument – and they do so because they failed to articulate the full spectrum of human behavior by relying on the easy-epistemology allowed by the records left from the exchange of money. They did not include the invisible institutional economy of sacrifices that people make by NOT doing things with their property, their time, their bodies and their money. I suspect the Misesians make these errors because they are a little too enamored of infinite property rights — a bias which stops them from seeing and articulating the limits of property rights, and how those limits can be calculated. (Calculation being necessary when time, permutation and content are beyond human perception without such tools.) And I suspect that they intuit, if not understand, that if they did explain that full spectrum of human action, that they’d be confronted with the necessity, rationality, and morality of redistribution and public services.

                      [callout]Rothbardianism and Misesianism are an attempt to create a luddite religion based upon trade, rather than a technical political order based upon land holding, trade route holding, market participation, coordination, calculation and adaptation.[/callout]

                      Rothbardianism and Misesianism are an attempt to create a luddite religion based upon trade, rather than a technical political order based upon land holding, trade route holding, market participation, coordination, calculation and adaptation. I suspect that this is simply an unconscious attempt to justify the Jewish maternal minority sentiment that comes from non-land-holding disaporic people, as opposed to the european majority fraternal sentiment of land-holding soldiers. These are sentiments, derivations and residues that we rarely if ever understand of ourselves. This Misesian and Rothbardian jewish wing is in direct contrast to the Hayekian and Christian wing’s sentiments of group persistence in order to be able to defend and hold land, and in holding and defending land, hold and defend markets and trade routes. These sentiments are the underlying difference between the Jewish and Christian wings of libertarianism: jewish reliance on words and systems of though and christian reliance on the republican and militaristic models of land holding. We cannot escape our Hayekian knowledge no matter how hard we try. and in turn, these two libertarian programs are attempts to find a solution to the problem of maintaining freedom and prosperity without having to confront the reality of the necessity of using violence to retain that freedom – when that freedom originated uniquely in the west precisely because it was obtained by, and held by, violence. In other words our political dialog is distracted by the contra-rational desire to ignore the necessity of using violence to retain sufficient power to retain freedom. [callout]our political dialog is distracted by the contra-rational desire to ignore the necessity of using violence to retain sufficient power to retain freedom.[/callout] The question remains which wing of classical liberal thought, whether it be the ‘liberal’ factions or the conservative factions, have made progress in articulating a framework for political economy once the epistemological boundary conditions imposed on the republican model by hard money were broken by the adoption of fiat money. The Austrian prescription is a return to the gold standard. Which is wrong, because the insurance provided by fiat money, or at least, paper money, is too valuable to ignore. This is simply the only solution that they can think of – and since they’re economists rather than information architects, they fall into a selection bias. We must understand that Misesian and Rothbardian thinking is that of luddites, just as was Marx – they are trying to return to a technology they understand without understanding why it’s necessary and what alternatives that there may be. These regressive ideas are conservative solutions — historical solutions to a problem of increasing individual participation in a market consisting of larger and larger numbers of people with increasingly localized and fragmentary knowledge, and operating in real time, in order to exploit opportunities that present themselves because of necessary and permanent asymmetry of information in a large population engaged in diverse production. The gold standard It is not the only solution. There are others. There is a very good one in particular. But you cannot understand that solution unless you understand the value of the methodology used in the Misesian, rothbardian, and hoppian models, and the limits of knowledge brought to bear by Popper and Hayek. This information-weakness in our existing political and economic institutions is the underlying problem of political economy with the civic republican model — If you can fathom it from the few and admittedly abstract words I’ve posted here. The problem is one of practical epistemology that allows experimentation and innovation without exposing us to the risk of human hubris on one end, and corruption, theft, and slavery on the other. [callout]The problem is one of practical epistemology that allows experimentation and innovation without exposing us to the risk of human hubris on one end, and corruption, theft, and slavery on the other.[/callout] And debates like this one over form and protocol, manners and arrogance, are frankly beneath me, and should be beneath anyone who is concerned about discovering real solutions to the problem of political economy. Both sides of this dispute, from my standpoint, are simply acknowledging their failure when they rely upon ideological, methodological, or rhetorical conformity as a means of argumentative discovery of the solutions we seek. All I read into Hoppe’s piece was sentimental reflection, and tame taunting elitism. Perhaps this is one of those debates among academics that is so important precisely because the stakes are so small. And I don’t think the above retort does much to disprove hoppe’s taunt. The tactical response would be to tease him and therefore disprove him rather than reinforce his position. And the real argument here is that everyone within this absurdly minority movement, just like all desperate little academic movements, is that it’s desperate for followers. And not operating logically, but instead, using silly socio-political tricks because we’re all desperately seeking confirmation biases in the face of a problem we cannot comprehend, rather than understanding each other’s position and desperately seeking a solution to political economy. Libertarianism is a fantastic research program within the branch of conservatism. And the world needs the movement simply because conservatives have failed to muster and articulate a rational and technical alternative to encroaching socialism. Historicism is insufficient because HISTORICAL MODELS FAILED. EACH OF THEM FAILED. The Austrians and Anarchists are very close to providing a rational solution to political economy. I suspect that they (myself included perhaps) will fail for the same reasons that this silly dispute of egos and manners illustrates. Even if someone were to publish an essay with the solution in it, and the truth of it were patently obvious, I would venture that everyone in every faction would desperately seek to use whatever content was inside that essay to justify his own position in order to keep his followers or demonstrate that he was right all along. Hume told us what the problem is. Kant failed to find a solution. A legion of political economists have spent a hundred and fifty years trying to find an answer. They came closest in the 1930’s. But Mises, Hayek and Parsons failed, just as Weber and Pareto failed. And because they failed the political sector reached out to Friedman, which provided a temporary solution even if it was the wrong one, and Hayek, because his sentiment was correct even if his solutions were faulty. The conservatives hoped to get enough people into the property society that they could counteract the dependence society. But they used general liquidity (cheap money) rather than direct investment, and so the money was used for consumption not innovation and increases in productivity. The liberals, having converted us from a saving to a debt society, the conservatives hoped to alter it, but only accomplished further indebtedness. Only the libertarians have attempted to reconvert us to mans greatest innovation: the saving and investment society. [callout]Only the libertarians have attempted to reconvert us to mans greatest innovation: the saving and investment society.[/callout] But the way we solve our political problem is not debt, or even monetary policy. It is to create an innovation over the greek city state and the roman empire and the anglo mercantilist and american consumer republic. And to understand why we need to innovate beyond that model: the limits of human perception in a complex division of knowledge and labor. And that when we break with hard money, AND at the same time pool information (accumulate quantities in categories using numeric values of abstract objects we call property) we launder the necessary causal information needed to make rational decisions. And in doing so we also remove the incentive for people to obtain and hold that information, and to be disciplined and truthful in their valuations. The information needed to evaluate Property cannot be embodied in numbers. It’s a perishable not conveyed by the number. Numbers and values are subjective judgements, not objective truths. This is the error of both liberal positivists and the general political fantasy of scientific politics sought by the socialists. [callout]The information needed to evaluate Property cannot be embodied in numbers. It’s a perishable not conveyed by the number. Numbers and values are subjective judgements, not objective truths. This is the error of both liberal positivists and the general political fantasy of scientific politics sought by the socialists.[/callout] The solution is to fix our institutions of banking and accounting, so that we possess sufficient information to make rational decisions under the economically stable civic republican model. This change in institutions is a technical problem, not a philosophical, religious or cultural one. And as a technical problem, it is a solvable problem. It does not ask anyone to ‘believe’ anything. Faith is not a strategy. Hope is not a tactic. As weber said, all advancement in institutions is calculative.

                      [callout]it is bureaucracy that is a danger to us, not government.[/callout]

                      The second half is to understand that it is bureaucracy that is a danger to us, not government. A bureaucrat lives outside the market, as does a priest, a politician, a union laborer, or a welfare recipient. They are no different – they are class descriptions of the same behavior. But government is the means by which we concentrate all forms of capital. It is a joint stock company whose membership is paid for by respect for property rights, and frankly, whose dividends are paid for in public services and redistribution. The problem we enter into is when public services become the purpose of government, rather than the concentration of capital necessary to provide the joint stock company with competitive economic advantage so that there are returns great enough that redistribution can be performed in one form or another. Aside from the transforming from the saving society to the debt society, the transformation of government from creating wealth to consuming it is the artifact of the 20th century. It is far easier for the houses of government to debate over spoils, than it is to debate over the creation of prosperity so that it can distribute the spoils. [callout]Aside from the transforming from the saving society to the debt society, the transformation of government from creating wealth to consuming it is the artifact of the 20th century.[/callout] The anarchists are working on solving, and have largely solved, the problem of bureaucracy. And the solution is not anarchy. The solution is privatization of the bureaucracy, and the improvement of our institutions such that the knowledge that was provided by individuals THROUGH hard money, can be provided by individuals through shared investment in borrowing from the public’s future commitments in exchange for mutual gain, while retaining accountability, and with those who are willing to be accountable because they possess knowledge by which to make rational decisions. Under this model, the government may make rational decisions about investments, and we are protected from enslavement by either debt or the bureaucracy. This is too much content for a posting, too poorly articulated for the scope of the problem. But I was trying to put the different factions into a context so that we could focus on the real problem: finding an answer to providing institutions that deliver both freedom and prosperity. And for my side, I consider Hans Hoppe a gift to all of us. He’s innovative, creative, pedagogically gifted, and most of all, funny.

                    • NYT On Libertarianism

                      The NYT posted an article today titled The Economics of Libertarianism, Revealed. And the usual NYT crowd followed with critical comments. Which is useful. Because we get to see what the proletariat think of a subject about which they know little to nothing. This is a very odd set of comments. Heresay on one end and incompetence and error on the other. Desipte that libertarianism is the most fully articulated political philosophy we currently possess, it is both incomplete, its authors mix semi-charismatic language with reason, and they start from a convenient and erroneous premise: non-violence. And thereby simplify the problem of political economy dramatically enough that they overstate the ease of attaining their goals. As a theorist in this field, I’ll try to correct some statements made here: 1) there are a numberer of libertarian sects. They share a preference forindividual freedom and property rights. But they vary greatly from a branch of articulated classical liberalism (cato – english sentiments) to articulated conservatism (hayekians – german sentiments) to articulated radical anarchists (rothbardians – jewish sentiments). You cannot take ‘libertariansim’ as a coherent body of work. Or better stated, you cannot take the words of any thinker at face value: most if not all human debate is an attempt to find a rational explanation for sentiments. And sentiments are residues of our cognitive biases. (Pareto) 2) Libertarianism is NOT anti-government it is anti-bureaucracy. This is the issue that confuses everyone by incorrectly framimg the debate. The terms Government and Bureaucracy are not synonyms. And libertarians are both right, rational, and supported by data when they argue against bureaucracy. It says that humans in bureaucracies (whether private or public) once they become insulated from the market and prices, live by self interest without the market function that puts their self interest to good use in the service of others. It is possible to live a life outside of the market by the homeless or hippie lifestyle, by making enough money to live on your wealth alone, or by joining the bureaucracy and simply living off the efforts of others, and ignoring their signals – prices. The underlying theory of libertarianism is a) economic calculation is competitively impossible without prices and the market. b) market incentives are necessary to create a prosperous advanced society. c) our cultural institutions are economic strategies that, much like our sentiments, we do not yet fully understand and they should be treated cautiously. Most importantly, our most cherished values are often false: people are unequal, cultures are not equal in value, diversity breeds discontent not happiness, people are racist, classist and culturist, and it’s in their interest to be so, even if it is not in their interest for legislation to be so. (Really.) d) Leglislation as we understand it is infereior to credit as a means by which we can change the behavior of people in a society. We must move from the law-society to the credit society, and our government is not organized to make that change, while the private sector is. Therefore we must push our ‘bureaucracy’ into the private secctor where the market will kill off organizations once they are no longer useful. e) insurance companies taht are highly regulated will do a better job than the governmetn of regulating most market activity. But we have over-corporialized both banking, insurance and management. In simple terms, your banker should personally back your loan, and not be able to resell it. Same for insurance. This is a complex topic but we cannot abstract all accountabilty without losing the knowledge to be accountable with in the process. f) All bureaucracies are anti-market, anti-prosperity, self-serving, eventually corrupt, and stagnate the culture and prey upon the citizenry. The market puts our selfishness to better use than the bureaucracy does. It’s that simple. The libertarian strategy is to push as much of the FUNCTON of government into the private sector where iti is subject to competitive market functions so that we can prevent the bureaucracy from forming. Because it is the bureaucracy, or, the market-exiting of people within the bureaucracy that is the problem, not government. None of the libertarians is right, word for word. They are attemtping to find a solution to a perrenial problem: coordinatoin and ocoperatin in a dynamic dividsion of knowledge and labor. They intuit solutoins based upon their cultural heritage then try to articulate solutions in a long term, vast attempt, to explain what it is that we do, and why it works. We’ve had markets for a long time. Economits don’t invent anything. They just try to explain it the best they can. Libertairnism is the best, most fully articulated political philosophy we have. But that does not mean it can be implemented without an ‘event’. Because our government is not structured to replace itself. And the citizenry will always favor democratically imposed tyrrany, commonly called Bonapartism, and teh certainty of it, over freedom.

                    • The New York Times Is An Organized Crime Syndicate – And Misrepresenting Libertarianism Is Fraud And Theft.

                      THE NYT IS AN ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE Why is the NYT an Organized Crime Syndicate? Because the NYT has committed as much journalistic fraud, at a greater scale, as any of the most controlled of state run media in modern history, and has brought to market a defective and harmful product, and profited from the sale of that defective product. And that defective product has caused harm to both the long term material economy, and the institutions and habits of the citizenry, that have been dearly paid for. We are repeatedly assailed by revelations that yet another corrupt New York Times journalist has stolen from society by creating artificial myths which they bring to the market of political discourse as fraudulently misrepresented products. We are confronted with editorial bias among most of the New York media, but systemically so by the NYT who not only editorializes, but conducts systemic hiring, encouragement of, and acceptance by those editors of authors who confirm the bias of those editors, rather than those who seek to falsify it. [callout] Falsification is the only scientific method we know of. If a news media wished to be engaged in rational and scientific discourse, each would list it’s editorial biases and ambitions and then seek to falsify them, rather than confirm them. But instead we use the MARKET for news to attempt to fix this problem, thereby subjecting the POPULATION to the problem of interpreting information that they are not equipped to qualify, and forcing them into the practical pursuit of confirmation biases rather than the pursuit of political truths simply by exhausting them.[/callout] What is the difference between a corporation that brings such a drug to market for profit, and a firm that manufactures journalism and brings it to market? They are both selling defective and harmful products into the marketplace. So what is the difference? Nothing.Organized Crime Definitions of organized crime vary according to the Mission and Scope of the organizations seeking to prosecute it. In general, organized crime is a form of organizational conspiracy for the purpose of profiting from illegal activities. Illegal activities are those that profit from theft of property or service. But there is another form of organized crime, that is within the mission and scope of another organization seeking to police and prosecute it: the citizenry. The citizenry must prevent systemic and organized theft of institutionally accumulated costs, paid for not with the currency of money, but with the currency of restraint: forgone opportunity costs. These crimes may be petty, such as those of manners, they may be material, such as those of ethics, and they are most commonly moral, as in those that undermine our institutions that assist us in saving and accumulating human capital. Free Speech Free speech is a product of the republican system of government, whereby debate is a proxy for violence. It is a means of resolving conflicts between peers. Its origins are among the strong and wealthy classes. The purpose of free speech is to create a political dialog for determining the optimum solution for the advancement of the polis among share-holding equals.

                      [callout] [ It is ] the citizenry who must prevent systemic and organized theft of institutionally accumulated costs, paid for not with the currency of money, but with the currency of restraint: forgone opportunity costs. These crimes may be petty, such as those of manners, they may be material, such as those of ethics, and they are most commonly moral, as in those that undermine our institutions that assist us in saving and accumulating human capital.[/callout]

                      Free speech universally degrades into the act of persuasion for pragmatic personal political and economic ends, whenever the cost of fraud becomes too low, and it becomes lowest when taken to it’s extreme under the principle of systemic non-violence. Free speech is only possible to employ without the subjective control of violence if there is a ‘science’ by which to constrain the debate. THe field of economic science is struggling to become that method of articulating moral, political action. ie: Rational debate is a proxy for violence. irrational debate simply trades violence for deception and fraud. Violence is immediate and it is of all things, HONEST, instructive and decisive. Fraud is dishonest, prolonged, confusing and indecisive. Over time we have developed a policy of tolerating errors in free speech because we assume that the truth will prevail. We assume that wise and honest men will honestly correct the course of debate. We assume that men desire the truth rather than simply victory by fraud, ad that when presented with the truth they will acquiesce. We model debate as if we are still peers in the house of lords, rather than disparate groups of common people promoting our elites to heroic status whereby they battle in public circles by allusions, deceptions, barbs and ridicule, rather than reason, logic, and facts. We are further cautious of free speech in media because of the inequality it gives to an individual’s voice, an because it gives our group heroic elites a distorted but unchecked monopolistic voice in a system of politics developed for orators in a forum.

                      [callout]… conservatives desire to preserve their freedom, and keep down the cost of it, by creating institutions that meritocratically rotate the elites, and whose institutions are meritocratic and therefore privatized. Conservatives are not against change. They are against change that creates systemic corruption. [/callout]

                      Conservatives are particularly cautious of these elites because the conservative’s preferred method of action is individual, functional and one of material commercial action rather than the left’s preferred method of coercion by politics, media, and anarchic violence. Or more simply stated, that conservatives desire to preserve their freedom and the cost of it, by creating institutions that meritocratic-ally rotate the elites, and whose institutions are meritocratic and therefore privatized. Conservatives are not against change. They are against change that creates systemic corruption. Perhaps, they are also cognizant of, and desirous of building a society where one is rewarded for good, honest, hard working and kind social behavior, and bureaucrats whether inside the state, or inside industry, who are not subject to market conditions are not incentivized to conform to good civic behavior as was illustrated by Adam Smith. Regardless of political spectrum, we are further skeptical of media, because media is a means for institutionalizing the act of profiteering from selling class and group conflict. JOURNALISTIC FRAUD IS ORGANIZED CRIMEThe Most Recent NYT Organized Crime Syndicate Initiative Is Against Libertarianism

                      It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market.

                      No, it was a set of LAWS called the “Jim Crow Laws” that the government instituted in order to create slavery, and maintain its persistence as a social and economic structure. The STATE created slavery. The state funded and protected THE SLAVE TRADE ROUTES. The state sanctioned, protected and taxed slave Markets. The state prosecuted and pursued escaped slaves. It was the STATE that created and built slavery. In fact, in all of human history, it was the a defining property of STATEHOOD that allowed one class of people to enslave another. The Israelites returned from the desert and enslaved people. The Entire egyptian and babylonian societies were enslaved or virtually so. Hellenic and Roman civilizations were slave owning. European civilization was slave owning. Almost all civilizations in agrarian history are slave owning because farming is hard labor.

                      [callout]…The STATE created slavery. The state funded and protected THE SLAVE TRADE ROUTES. The state sanctioned, protected and taxed slave Markets. The state prosecuted and pursued escaped slaves. It was the STATE that created and built slavery.[/callout]

                      Secondly, it is the innovations in technology by the private sector that have made slavery unprofitable. And it is the insight of libertarian economists that slavery is simply LESS PROFITABLE than turning your former slaves into consumers. Because as consumers they simply have superior incentives to be productive in the market place. No, it was not the state, it was individuals, largely Christian men, who promoted anti-slavery, because as christians they saw this as un-christian behavior. It was women who took advantage of this anti-slavery momentum as a political step in getting their own vote via the suffrage movement once the industrial revolution started to free them from home-drugery. And it was politicians in Washington and the north that promoted anti-slavery, and Lincoln in particular who promoted it as a means of forcing the north to war against the south for entirely political reasons. But these people were not anti-slavery at the outset. They were agitated by the fact that the north and south produced different market products (southern raw cotton versus northern manufactured goods) and that the south was paying the federal taxes that they funded the state. The south was consuming overseas goods, and the north wanted to decrease competition from overseas for their goods, and so the north wanted to use the STATE to force the south to ‘buy american’, and needed to overtake power. Slavery was simply a rallying cry by which the state could get the Christian population to support a war. Slavery was on it’s way out the world over because it is UNPRODUCTIVE under industrialization. Slavery was not conquered because it was immoral. It was for political and economic reasons. The anti-slavery movement only accelerated the natural process of abandonment of slavery under industrialization, for purely self-serving, economic and political motivations. Slavery would have been eliminated by the free market. It was the state that interfered with the process by prolonging it. It was the state that took credit for the dissolution of slavery that was in reality, a dissolution created by the free market. This is what the DATA SHOWS. Regardless of the ridiculous public utterances and pamphleteering in the political arena, slavery was of declining productivity.

                      It was government that rescued the economy from the Depression and promoted safety and equality in the workplace.

                      No that’s not true. There is a vast body of work on this topic and it is still in dispute. So no, this is not settled science. We know that the governments created the problems that led to the great depression by creating fiat money and rapid immigration. We know that the war is what got the country out of depression. We know the post-war-era prosperity was largely due to the conversion of manufacturing and construction to war-materials (panel products). But we do not know that the government got the country out of depression and there is a substantive and arguably correct body of work that states that the government both caused the rapid decline, and by it’s policies prolonged it. Just as the policies enacted during the depressionary period are the cause of the systemic crash of western economies, which despite warnings from libertarians, are the result of converting society from “cultures of saving and increasing production to inter-generational redistribution and inflationary consumption” which thereby exposed the civilization to cumulative and irreparable risk. Libertarians warned that progress was not eternal, could not be depended upon, and that our economic tools and theories could not provide us with the insights which we attributed to them. But to no avail.

                      “Under this philosophy, the punishment for a lunch counter that refuses to seat black customers would be public shunning, not a court order.”

                      What it means is that any group should be able to ostracize what they see as anti-social behavior. And they have the right to determine what they consider anti-social behavior to be. Libertarianism states that if you want to build a homophobic, racist little town somewhere, go ahead, because you will descend into poverty by doing so. It says, quite conversely, that if you want to create a homocentric pluralistic city, that you can do so, and that economically you will benefit by doing so. Libertarianism states that it is up to the individual to choose which of those cities to live in. And that neither fantasy has the right to oppress the other. Libertarianism CELEBRATES DIVERSITY of choice, not choice-less mandated diversity. And it does so because it advocates that markets reward and punish. (( To counter argue this position no matter what angle one took, simply would require that you argue white europeans, or some other ethnic group, are a superior race. )) And any group that does engage in such economic ostracization such as refusing to seat customers of one race or another, would accomplish one of the following things: 1) go out of business by the loss of customers and the creation of competitors who serve the rejected customers 2) increase their business by the decrease in presence of anti-social behavior In fact, this is what people DO, in reality. Except in the very RAREST of circumstances in the very largest cities, in the most wealthy shopping and business districts, people congregate with people who look, and act, and speak, as they do. While this observation is trivial to any person on the street, yet escapes the Schumpeterian (( Schumpeterian Intellectual: someone who profits from selling his services as a public intellectual by criticizing the traditions of the society that made his idleness and therefore his criticism possible, and by consequence, subsidizing the bureaucratic evolution of totalitarianism. )) intellectual class, despite the data and evidence that proves uncontrovertibly that people are racist, act racist and always will act racist, and that the will do so for rational reasons: they obtain more status in-group than out of group. And business people are not motivated by social conformity. They are motivated by profitability. And RACISM IS UNPROFITABLE. Period. On the other hand bias against anti-social behavior IS PROFITABLE. And prevents the takeover via government sanction, by the act of denying businesses the right to choose customers, of the business by a market that is detrimental to the owners. Those same owners who risked their savings, retirement, homes and safety in order to buy, build, run and operate that business. And further more, ostracization is the only means by which a group in an advanced society can enforce the INTEGRATION that makes IMMIGRATION both tolerable and economically possible. Societies never have immigration problems. They have IMMIGRATION problems, and ostracization is the most effective method of enforcing integration into the social system. Limits Of The Market Libertairanism has it’s limits, because the market has its limits. It does have limits. The market has become large, far larger than that envisioned by Classical Liberals (libertarians) and too large to solve those problems of infrastructure development at scale, where the body of citizens can be served by long term investment in nuclear power plants, roads, and the electrical power grid. Even at that scale, it is a problem of financing and competing with regulation, not of execution – the market will execute better than the sate.. Liability Libertarianism would also indicate, that the use of media to make such misrepresentations, whether they be errors or deceptions for the purpose of concentrating political power, so that the violence of law and the state could be used to oppress people who seek liberty is a form of THEFT. Freedom of speech is not common to man. It is a sanction given by the nobility in a republic for the purpose of permitting exploration of the optimum set of ideas among a fraternal order of city-defending soldiers whose military tactics and military cost structure required enfranchisement of many men. But even among these people, free speech is not an unlimited right. It has it’s limits. And if we re-instituted liability laws so that one was required to be accurate in both political (fraudulent) and personal (libelous) speech, the NYT would be forced out of business, and the author of this piece, which is a cowardly and unsigned editorial, would be subject to prosecution. And it is that solution that many libertarians (like myself) would advocate. The Fully Articulated Political Philosophy Libertarianism is the MOST FULLY ARTICULATED CAUSALLY-COMPLETE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY that has ever been created by human beings. (( It is arguable that Marxism produced a volume of literature under the erroneous tribal belief in familial bureaucracy, but it is a well understood dead political and economic philosophy, if a living moral philosophy. It can be argued that classical liberalism produced a body of literature under the principles of individualism and organized public debate. However, the contract model has proven non-durable in time against the bureaucracy’s circumvention of the constitution via the judiciary. )) Libertarianism is imperfect, because all political theory is imperfect. That’s because man continues to evolve into a greater and greater division of knowledge and labor — and as he evolves, he requires deeper understanding of what it is he does, so that he can better comprehend how to resolve the necessary conflicts that rise from the speculative but rewarding human interaction in the market. LIke any fully articulated systemic advancements in human thought, libertarianism requires comprehension before criticism can be levied against it. Because as a SYSTEM, it cannot be debated piecemeal, just as any political system cannot be implemented or discussed piecemeal. Because it is a SYSTEM of interlocking processes of coordination and epistemology. And any attempt to argue it outside of systemic comparisons rather than policy comparisons, is an attempt to compare apples and oranges, and as an attempt to compare apples and oranges it is a willful attempt at FRAUD, or a silly and vain error by the incompetent. Incompetence is not something we should tolerate among those who we grant sanctions, and whom we grant the special permission of free speech in media. Curt Doolittle The NYT article is included here for reference.

                      Limits of Libertarianism By denigrating several of the signal achievements of modern American society, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act, Rand Paul has performed a useful service for voters who are angry at their elected officials. He has helped to illuminate the limits and the hazards of antigovernment sentiment. Many Americans are sputtering mad, believing that government has let them down in abetting a ruinous recession, bailing out bankers and spending wildly. But is Rand Paul really the remedy they had in mind? His views and those of other Tea Party candidates are unintentional reminders of the importance of enlightened government. In a handful of remarkably candid interviews since winning Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary this week, Mr. Paul made it clear that he does not understand the nature of racial progress in this country. As a longtime libertarian, he espouses the view that personal freedom should supersede all government intervention. Neighborhood associations should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, he has written, and private businesses ought to be able to refuse service to anyone they wish. Under this philosophy, the punishment for a lunch counter that refuses to seat black customers would be public shunning, not a court order. It is a theory of liberty with roots in America’s creation, but the succeeding centuries have shown how ineffective it was in promoting a civil society. The freedom of a few people to discriminate meant generations of less freedom for large groups of others. It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market. It was government that rescued the economy from the Depression and promoted safety and equality in the workplace. Republicans in Washington have breathlessly distanced themselves from Mr. Paul’s remarks, afraid that voters might tar them with the same extremist brush. But as they continue to fight the new health care law and oppose greater financial regulation, claiming the federal government is overstepping its bounds, they should notice that the distance is closing.

                    • Another Round On Paparazzi

                      Peter Surda April 21, 2010 at 2:35 am

                      However, it is still a person’s asset, regardless of price, because people ACT as if it is an asset, and that asset has material value to individuals, which we can determine by surveying the ACTIONS that people take, businesses take, regarding their reputation

                      But this is valid with regard to anything, not only reputation. This does not help define property, it confuses. Any change has a negative effect on someone. Does that mean that any action whatsoever is a property right violation? This is one of the reasons why I reject the notion of immaterial trespass. Instead, I humbly propose that only those immaterial negative effects that are defined in contracts are to be prosecuted (i.e. contract violations). Furthermore…

                      Property is a claim on an opportunity to make use of any object, material or abstract, upon which men can act.

                      It is not necessary to own immaterial goods to make use of them, therefore from the existence of an opportunity you cannot imply ownership. As I said before, with immaterial goods, anything causally related is “making use of”.

                      We can create representations of abstracts, can’t we? We’ve created plenty of them. I can stake a claim on land. I can form an abstract entity called a joint stock corporation, and then sell shares. I can marry someone and get a marriage certificate. I can get a receipt for a deposit. I can sign a contract. I can buy an option. I can wager a bet. Why can’t I stake a claim on a formulae? Or a brand or trademark? Or a design or patent? Simply because they require uniqueness against a broader pool of people, because are treated as first-come first-serve exclusivity, rather than an auction model, and because the market cannot expand to provide better and more accurate service than does the state. These registries try to prevent copying and bypassing investment (theft) rather than parallel innovation, which is in the market interest. Under the Hoppian property scheme land registries are maintained and protected by insurance companies and private firms instead of the state. But to limit the scope of property is to limit the competitive ability of groups to compete against other groups. The problem is that the government owns the registry and terms by which abstracts are registered, while denying the purpose for which we enact the registry: to encourage capital investment so that goods and services can be rapidly brought to market at lower risk rather than through direct subsidy. But in turn these devices can be used to prevent products and services from entering the market, and in particular, products and services that do not require capitalization, and that they too often endure long enough to create artificial monopolies. Book protections that persist beyond one generation of offspring of the author. Banks regulate their own ‘market’ of loans. Each stock market has regulations. Why can’t we have markets for other claims? Why can’t we auction off uses of a design, rather than simply deny competitors to the market. it’s the state monopoly that’s the problem. Material trespass and immaterial trespass are simply conventions driven by the ease of registry. In a man’s mind he can know his physical property, and know that any other object is not his physical property. If we could catalog ideas just as easily, would we not treat them as such? We do. We create ‘pointers’ to externally reference memories. They’re real world representations of abstractions. Is the purpose of the libertarian program to create a platform for cooperation and trade, to minimize the potential for government corruption, interference, theft, bureaucracy, waste, violence, class warfare, and exploitation using the evidence of how men actually act? Or is to create another silly religion that is contrary to the behavior of human beings, or is it just another absurd metaphysics like Marxism? A libertarian society must be one by consent – or we need to abandon the principle of non violence and implement it by force. And if it’s to be a society of consent, then it must reflect human behavior in order to gain consent. Human behavior, and the evolution of our knowledge, dictates that we leave the system for definition of property and the registry thereof open to innovation. Not closed, and limited to material constructs. The general body of arguments on this topic are reductio and illusory because of it. The real issue at hand is that in the division of labor, specialized knowledge is required to in order to innovate, and innovation in all but the black swan areas requires capital concentration, and markets are best served by their own division of labor in the act of policing fraud and theft, or even of registrations of claims against property. Government is not an innovative organ, and it is a corrupt and slow moving one. The issue instead, is to adopt a Hoppian division of labor and competition rather than a Rothbardian Luddite program, or a government-run monopoly program that by it’s very nature is expressly counter to the innovation, division of labor and specialization of knowledge needed to keep pace with our innovations, almost all of which, are currently ABSTRACTIONS. In this EXPANDING WORLD, the Hoppian model of privatization and risk management using insurance schemes rather than the monopoly of government is a superior answer than that of the Rothbardian Luddite model, which artificially Harrison-Bergeron’s” the civilization – to a man. If we can protect several property so that it can be invested in. We can protect abstract property so that it can be invested in. The institutional problem is registration and regulation. Not Rothbardian abstinence. And not to get a population to adhere to an absurd metaphysics. But to create institutions wherein real human beings can interact using real human innovations, almost all of which are abstractions, and most of which are now beyond individual comprehension. ( Property requires memory. Institutions are a form of social memory. Institutions educate indirectly. Memory becomes behavior. Behavior becomes normative.) Our problem is institutions, not beliefs. Actions not words. And any libertarian, and anarchic program that would simply force people to prefer to resort to violence to resolve differences, or which would impoverish the greater body of people by making them less competitive against other groups (which Rothbardian property would do) is simply to exchange the prosperity of the market for abstract registry of opportunities for the poverty of the bazaar society. It is regression. It is to limit man to the industrial age. It’s a Luddite philosophy. The anarchic research program’s undermining of the historic legitimacy of the state is separate from the use of non-state (insurance) institutions to maintain both real and abstract property. Focus on the right problem. Private, competitive, market institutions that divide knowledge and labor and provide service over government monopoly institutions that provide corruption, theft and incompetence.