Curt Doolittle

Theme: Reform

  • HOPPE IS WRONG ON POPPER – AND THIS IS WHY. I suspect that at this point Popper

    HOPPE IS WRONG ON POPPER – AND THIS IS WHY.

    I suspect that at this point Popper would suggest that all our attempts at social engineering have failed. And that we should constrain our ambitions to improving the institutions that facilitate economic calculation.

    While Hans attacks Popper for his piecemeal social engineering, the fact of the matter is, that Popper’s philosophical work is the closest to that of Propertarianism yet stated in the Germanic languages.

    I don’t criticize Hans for his imperfections: (a) that private property rights are logically sufficient for the suppression of demand for the state, and (b) that argumentation is not causal, (c) that praxeological statements are a-prioristically deductive, rather than sympathetically testable. Instead, I focus on what he got RIGHT – the incentives of monarchs vs rentiers, and the structure of non-monopolistic formal institutions

    I think we can forgive popper his open door to experimentation, and take from him what we can: that GiVEN THE FRAILTY OF OUR KNOWLEDGE, COERCIVE GOVERNMENT IS NEVER MORAL and never can be.

    Popper’s prohibition on truth claims is a moral one. And given that Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe are all WRONG in the interpretation of truth claims of Praxeology, and the structure of economic science, we’ve simply proven that not only is Popper RIGHT, but Popper has told us how to correct praxeology. Or at least that is how i was able to understand how to correct praxeology.

    Unfortunately, other than Hans it’s not possible to find many libertarians smart enough to have this level of discussion with. And I suspect he won’t appreciate it much. 🙂

    I need to get hans off of this argument. He’s wrong. Plain and simple. Popper is an asset not a liability. The prohibition on piecemeal engineering is one that POPPER gave us, NOT Mises.

    We can never claim to know enough to forcibly use other’s money for theoretical ends. The content in our myths, habits and traditions is also more dense than our understanding of those myths, habits and traditions. We may know how to USE those traditions. But like any complex technology we may not have knowledge of their CONSTRUCTION. And we certainly cannot observe the totality of their externalities – any more than we can observe the totality of the externality of prices.

    That’s Popper’s gift to us. That was Hayek’s gift to us. Hayek and Popper were closer to the answer than Mises – who, by applying Weber and Poincare, correctly understood economic calculation, but failed to grasp that economic science was not a-prioristic, but entirely empirical. He confused our ability to sympathetically test any human action for rational incentives, with the ability to deduce anything meaningful from the necessity for rational action.

    Curt Doolittle

    Propertarianism

    Rescuing liberty from the ethics of the ghetto, one paragraph at a time.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-02 16:53:00 UTC

  • UKRAINE : PUNISHMENT IS NOT AN ACHIEVEMENT – it’s housekeeping. It’s all well an

    UKRAINE : PUNISHMENT IS NOT AN ACHIEVEMENT – it’s housekeeping.

    It’s all well and good to punish the old guard that preyed upon the people. On the other hand, retribution is not a strategy for fixing Ukraine. Nothing will be different. In fact, obsession with the past is merely a foolish or lazy person’s way of failing to deal with the future.

    A new president and new parliament will do no good without reforming those aspects of life that directly affect the ability of Ukrainian people to prosper.

    1. Reform the judiciary. Add the Jury system. Look at the court data. Hire Ukrainian expatriates from German and English legal systems to audit the judiciary and to determine likely areas of corruption. Although most english and german speaking legal firms in Kiev have written extensively on how to cure Ukrainian judges’ notorious disrespect for the rule of law. This only requires honest effort. There is no secret here. Corruption in the judiciary is an open secret that everyone knows – and most people in western countries understand how to fix.

    2. Reform the Police on the Georgian or Russian model – pay the good one’s eliminate the others. Be merciless about reforming them. Any person can bring suit against an officer. Use citizen juries to try the police officers. If a policeman is fired by the jury, then he is permanently ineligible for service in any capacity in the government. This is sufficient incentive to protect the people from police corruption.

    3. “Universal Legal Standing Against Corruption” Treat corruption (even your own) as a crime against your people,and punish all of it, from the most political cheat, to the simplest credit thief, as a threat to the future of Ukraine and its people.

    4. Obtain the “universal right to bear arms” – it is the only source of freedom. Americans call this right “shall issue”. Meaning that the government must issue unless there is a reason not to. Do not settle for requiring a reason. Freedom from evil people in government is the only reason you need to bear arms. Ukraine is one of the only countries that understands the power of armed citizenry in securing its freedom from oppression. An armed society is not only a polite society but it is also a free society.

    5. Commit to a 10 year television and education campaign on ‘truth, trust and elimination of corruption in all walks of life.’ This is, believe it or not, one of the most important things that you can do in a low trust society like Ukraine. (If I spoke the language I’d drive initiative for it myself.) Ukrainians in my opinion are the best and most good people in the world. But trust is a technology. It can be taught like any other technology. And Ukrainians’ need to understand how to use that technology, rather than rely on centuries of experience without trust.

    GOOD ADVICE

    1. Try to get younger people into office who do not have adult experience under the Soviet model. It is very hard to change our intuitions about what we learn in our youth.

    2. Start teaching ‘rule of law’, ‘the common law’, commercial ethics, checkbook management, basic accounting, and basic economics to all students in all schools at an early age.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-24 06:30:00 UTC

  • ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF “PARLIAMENTARY COMMON LAW” It’s not a practical time for bi

    ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF “PARLIAMENTARY COMMON LAW”

    It’s not a practical time for big political ideas, but in a country like Ukraine, that probably DOES need a parliament, it would be very helpful to use lottocracy to elect ‘citizen judges’, selected by lot, from each district, to approve any law voted on by the parliament. Say, 12 citizen jurors for each representative. This essentially places common law requirements on the legislature. Use standard jury selection processes. As a citizen judge you must only vote in favor of a law if you understand it, it does not violate the constitution and it is good for your country.

    That is the best protection OTHER than NO GOVERNMENT that we can come up with, Direct democracy is a good idea but it is also terribly open to corruption, whereas juries whose actions are taken in public are not as easily corrupted as you think.

    This makes each citizen have a personal stake in the law.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-23 09:45:00 UTC

  • “DEAR AMERICA. TAKE NOTES. EUROMAIDAN IS A TUTORIAL.”

    “DEAR AMERICA. TAKE NOTES. EUROMAIDAN IS A TUTORIAL.”

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 16:19:00 UTC

  • MORALITY BACK INTO ECONOMICS – ONE POST AT A TIME (response to ‘economist’s view

    http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2014/02/forget-the-minimum-wage-job-losses-its-government-cuts-thatll-getyou-mad.htmlADDING MORALITY BACK INTO ECONOMICS – ONE POST AT A TIME

    (response to ‘economist’s view’)

    NOTE: current macro economic models assumes either (a) a nation state or (b) universalism. But it does not account for moral differences in a heterogeneous polity. My argument is that these models are increasingly predictive under artificially heated economies, and increasingly NON-PREDICTIVE under increasingly normal economies. The rate of change in wealth determines our tolerance for ‘immoral’ behavior. The lower the rate of change, the less tolerance, and the rate of contraction determines the level of intolerance.

    I believe that this is one of the missing ‘laws’ of macro economic analysis.

    Moral heterogeneity is a bad thing. It’s not a matter of race. it’s a matter of morality and identity. Race just happens to influence identity and morality a lot. Less so in the UK than the States for example. Less so in Canada than the UK. For obvious reasons: density and rates of change.

    — POST FOLLOWS—

    –“I love the clarity and consistency of the posts on this blog. But Cosmopolitan morality is not universal. It has a specific ideological origin. And it’s both a luxury good, and a status symbol, and symbol of conspicuous consumption.

    I’ve been arguing since ’06 I think, that people DEMONSTRATE by their actions that they will absorb significant personal harm, in order to ‘punish’ cheaters and free riders.

    At present, the financial community is an ally against the state. And the state has very, very bad polling numbers. Trust (polling number on our civil interactions) has declined rapidly since the 60’s along with the increase in our homogeneity of interest.

    So the people in both the USA and in Europe, are rebelling against what they see as ‘immoral’ behavior both by the state, and in the case of Europe, the low trust high corruption southern europeans. And in America, the high trust protestants against the low trust everyone-else.

    ‘We’ are not a family. There is no Cosmopolitan ‘we’. We are an empire.

    Cooperation is very different from redistribution. And redistribution is only tolerable if it does not produce immoral consequences. We can agree to cooperate if we have different objectives. But we cannot sacrifice across trust, family, race and cultural boundaries.

    We can all agree that the means of redistributing money via the financial system instead of directly to consumers is simply an artifact of previous technical limitations – limitations that we no longer have. MMT looks like a partial answer to the problem since we can issue debit cards and accounts to individuals at near zero cost. And we could even eliminate the financial system as a distribution network.

    This has the benefit of making work a means of obtaining luxuries, rather than absolute necessities. And it removes employment from consideration in policy, and instead refocuses us on productivity.

    The problem is, that the only way that will be enacted over moral objection, and over economic constraints, is to eliminate all entitlement programs, and all social service programs, and roll them into the new model.

    The conservatives will go for this solution if it means disbanding interference – including in the labor and social market, by the state.

    The truth test then, is whether people on the left are actually interested in such conversion of the economy and polity, or whether it’s just political power over the productive class. “–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 08:17:00 UTC

  • UKRAINE : A LESSON FOR AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES The square in Maydan has held ne

    UKRAINE : A LESSON FOR AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES

    The square in Maydan has held nearly a million people, but is being manned by as few as 20,000.

    Their successes and sacrifices have encouraged people in other areas of the country to revolt.

    It is very easy to render a country ungovernable, and a government illegitimate, with a very small number of people willing to use violence and to risk life and limb for freedom.

    A small, armed, distributed population, willing to use weapons against police and military, to disrupt bureaucratic organizations from functioning under their the thin veil of legitimacy, can rapidly bring an economy to a halt.

    The status quo in any society is not an immutable force of gravity. It’s a fragile set of habits, easily disrupted. And with that disruption the veil of ignorance is lifted from the public: governments are disposable. Freedom is not.

    UKRAINE IS A TUTORIAL.

    WATCH CAREFULLY.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-20 13:13:00 UTC

  • The N.A.P. Is Insufficient For Suppression Of Demand For The State – In Fact, the NAP Is "Unethical" By Definition

    (I wanted to thank Jason Maher for very intelligent comments. But also to respond to criticisms, and perhaps to fill a few gaps.) This post is part of a discussion on Argumentation Ethics. 1) In that thread, my purpose was to illustrate that neither AE, nor performative contradiction, are causal arguments. However, since both correctly assume self ownership is a necessity, then that the single assumption is sufficient to deduce all of the institutional solutions that Hoppe addressed in his work. It’s weak causal argumentative support, but it demonstrates internal consistency. And, in both logic and mathematics, whenever we construct a proof, we require internal consistency. Internal consistency does not determine external correspondence. And external correspondence is the only test of ‘truth’. But his arguments are internally consistent, and that’s something that doesn’t happen very often in ethics. 2) The rest of my post (and most of my work) is designed to articulate the universally DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS demonstrated by man, and to argue how, given such a descriptive ethics, liberty can be achieved as a system of NORMATIVE ETHICS. 3) The reason this construction is necessary is to correct the FAILURE of libertarian arguments to gain political support – or even to constrain the state. Or more simply: if we have better rational and economic arguments, then why do conservatives succeed in resisting the state, but libertarians fail to resist the state? The answer is that humans vote and act, morally, not rationally. (And it’s necessary for them to do so for many reasons, not the least of which is limited cognitive ability in real time, combined with fragmentary knowledge and living in an environment surrounded by others who are engaged in limited theft and violence, but pervasive deception, fraud, obscurantism, free riding, rent seeking and conspiracy. So the purpose of my work is to attempt to correct libertarian ethics such that the failed effort to gain popular support can either be corrected by improvements to libertarian ethics such that they are preferable to a political majority, or to alter the libertarian strategy such that we abandon both the attempt to obtain a political majority (or even an effective resistance), and attempt a separate solution. The various means which I’ve attempted to suggest are too long for this forum. NOW, TO JASON’S INSIGHTFUL COMMENTS –“An interesting conceptual division of methods to nick what belongs to someone else. Mr. Doolittle’s principle argument is the the Non Aggression Principle can only deal with #1 and part of #4, but is completely powerless against #2 and #3. Specifically, he speaks of the NAP lacking a mechanism for dealing with classes 2 and 3, and even encourages them…”– You are correct. Yes. –“”Private property is contrary [to] the female reproductive strategy””– This fact may seem humorous to you but the consequences explain why the introduction of women into the voting pool has driven us consistently toward a redistributive society, despite the fact that none of such would have occurred without the introduction of women in the voting pool. (I can’t vouch for Australia because I don’t know the data, But it’s true in the states and Canada. In Canada, without the French vote, the mix would be as conservative as the united states. Which is why conservative Canadians want Quebec to secede.) The female reproductive strategy is not monogamous, but polyamorous for support and protection, but to capture the better genes she can run across from those multiple encounters. And then to retain the burden of care, but to place the burden of upkeep on the tribe. Wherever monogamous marriage (the nuclear family, or the northern european absolute nuclear family) declines women return to this strategy via proxy of the state. Property rights that accompanied animal husbandry and agrarian settlement, inverted matrilineal reproductive control, and placed reproductive control in the hands of males – something the marxists have argued against since Engels wrote his tome on it. I can go into this at depth but lets just say that the evidence is that women cause the change in property rights policy and that they demonstrate a return to community property in their voting patterns. –“NAP covers externalities easily… complete allocation of private property rights to avoid “tragedy of the commons” and then allowing people to sue for damage to their property.”– –“NAP covers fraud too since it is basically theft through breach of contract.”– –“NAP doesn’t cover asymmetric information to the degree that it simply means two different people have different information. But having different information isn’t a property rights violation and is simply the state of nature. It is impossible and absurd to talk about all people in the world having identical information.”– Individual contracts place an extremely high transaction cost on all exchanges. So if you are one of the owners of an enormous shopping mall, and you rent space for stores to merchants, and you want to maximize your revenue, will you, or will you not, want to decrease transaction costs? People are entirely cognizant of transaction costs. The high trust society eliminates them, by a normative prohibition on all involuntary transfers, not just those transfers that constitute aggression. Further, no society exists that has property rights and liberty as we know it EXCEPT where there has been a near prohibition on all involuntary transfers – because it is the only way to reduce demand for the state: demand for the mall owners so to speak, to reduce transaction costs. We must remember that for humans, loss aversion, and altruistic punishment are MORE ACTIVATING (we are more passionate about them) than self interest. So all our decisions are asymmetrically weighted against risk. So the libertarian errors are those of incorrect attribution of praxeological analysis to transactions. And the reason for that praxeological error is that mises and rothbard both made the error of using commodity purchases and ordinal preferences, where commodity purchases are marginally indifferent except on price, and where human differences are not ordinal but a network, and where that network demonstrates necessary biases against risk and necessary cooperative biases that punish offenders> Think of it this way. If we did not operate by such rules, then transaction costs would be infinite, and we would not exist. It is not possible for humans to function without these prohibitions. It is non logical for libertarians to rely on the NAP, which structurally contains errors that are impossible for humans to cooperate using. I am aware that it is quite unlikely that you will, at first reading, drop your high investment in rothbardian and misesian logic. And I suspect that this one argument is insufficient to convince you. But you will have a very hard time both rationally and empirically circumventing that logic. So it is not that I err, or fail to grasp, or have not made sufficient efforts in this area of inquiry. It is that I am not trying to JUSTIFY liberty, but instead am trying to explain how to obtain it as a preference, because it is not justifiable. and it is not justifiable because while liberty is in our reproductive interests. It is not in the reproductive interests of all. Or even the majority. —“And perhaps more importantly, the NAP is not the only basis for anarchy. David Friedman is one of the most famous living anarchists and he (and I) argue based on consequences, not NAP.”— Well, I never made that statement. I’m making the statement that NAP is insufficient for DESCRIBING what people do. And that the weakness of the NAP explains why we fail to understand why even those people who prefer government out of their lives, demonstrate a demand for government under conditions that the NAP prescribes. The NAP only prohibits crime. It does not prohibit unethical or immoral conduct. To obtain voluntary participation you must forbid both unethical and immoral conduct, otherwise individuals will demand intervention to prohibit it. By having the state, a population trades free riding, theft, unethical and immoral conduct that they cannot avoid for rent seeking and corruption that they can avoid. You cannot eliminate rent seeking and corruption via the state without also retaining the prohibition on unethical and immoral actions suppressed by the state. Its non logical. I am trying to reform libertarianism to repair the errors in Rothbardian ethics in order to explain why we lose. And the NAP is one of the reasons that we lose: because it prohibits criminality but not unethical or immoral behavior. And if the NAP fails to prohibit unethical and immoral behavior, and If we claim to have a lock on ethics, then what is the basis for that claim? If we have a lock on ethics, then why do we fail? Are humans naturally unethical? That would mean that natural law was a false basis for liberty. This is because aggression is not the test of the ethics of property. It is only the test of criminality. Ethical constraint and moral constraint are place higher demands on property rights. Blackmail, as Rothbard argues, is not a violation of the NAP. It is a voluntary exchange. What is it about blackmail that we can say is moral or ethical? It should be clear at this point that the NAP is not a test of ethical or moral behavior, but only of criminal behavior. THE NAP IS LESS OF A REASON FOR A VOLUNTARY SOCIETY The NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society if we merely exchange free riding, rent seeking and corruption via the state, which we can both avoid and which we rarely experience, for unethical and immoral behavior which is pervasive in society, and we cannot avoid or fail to experience. Praxeology demands that we attribute rational choice to individuals. It’s non-praxeological to assert that the exchange of pervasive and daily thefts is preferable to infrequent and invisible thefts. If only for the transaction costs to each of us. So no, the NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society. People see the state, rationally, as the lesser evil between pervasive criminality, unethical behavior, and immoral behavior. They willingly trade rent seeking and corruption that they cannot see for criminality, unethical, and immoral behavior. And they are rightly rational to do so. So what is the means by which we eliminate the state’s free riding, rent seeking and corruption, while also prohibiting the criminal, unethical, and immoral? What is the basis for property rights if we must prohibit the criminal, unethical, immoral, AND the CORRUPT? NAP does not tell us this. Our reliance on the argumentative value of the NAP is the reason we fail. The NAP is in fact a RECIPE FOR FAILURE, because it is an unethical and immoral standard for the construction of property rights, norms and the common law. THE NAP IS ONE OF THE REAONS WE FAIL. Without prior promise of constraint of blackmail, we cannot reduce demand for the state. Private Property only developed where unethical and immoral conduct was suppressed at every possible level. The EVIDENCE is that the demand for private property only exists in the suppression of immoral and unethical conduct. Criminality is insufficient. So it’s not RATIONAL to argue that the NAP is sufficient. The trust necessary for private property must exist PRIOR to the demand for private property, and the reduction of demand for the state. Further, it’s not evident (it’s contrary to the evidence) that the market suppresses unethical and immoral behavior. Just the opposite. The expansion of the market INCREASES opportunity for immoral and unethical behavior. Immoral and unethical behavior is cheaper than honest ethical and moral behavior, which imposes costs on the participants. Property rights are a cost. Every time they are respected. Forgoing those opportunities requires trust. The result of forgoing opportunities and TRUST creates property rights. Not the other way around. Private property does not create trust. Once you suppress criminal, unethical and immoral behavior, the only POSSIBLE means of interaction is via private property. We cannot confuse cause and consequence. TRUST FIRST. PROPERTY SECOND. STATE LAST. So, again, trust (willingness to take risks / low transaction cost exchange) requires the suppression of criminal, unethical and immoral behavior. And the trust that appears to be sufficient for demand for private property requires near total suppression of unethical behavior. We must suppress even MORE unethical and rent seeking and corrupt behavior in order to reduce demand for the state. If we are to define property rights as the basis of a moral and peaceful society, then what is the definition of property rights that prohibits not only criminal behavior (the NAP) but also unethical, immoral, as well as free riding, rent seeking, and corruption? I think that it looks like the state would be the natural means of transforming criminal, unethical, immoral behavior into free riding, rent seeking and corruption in an effort to decrease transaction costs. Now, how do we FURTHER suppress free riding, rent seeking and corruption without the state? Privatization. But for privatization we must have a set of property rights that increase suppression of free riding, rent seeking and corruption, without sacrificing the reason for the state: suppression of unethical and immoral behavior. It’s non logical to ask people to yet bear again that which they have rid themselves of, by clear and demonstrated preference, almost universally. People have already demonstrated that they are willing to trade unethical and immoral behavior, for corrupt and rent seeking behavior. And they were rational to do so. You cannot tell them that they are gaining something by simply reverting them to a previous state that they have already rejected. We can only offer them something BETTER. Which is to ALSO prohibit rent seeking and corruption AS WELL as unethical and immoral behavior. So no. The NAP was a terrible mistake for the liberty movement. It was tragic. I understand why they resorted to ghetto ethics, because they didn’t understand where liberty and the high trust society came from. But now that we do (or at least I do) we must base any argument that we deem ethically superior on a set of property rights that is a net gain, not a net loss, for the population. This is very difficult for Rothbardians to swallow, but pride and personal investment in a failed ideology are less important than the achievement of freedom.

  • The N.A.P. Is Insufficient For Suppression Of Demand For The State – In Fact, the NAP Is "Unethical" By Definition

    (I wanted to thank Jason Maher for very intelligent comments. But also to respond to criticisms, and perhaps to fill a few gaps.) This post is part of a discussion on Argumentation Ethics. 1) In that thread, my purpose was to illustrate that neither AE, nor performative contradiction, are causal arguments. However, since both correctly assume self ownership is a necessity, then that the single assumption is sufficient to deduce all of the institutional solutions that Hoppe addressed in his work. It’s weak causal argumentative support, but it demonstrates internal consistency. And, in both logic and mathematics, whenever we construct a proof, we require internal consistency. Internal consistency does not determine external correspondence. And external correspondence is the only test of ‘truth’. But his arguments are internally consistent, and that’s something that doesn’t happen very often in ethics. 2) The rest of my post (and most of my work) is designed to articulate the universally DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS demonstrated by man, and to argue how, given such a descriptive ethics, liberty can be achieved as a system of NORMATIVE ETHICS. 3) The reason this construction is necessary is to correct the FAILURE of libertarian arguments to gain political support – or even to constrain the state. Or more simply: if we have better rational and economic arguments, then why do conservatives succeed in resisting the state, but libertarians fail to resist the state? The answer is that humans vote and act, morally, not rationally. (And it’s necessary for them to do so for many reasons, not the least of which is limited cognitive ability in real time, combined with fragmentary knowledge and living in an environment surrounded by others who are engaged in limited theft and violence, but pervasive deception, fraud, obscurantism, free riding, rent seeking and conspiracy. So the purpose of my work is to attempt to correct libertarian ethics such that the failed effort to gain popular support can either be corrected by improvements to libertarian ethics such that they are preferable to a political majority, or to alter the libertarian strategy such that we abandon both the attempt to obtain a political majority (or even an effective resistance), and attempt a separate solution. The various means which I’ve attempted to suggest are too long for this forum. NOW, TO JASON’S INSIGHTFUL COMMENTS –“An interesting conceptual division of methods to nick what belongs to someone else. Mr. Doolittle’s principle argument is the the Non Aggression Principle can only deal with #1 and part of #4, but is completely powerless against #2 and #3. Specifically, he speaks of the NAP lacking a mechanism for dealing with classes 2 and 3, and even encourages them…”– You are correct. Yes. –“”Private property is contrary [to] the female reproductive strategy””– This fact may seem humorous to you but the consequences explain why the introduction of women into the voting pool has driven us consistently toward a redistributive society, despite the fact that none of such would have occurred without the introduction of women in the voting pool. (I can’t vouch for Australia because I don’t know the data, But it’s true in the states and Canada. In Canada, without the French vote, the mix would be as conservative as the united states. Which is why conservative Canadians want Quebec to secede.) The female reproductive strategy is not monogamous, but polyamorous for support and protection, but to capture the better genes she can run across from those multiple encounters. And then to retain the burden of care, but to place the burden of upkeep on the tribe. Wherever monogamous marriage (the nuclear family, or the northern european absolute nuclear family) declines women return to this strategy via proxy of the state. Property rights that accompanied animal husbandry and agrarian settlement, inverted matrilineal reproductive control, and placed reproductive control in the hands of males – something the marxists have argued against since Engels wrote his tome on it. I can go into this at depth but lets just say that the evidence is that women cause the change in property rights policy and that they demonstrate a return to community property in their voting patterns. –“NAP covers externalities easily… complete allocation of private property rights to avoid “tragedy of the commons” and then allowing people to sue for damage to their property.”– –“NAP covers fraud too since it is basically theft through breach of contract.”– –“NAP doesn’t cover asymmetric information to the degree that it simply means two different people have different information. But having different information isn’t a property rights violation and is simply the state of nature. It is impossible and absurd to talk about all people in the world having identical information.”– Individual contracts place an extremely high transaction cost on all exchanges. So if you are one of the owners of an enormous shopping mall, and you rent space for stores to merchants, and you want to maximize your revenue, will you, or will you not, want to decrease transaction costs? People are entirely cognizant of transaction costs. The high trust society eliminates them, by a normative prohibition on all involuntary transfers, not just those transfers that constitute aggression. Further, no society exists that has property rights and liberty as we know it EXCEPT where there has been a near prohibition on all involuntary transfers – because it is the only way to reduce demand for the state: demand for the mall owners so to speak, to reduce transaction costs. We must remember that for humans, loss aversion, and altruistic punishment are MORE ACTIVATING (we are more passionate about them) than self interest. So all our decisions are asymmetrically weighted against risk. So the libertarian errors are those of incorrect attribution of praxeological analysis to transactions. And the reason for that praxeological error is that mises and rothbard both made the error of using commodity purchases and ordinal preferences, where commodity purchases are marginally indifferent except on price, and where human differences are not ordinal but a network, and where that network demonstrates necessary biases against risk and necessary cooperative biases that punish offenders> Think of it this way. If we did not operate by such rules, then transaction costs would be infinite, and we would not exist. It is not possible for humans to function without these prohibitions. It is non logical for libertarians to rely on the NAP, which structurally contains errors that are impossible for humans to cooperate using. I am aware that it is quite unlikely that you will, at first reading, drop your high investment in rothbardian and misesian logic. And I suspect that this one argument is insufficient to convince you. But you will have a very hard time both rationally and empirically circumventing that logic. So it is not that I err, or fail to grasp, or have not made sufficient efforts in this area of inquiry. It is that I am not trying to JUSTIFY liberty, but instead am trying to explain how to obtain it as a preference, because it is not justifiable. and it is not justifiable because while liberty is in our reproductive interests. It is not in the reproductive interests of all. Or even the majority. —“And perhaps more importantly, the NAP is not the only basis for anarchy. David Friedman is one of the most famous living anarchists and he (and I) argue based on consequences, not NAP.”— Well, I never made that statement. I’m making the statement that NAP is insufficient for DESCRIBING what people do. And that the weakness of the NAP explains why we fail to understand why even those people who prefer government out of their lives, demonstrate a demand for government under conditions that the NAP prescribes. The NAP only prohibits crime. It does not prohibit unethical or immoral conduct. To obtain voluntary participation you must forbid both unethical and immoral conduct, otherwise individuals will demand intervention to prohibit it. By having the state, a population trades free riding, theft, unethical and immoral conduct that they cannot avoid for rent seeking and corruption that they can avoid. You cannot eliminate rent seeking and corruption via the state without also retaining the prohibition on unethical and immoral actions suppressed by the state. Its non logical. I am trying to reform libertarianism to repair the errors in Rothbardian ethics in order to explain why we lose. And the NAP is one of the reasons that we lose: because it prohibits criminality but not unethical or immoral behavior. And if the NAP fails to prohibit unethical and immoral behavior, and If we claim to have a lock on ethics, then what is the basis for that claim? If we have a lock on ethics, then why do we fail? Are humans naturally unethical? That would mean that natural law was a false basis for liberty. This is because aggression is not the test of the ethics of property. It is only the test of criminality. Ethical constraint and moral constraint are place higher demands on property rights. Blackmail, as Rothbard argues, is not a violation of the NAP. It is a voluntary exchange. What is it about blackmail that we can say is moral or ethical? It should be clear at this point that the NAP is not a test of ethical or moral behavior, but only of criminal behavior. THE NAP IS LESS OF A REASON FOR A VOLUNTARY SOCIETY The NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society if we merely exchange free riding, rent seeking and corruption via the state, which we can both avoid and which we rarely experience, for unethical and immoral behavior which is pervasive in society, and we cannot avoid or fail to experience. Praxeology demands that we attribute rational choice to individuals. It’s non-praxeological to assert that the exchange of pervasive and daily thefts is preferable to infrequent and invisible thefts. If only for the transaction costs to each of us. So no, the NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society. People see the state, rationally, as the lesser evil between pervasive criminality, unethical behavior, and immoral behavior. They willingly trade rent seeking and corruption that they cannot see for criminality, unethical, and immoral behavior. And they are rightly rational to do so. So what is the means by which we eliminate the state’s free riding, rent seeking and corruption, while also prohibiting the criminal, unethical, and immoral? What is the basis for property rights if we must prohibit the criminal, unethical, immoral, AND the CORRUPT? NAP does not tell us this. Our reliance on the argumentative value of the NAP is the reason we fail. The NAP is in fact a RECIPE FOR FAILURE, because it is an unethical and immoral standard for the construction of property rights, norms and the common law. THE NAP IS ONE OF THE REAONS WE FAIL. Without prior promise of constraint of blackmail, we cannot reduce demand for the state. Private Property only developed where unethical and immoral conduct was suppressed at every possible level. The EVIDENCE is that the demand for private property only exists in the suppression of immoral and unethical conduct. Criminality is insufficient. So it’s not RATIONAL to argue that the NAP is sufficient. The trust necessary for private property must exist PRIOR to the demand for private property, and the reduction of demand for the state. Further, it’s not evident (it’s contrary to the evidence) that the market suppresses unethical and immoral behavior. Just the opposite. The expansion of the market INCREASES opportunity for immoral and unethical behavior. Immoral and unethical behavior is cheaper than honest ethical and moral behavior, which imposes costs on the participants. Property rights are a cost. Every time they are respected. Forgoing those opportunities requires trust. The result of forgoing opportunities and TRUST creates property rights. Not the other way around. Private property does not create trust. Once you suppress criminal, unethical and immoral behavior, the only POSSIBLE means of interaction is via private property. We cannot confuse cause and consequence. TRUST FIRST. PROPERTY SECOND. STATE LAST. So, again, trust (willingness to take risks / low transaction cost exchange) requires the suppression of criminal, unethical and immoral behavior. And the trust that appears to be sufficient for demand for private property requires near total suppression of unethical behavior. We must suppress even MORE unethical and rent seeking and corrupt behavior in order to reduce demand for the state. If we are to define property rights as the basis of a moral and peaceful society, then what is the definition of property rights that prohibits not only criminal behavior (the NAP) but also unethical, immoral, as well as free riding, rent seeking, and corruption? I think that it looks like the state would be the natural means of transforming criminal, unethical, immoral behavior into free riding, rent seeking and corruption in an effort to decrease transaction costs. Now, how do we FURTHER suppress free riding, rent seeking and corruption without the state? Privatization. But for privatization we must have a set of property rights that increase suppression of free riding, rent seeking and corruption, without sacrificing the reason for the state: suppression of unethical and immoral behavior. It’s non logical to ask people to yet bear again that which they have rid themselves of, by clear and demonstrated preference, almost universally. People have already demonstrated that they are willing to trade unethical and immoral behavior, for corrupt and rent seeking behavior. And they were rational to do so. You cannot tell them that they are gaining something by simply reverting them to a previous state that they have already rejected. We can only offer them something BETTER. Which is to ALSO prohibit rent seeking and corruption AS WELL as unethical and immoral behavior. So no. The NAP was a terrible mistake for the liberty movement. It was tragic. I understand why they resorted to ghetto ethics, because they didn’t understand where liberty and the high trust society came from. But now that we do (or at least I do) we must base any argument that we deem ethically superior on a set of property rights that is a net gain, not a net loss, for the population. This is very difficult for Rothbardians to swallow, but pride and personal investment in a failed ideology are less important than the achievement of freedom.

  • The N.A.P. Is Insufficient For Suppression Of Demand For The State – In Fact, the NAP Is “Unethical” By Definition

    (I wanted to thank Jason Maher for very intelligent comments. But also to respond to criticisms, and perhaps to fill a few gaps.) This post is part of a discussion on Argumentation Ethics. 1) In that thread, my purpose was to illustrate that neither AE, nor performative contradiction, are causal arguments. However, since both correctly assume self ownership is a necessity, then that the single assumption is sufficient to deduce all of the institutional solutions that Hoppe addressed in his work. It’s weak causal argumentative support, but it demonstrates internal consistency. And, in both logic and mathematics, whenever we construct a proof, we require internal consistency. Internal consistency does not determine external correspondence. And external correspondence is the only test of ‘truth’. But his arguments are internally consistent, and that’s something that doesn’t happen very often in ethics. 2) The rest of my post (and most of my work) is designed to articulate the universally DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS demonstrated by man, and to argue how, given such a descriptive ethics, liberty can be achieved as a system of NORMATIVE ETHICS. 3) The reason this construction is necessary is to correct the FAILURE of libertarian arguments to gain political support – or even to constrain the state. Or more simply: if we have better rational and economic arguments, then why do conservatives succeed in resisting the state, but libertarians fail to resist the state? The answer is that humans vote and act, morally, not rationally. (And it’s necessary for them to do so for many reasons, not the least of which is limited cognitive ability in real time, combined with fragmentary knowledge and living in an environment surrounded by others who are engaged in limited theft and violence, but pervasive deception, fraud, obscurantism, free riding, rent seeking and conspiracy. So the purpose of my work is to attempt to correct libertarian ethics such that the failed effort to gain popular support can either be corrected by improvements to libertarian ethics such that they are preferable to a political majority, or to alter the libertarian strategy such that we abandon both the attempt to obtain a political majority (or even an effective resistance), and attempt a separate solution. The various means which I’ve attempted to suggest are too long for this forum. NOW, TO JASON’S INSIGHTFUL COMMENTS –“An interesting conceptual division of methods to nick what belongs to someone else. Mr. Doolittle’s principle argument is the the Non Aggression Principle can only deal with #1 and part of #4, but is completely powerless against #2 and #3. Specifically, he speaks of the NAP lacking a mechanism for dealing with classes 2 and 3, and even encourages them…”– You are correct. Yes. –“”Private property is contrary [to] the female reproductive strategy””– This fact may seem humorous to you but the consequences explain why the introduction of women into the voting pool has driven us consistently toward a redistributive society, despite the fact that none of such would have occurred without the introduction of women in the voting pool. (I can’t vouch for Australia because I don’t know the data, But it’s true in the states and Canada. In Canada, without the French vote, the mix would be as conservative as the united states. Which is why conservative Canadians want Quebec to secede.) The female reproductive strategy is not monogamous, but polyamorous for support and protection, but to capture the better genes she can run across from those multiple encounters. And then to retain the burden of care, but to place the burden of upkeep on the tribe. Wherever monogamous marriage (the nuclear family, or the northern european absolute nuclear family) declines women return to this strategy via proxy of the state. Property rights that accompanied animal husbandry and agrarian settlement, inverted matrilineal reproductive control, and placed reproductive control in the hands of males – something the marxists have argued against since Engels wrote his tome on it. I can go into this at depth but lets just say that the evidence is that women cause the change in property rights policy and that they demonstrate a return to community property in their voting patterns. –“NAP covers externalities easily… complete allocation of private property rights to avoid “tragedy of the commons” and then allowing people to sue for damage to their property.”– –“NAP covers fraud too since it is basically theft through breach of contract.”– –“NAP doesn’t cover asymmetric information to the degree that it simply means two different people have different information. But having different information isn’t a property rights violation and is simply the state of nature. It is impossible and absurd to talk about all people in the world having identical information.”– Individual contracts place an extremely high transaction cost on all exchanges. So if you are one of the owners of an enormous shopping mall, and you rent space for stores to merchants, and you want to maximize your revenue, will you, or will you not, want to decrease transaction costs? People are entirely cognizant of transaction costs. The high trust society eliminates them, by a normative prohibition on all involuntary transfers, not just those transfers that constitute aggression. Further, no society exists that has property rights and liberty as we know it EXCEPT where there has been a near prohibition on all involuntary transfers – because it is the only way to reduce demand for the state: demand for the mall owners so to speak, to reduce transaction costs. We must remember that for humans, loss aversion, and altruistic punishment are MORE ACTIVATING (we are more passionate about them) than self interest. So all our decisions are asymmetrically weighted against risk. So the libertarian errors are those of incorrect attribution of praxeological analysis to transactions. And the reason for that praxeological error is that mises and rothbard both made the error of using commodity purchases and ordinal preferences, where commodity purchases are marginally indifferent except on price, and where human differences are not ordinal but a network, and where that network demonstrates necessary biases against risk and necessary cooperative biases that punish offenders> Think of it this way. If we did not operate by such rules, then transaction costs would be infinite, and we would not exist. It is not possible for humans to function without these prohibitions. It is non logical for libertarians to rely on the NAP, which structurally contains errors that are impossible for humans to cooperate using. I am aware that it is quite unlikely that you will, at first reading, drop your high investment in rothbardian and misesian logic. And I suspect that this one argument is insufficient to convince you. But you will have a very hard time both rationally and empirically circumventing that logic. So it is not that I err, or fail to grasp, or have not made sufficient efforts in this area of inquiry. It is that I am not trying to JUSTIFY liberty, but instead am trying to explain how to obtain it as a preference, because it is not justifiable. and it is not justifiable because while liberty is in our reproductive interests. It is not in the reproductive interests of all. Or even the majority. —“And perhaps more importantly, the NAP is not the only basis for anarchy. David Friedman is one of the most famous living anarchists and he (and I) argue based on consequences, not NAP.”— Well, I never made that statement. I’m making the statement that NAP is insufficient for DESCRIBING what people do. And that the weakness of the NAP explains why we fail to understand why even those people who prefer government out of their lives, demonstrate a demand for government under conditions that the NAP prescribes. The NAP only prohibits crime. It does not prohibit unethical or immoral conduct. To obtain voluntary participation you must forbid both unethical and immoral conduct, otherwise individuals will demand intervention to prohibit it. By having the state, a population trades free riding, theft, unethical and immoral conduct that they cannot avoid for rent seeking and corruption that they can avoid. You cannot eliminate rent seeking and corruption via the state without also retaining the prohibition on unethical and immoral actions suppressed by the state. Its non logical. I am trying to reform libertarianism to repair the errors in Rothbardian ethics in order to explain why we lose. And the NAP is one of the reasons that we lose: because it prohibits criminality but not unethical or immoral behavior. And if the NAP fails to prohibit unethical and immoral behavior, and If we claim to have a lock on ethics, then what is the basis for that claim? If we have a lock on ethics, then why do we fail? Are humans naturally unethical? That would mean that natural law was a false basis for liberty. This is because aggression is not the test of the ethics of property. It is only the test of criminality. Ethical constraint and moral constraint are place higher demands on property rights. Blackmail, as Rothbard argues, is not a violation of the NAP. It is a voluntary exchange. What is it about blackmail that we can say is moral or ethical? It should be clear at this point that the NAP is not a test of ethical or moral behavior, but only of criminal behavior. THE NAP IS LESS OF A REASON FOR A VOLUNTARY SOCIETY The NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society if we merely exchange free riding, rent seeking and corruption via the state, which we can both avoid and which we rarely experience, for unethical and immoral behavior which is pervasive in society, and we cannot avoid or fail to experience. Praxeology demands that we attribute rational choice to individuals. It’s non-praxeological to assert that the exchange of pervasive and daily thefts is preferable to infrequent and invisible thefts. If only for the transaction costs to each of us. So no, the NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society. People see the state, rationally, as the lesser evil between pervasive criminality, unethical behavior, and immoral behavior. They willingly trade rent seeking and corruption that they cannot see for criminality, unethical, and immoral behavior. And they are rightly rational to do so. So what is the means by which we eliminate the state’s free riding, rent seeking and corruption, while also prohibiting the criminal, unethical, and immoral? What is the basis for property rights if we must prohibit the criminal, unethical, immoral, AND the CORRUPT? NAP does not tell us this. Our reliance on the argumentative value of the NAP is the reason we fail. The NAP is in fact a RECIPE FOR FAILURE, because it is an unethical and immoral standard for the construction of property rights, norms and the common law. THE NAP IS ONE OF THE REAONS WE FAIL. Without prior promise of constraint of blackmail, we cannot reduce demand for the state. Private Property only developed where unethical and immoral conduct was suppressed at every possible level. The EVIDENCE is that the demand for private property only exists in the suppression of immoral and unethical conduct. Criminality is insufficient. So it’s not RATIONAL to argue that the NAP is sufficient. The trust necessary for private property must exist PRIOR to the demand for private property, and the reduction of demand for the state. Further, it’s not evident (it’s contrary to the evidence) that the market suppresses unethical and immoral behavior. Just the opposite. The expansion of the market INCREASES opportunity for immoral and unethical behavior. Immoral and unethical behavior is cheaper than honest ethical and moral behavior, which imposes costs on the participants. Property rights are a cost. Every time they are respected. Forgoing those opportunities requires trust. The result of forgoing opportunities and TRUST creates property rights. Not the other way around. Private property does not create trust. Once you suppress criminal, unethical and immoral behavior, the only POSSIBLE means of interaction is via private property. We cannot confuse cause and consequence. TRUST FIRST. PROPERTY SECOND. STATE LAST. So, again, trust (willingness to take risks / low transaction cost exchange) requires the suppression of criminal, unethical and immoral behavior. And the trust that appears to be sufficient for demand for private property requires near total suppression of unethical behavior. We must suppress even MORE unethical and rent seeking and corrupt behavior in order to reduce demand for the state. If we are to define property rights as the basis of a moral and peaceful society, then what is the definition of property rights that prohibits not only criminal behavior (the NAP) but also unethical, immoral, as well as free riding, rent seeking, and corruption? I think that it looks like the state would be the natural means of transforming criminal, unethical, immoral behavior into free riding, rent seeking and corruption in an effort to decrease transaction costs. Now, how do we FURTHER suppress free riding, rent seeking and corruption without the state? Privatization. But for privatization we must have a set of property rights that increase suppression of free riding, rent seeking and corruption, without sacrificing the reason for the state: suppression of unethical and immoral behavior. It’s non logical to ask people to yet bear again that which they have rid themselves of, by clear and demonstrated preference, almost universally. People have already demonstrated that they are willing to trade unethical and immoral behavior, for corrupt and rent seeking behavior. And they were rational to do so. You cannot tell them that they are gaining something by simply reverting them to a previous state that they have already rejected. We can only offer them something BETTER. Which is to ALSO prohibit rent seeking and corruption AS WELL as unethical and immoral behavior. So no. The NAP was a terrible mistake for the liberty movement. It was tragic. I understand why they resorted to ghetto ethics, because they didn’t understand where liberty and the high trust society came from. But now that we do (or at least I do) we must base any argument that we deem ethically superior on a set of property rights that is a net gain, not a net loss, for the population. This is very difficult for Rothbardians to swallow, but pride and personal investment in a failed ideology are less important than the achievement of freedom.

  • Against Ideal Worlds

    1) I think it is a philosophical error (or at least naivety, and possibly profound arrogance) to think in terms of ideal worlds. I tend to think in terms of improving the world we live in, without causing externalities that negate the improvement. It is the latter part of that statement that changes philosophy from an interesting parlor game to one of consequence. 2) I think the purpose of philosophy is to integrate expansions in scientific understanding into our current understanding of the world, such that we improve our ability to reason and act in such a way as to take superior advantage of the difference between our rate of change and the universe’s suite of constant relations. 3) I think value claims are normative. In my work, I have found that if one looks at a) the structure of production b) the structure of reproduction (family) c) the class and status of the extended family d) the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the polity. e) the gender and generation of the individuals. That moral biases are predictable portfolios that reflect our reproductives strategies. 4) I think we can agree on means but not ends. And if we could agree upon ends, we increase fragility and risk. But that said, it is non-rational to expect one group to sacrifice its reproduction for another group’s reproduction. And people demonstrate this universally in all polities (at least over time.) As such I see the only ‘good’ as creating sufficient prosperity, and maintaining it, so that we are all wealthy enough to obtain what we desire individually or in small groups, but certainly not en masse. And neither equality nor diversity assist us in this objective. And that is demonstrably empirical, and very difficult to refute without selective reasoning. If it stands that women are at maximum density in one sector or other the economy, then that is the optimum best for all, because any other arrangement, whether prohibited from their potential, or prohibiting some male from his potential, is detrimental to the fulfillment of all potentials. That is, unless, you feel one of the luxuries that we can afford, is false status signals. An that is a valid preference. It may be that we prefer to create certain false signals because we are wealthy enough to do so. The problem is in anticipating the externalizes (consequences) of such false signals. And whether one or many have the right to involuntarily cause others sacrifice for self benefit.