Curt Doolittle

Theme: Reform

  • FISCAL CLIFF DEMANDS I’ve been saying this for years and I’ll say it again this

    FISCAL CLIFF DEMANDS

    I’ve been saying this for years and I’ll say it again this time:

    In exchange for taxes require the DoEd, HUD and Energy shuttered. That’s enough.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-30 11:02:00 UTC

  • Letter To Lew : On 30 Years Of The Mises Institute

    I posted this on Mises.org in response to The First 30 Years of the Mises Institute [I] was terribly afraid that you would not make this change in direction, and am both excited and pleased that you have decided to. Rothbardian ethics specifically avoids the Protestant requirements for symmetry of information, and warrantee in any transaction, and Rothbard consistently avoids the treatment of norms as a commons – despite the necessity of property as a norm. Both of theses facets of Rothbardian thought permanently render Rothbardian ethics regressive and insufficient for the high-trust society that is the moral ideology of the american population. Hoppe has supplied some of the necessary solutions, but they require institutional changes that first require the support of the population’s moral sentiments. And only constant exposure to morally agreeable ideas will make them tolerate institutional change. Ron Paul, whether intentionally or not, (I do not know) does not make the Rothbardian error in his promotion of libertarianism, and therefore renders social and moral code more acceptable to a broader audience of Americans – most of whom embrace the sentiments of the founders and some variant of the protestant ethic. Conservatives in particular see the morality of the normative commons as equal in importance to the rule of law. This is why Ron Paul’s message sells with the population more than Rothbard’s. Rothbard did give us Propertarian ethics and revisionist history, and the language we needed to talk about freedom. But his ethics is not tolerable by members of a high trust society, and libertarianism is only possible within a high trust society. Ron Paul’s ethics is tolerable, because implicitly, his message does not undermine the high-trust moral code. I’ve felt your use of ideology, education, and technology was always superior to the actual ethical program it contained. Hopefully the ethical program (which people sense, even if they cannot articulate) when subject to the Ron Paul ethos, will change, so that the operational superiority of the Mises Institute will be matched by a philosophical and ethical program that will take us beyond the support of a tenth of the population, with MI as the well-funded and leading organization behind that change. It’s also great to see Tom Woods put to full use, and that his confidence in himself and his ideas has finally taken hold – it comes across in everything he writes, says and does. I’m surprised and thrilled that you’ve brought in Napolitano. It would be helpful if we could recruit more time and effort from Bob Murphy – especially if he had some coaching on presentation of his arguments from Napolitano. (I’ve been toying with the idea of using Karl Smith, to play the foil for our side, because he is the only honest liberal economist emerging from the current generation that is literate in both moral and economic ideas. He has and will engage with Murphy. But the problem is in creating the appropriate venue, and I have enough work on my plate right now.) Anyway, all that said, congratulations on the change in direction. I”m one of the many people that owes an intellectual debt to MI. Curt

  • MORE FUN FOR AN EXTERNAL CEO THAN TURNING AROUND A TROUBLED COMPANY I don’t like

    http://business.time.com/2012/08/02/10-ceos-who-are-new-on-the-job-and-trying-to-do-the-impossible/NOTHING MORE FUN FOR AN EXTERNAL CEO THAN TURNING AROUND A TROUBLED COMPANY

    I don’t like to refer anyone to Time Magazine. It’s been the intellectual equivalent of a producer of hazardous waste for most of my life. But this article on the tough job of CEO’s whose job it is to turn around companies that the market has left behind, is not so much worth the read, but worth reminding us of how hard it is to solve some of these problems.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-08-03 10:59:00 UTC

  • An Example Of The Sea Change In Libertarianism

    ‘AN EXAMPLE OF THE SEA CHANGE IN LIBERTARIANISM (I posted this in response to a comment on The Skeptical Libertarian, which was critical of Tom Woods’ jibe that TSL was not skeptical enough of the government. It’s an opportunity to illustrate the current changes in the libertarian movement. These comments get lost if I don’t post them on my own timeline so I’ve copied it here for reference, and for those who might want to read it.)1) LIBERTARIANISM IS A SENTIMENT AND WE HAVE CREATED A SPECTRUM OF INSTITUTIONAL SOLUTIONS The ROTHBARDIANS are the anarchic WING of LIBERTARIANISM. Libertarianism describes a spectrum of political solutions of which Rothbardian Anarchism is only one permutation. 2) ROTHBARD”S INSIGHT The Rothbardians were successful largely because Rothbard’s PROPERTARIANISM, in his Ethics of Liberty created a rational framework that could be used to defeat marxist arguments, where both conservatives and classical liberal libertarians had failed to provide such a rational framework. Marxism is philosophically rigorous. Rothbard made libertarianism philosophically rigorous. He then created a revisionist history to support his arguments. 3) THE PROBLEM WITH ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS There is a tragic weakness in Rothbardianism that invalidates much of his reliance on Natural Law. THat is that human beings are twice as motivated to suppress ‘cheating’ in others as they are to create personal gain. Rothbardianism provides no vehicle for suppressing ‘cheating’. In particular, the export of involuntary transfers to third parties. Hoppe managed to repair much of Rothbardianism, but his written works do not successfully capture his oral arguments, nor is his rather turgid german prose as accessible as Rothbard’s. So Rothbardianism remains the gospel of the anti-state movement. (I’ve tried to capture these ethical problems on my site. But my work is quite philosophically dense and not accessible either.) 4) THE MISES INSTITUTE These ROTHBARDIANS are concentrated in the Mises organization, which was purposefully constructed by Lew Rockwell. The Mises organization is trying to monopolize the language of libertarianism using Alinsky’s model for Marxism. The idea is to create a ‘religion’, because emotionally activated advocates are more effective, loyal and missionary than are rationally educated constituents. This strategy is not something they are shy about. (I’ve written about this frequently.) 5) THE NEED FOR ARGUMENTS As part of their intellectual program, Rothbardians provide arguments against all state activities that we assume cannot be provided from the market. They acknowledge that market solutions produce DIFFERENT externalities than does government, but they state that market externalities are LESS BAD than government externalities. 6) TOM WOODS When Tom Woods criticizes others, it’s in this context: he’s saying that the externalities produced by odd science are less bad than government regulations and mandates. This is somewhat hard to argue with. However, it is vulnerable to criticism because human beings have such high distaste for ‘cheating’. And they consider silly science and snake oil cheating, but are unable to determine which items are snake oil and which are not. And as Kuhn showed us, science is prone to paradigmatic error. So we rarely know when science is junk science or not. 7) GENERATIONAL SHIFT IN THE PROBLEM SET We should note that there is a generational change in libertarianism at the moment. We are moving from a suite of intellectuals who fought against socialism to a suite of intellectuals who fight against redistributive social democracy, and another that more closely matches the white conservative movement, now that whites are acting as a minority. There is a certain surrender to demographic change going on. Also, the polarization of the electorate due to the south abandoning it’s prohibition on the Republican party, and the reaction of whites to immigration that has made them a minority, has caused frustration with the government that has made the youngest generation of voters the most libertarian in history. But they are socially positive if institutionally negative. And this has created a problem for the Rothbardians. In this changing generational environment the dominance of Rothbardians in the intellectual debate has caused a number of reactions. I. First, the other sects (Cato, Bleeding Hearts, Heritage, various others, including my Propertarianism) both congratulate Lew and his MIses organization for their success at promoting libertarian ideas, and adopt those communication strategies that the mises organization was visionary in employing on the internet. II. Second, there is a limit to the number of acolytes that will adopt the anti-social rothbardian ideology. (although not the Hoppean version.) We are at that limit. The Mises organization is making changes to eliminate the ‘whacky factor’. This includes cleaning up their blog and limiting it to intellectuals. So the Mises org is adapting as well. III. Third, and probably not as obvious, is that science has increasingly undermined the ‘progressive’ vision of human nature, and is on its way to confirming the conservative vision of human nature. We are slowly retiring the equality meme’s nonsensical environmental presumption in favor of the conservative genetic argument. The current argument is 60/40 and I suspect we will eventually conclude it is an 80/20 proposition. It may be too late, but the ideological tide has turned. This will make it possible to address institutional solutions rationally in a way that has been impossible for seventy years. IV. Fourth, it is becoming obvious from the data that classical liberalism’s multi-house model cannot survive the addition of women to the voting pool. Men and women have different reproductive strategies and different moral codes which agrarian marriage and the nuclear family managed to accomodate. However, since males skew individualist, and women skew collectivist, we cannot use majority rule to accomodate both moral codes. We have no ‘houses’ which will allow the creating of exchanges rather than ‘takings’. The conservative think tanks are so enamored of the past that they cannot solve this problem. All think tanks, all ideologies, all movements, currently seek to gain a majority of like-minded individuals under majority rule, rather than to construct a government where these groups can conduct exchanges. The market allows us to cooperate on means if not ends. The population will need a means to do so as well. And to do so where ‘cheating’ is prohibited. This is why government will persist: as a means of prohibiting cheating. TRENDS For the first two reasons above, you should expect to see the eccentricity of the Rothbarian movement coming out of the Mises institute to be less supportive of heretical science, and more explicit in its use of arguments that discuss the differences in externalities between government and market solutions. I do not know if they will be smart enough to try to move from a Rothbardian criticism-dominated, to a Hoppeian solution-dominated framework, and therefor provide an institutional solution that is competitive to and superior to that of the classical liberals. And I can’t imagine that they would try to co-opt the classical liberal wing (where the money is), and by doing so suggest the entire spectrum of libertarian institutional solutions, but they are the people who could successfully accomplish it if they tried. I just can’t see them being that pragmatic. You do not build an ideology then become a pragmatist. That would take new leadership. The Heritage organization is data driven and has wide appeal. But it is not philosophically rigorous, and it does not recommend changes to the existing institutions that would accomodate contemporary reality. Cato is neither data driven nor philosophically rigorous, but corresponds correctly to classical sentiments. Rothbardianism and Hoppianism as well as Hayekianism are all philosophically rigorous systems of thought. But Rothbardianism is not going to ever be acceptable to enough people to gain office and change institutions. It is a brilliant ideological strategy. It worked. We shoujld all congratulate Lew Rockwell on his vision. But Rothbardianism is not an institutional solution. Because a Christian people will not tolerate the rampant cheating present in the ‘ethics of the bazaar’ that Rothbard advocates. and they’re right to reject it. They spent too many centuries trying to escape it, and build the High Trust Society. Perhaps the only high trust society that ever existed.

  • AN EXAMPLE OF THE SEA CHANGE IN LIBERTARIANISM (I posted this in response to a c

    AN EXAMPLE OF THE SEA CHANGE IN LIBERTARIANISM

    (I posted this in response to a comment on The Skeptical Libertarian, which was critical of Tom Woods’ jibe that TSL was not skeptical enough of the government. It’s an opportunity to illustrate the current changes in the libertarian movement. These comments get lost if I don’t post them on my own timeline so I’ve copied it here for reference, and for those who might want to read it.)

    1) LIBERTARIANISM IS A SENTIMENT AND WE HAVE CREATED A SPECTRUM OF INSTITUTIONAL SOLUTIONS

    The ROTHBARDIANS are the anarchic WING of LIBERTARIANISM. Libertarianism describes a spectrum of political solutions of which Rothbardian Anarchism is only one permutation.

    2) ROTHBARD”S INSIGHT

    The Rothbardians were successful largely because Rothbard’s PROPERTARIANISM, in his Ethics of Liberty created a rational framework that could be used to defeat marxist arguments, where both conservatives and classical liberal libertarians had failed to provide such a rational framework. Marxism is philosophically rigorous. Rothbard made libertarianism philosophically rigorous. He then created a revisionist history to support his arguments.

    3) THE PROBLEM WITH ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS

    There is a tragic weakness in Rothbardianism that invalidates much of his reliance on Natural Law. THat is that human beings are twice as motivated to suppress ‘cheating’ in others as they are to create personal gain. Rothbardianism provides no vehicle for suppressing ‘cheating’. In particular, the export of involuntary transfers to third parties. Hoppe managed to repair much of Rothbardianism, but his written works do not successfully capture his oral arguments, nor is his rather turgid german prose as accessible as Rothbard’s. So Rothbardianism remains the gospel of the anti-state movement. (I’ve tried to capture these ethical problems on my site. But my work is quite philosophically dense and not accessible either.)

    4) THE MISES INSTITUTE

    These ROTHBARDIANS are concentrated in the Mises organization, which was purposefully constructed by Lew Rockwell. The Mises organization is trying to monopolize the language of libertarianism using Alinsky’s model for Marxism. The idea is to create a ‘religion’, because emotionally activated advocates are more effective, loyal and missionary than are rationally educated constituents. This strategy is not something they are shy about. (I’ve written about this frequently.)

    5) THE NEED FOR ARGUMENTS

    As part of their intellectual program, Rothbardians provide arguments against all state activities that we assume cannot be provided from the market. They acknowledge that market solutions produce DIFFERENT externalities than does government, but they state that market externalities are LESS BAD than government externalities.

    6) TOM WOODS

    When Tom Woods criticizes others, it’s in this context: he’s saying that the externalities produced by odd science are less bad than government regulations and mandates. This is somewhat hard to argue with. However, it is vulnerable to criticism because human beings have such high distaste for ‘cheating’. And they consider silly science and snake oil cheating, but are unable to determine which items are snake oil and which are not. And as Kuhn showed us, science is prone to paradigmatic error. So we rarely know when science is junk science or not.

    7) GENERATIONAL SHIFT IN THE PROBLEM SET

    We should note that there is a generational change in libertarianism at the moment. We are moving from a suite of intellectuals who fought against socialism to a suite of intellectuals who fight against redistributive social democracy, and another that more closely matches the white conservative movement, now that whites are acting as a minority. There is a certain surrender to demographic change going on.

    Also, the polarization of the electorate due to the south abandoning it’s prohibition on the Republican party, and the reaction of whites to immigration that has made them a minority, has caused frustration with the government that has made the youngest generation of voters the most libertarian in history. But they are socially positive if institutionally negative. And this has created a problem for the Rothbardians.

    In this changing generational environment the dominance of Rothbardians in the intellectual debate has caused a number of reactions.

    First, the other sects (Cato, Bleeding Hearts, Heritage, various others, including my Propertarianism) both congratulate Lew and his MIses organization for their success at promoting libertarian ideas, and adopt those communication strategies that the mises organization was visionary in employing on the internet.

    Second, there is a limit to the number of acolytes that will adopt the anti-social rothbardian ideology. (although not the Hoppean version.) We are at that limit. The Mises organization is making changes to eliminate the ‘whacky factor’. This includes cleaning up their blog and limiting it to intellectuals. So the Mises org is adapting as well.

    Third, and probably not as obvious, is that science has increasingly undermined the ‘progressive’ vision of human nature, and is on its way to confirming the conservative vision of human nature. We are slowly retiring the equality meme’s nonsensical environmental presumption in favor of the conservative genetic argument. The current argument is 60/40 and I suspect we will eventually conclude it is an 80/20 proposition. It may be too late, but the ideological tide has turned. This will make it possible to address institutional solutions rationally in a way that has been impossible for seventy years.

    Fourth, it is becoming obvious from the data that classical liberalism’s multi-house model cannot survive the addition of women to the voting pool. Men and women have different reproductive strategies and different moral codes which agrarian marriage and the nuclear family managed to accomodate. However, since males skew individualist, and women skew collectivist, we cannot use majority rule to accomodate both moral codes. We have no ‘houses’ which will allow the creating of exchanges rather than ‘takings’. The conservative think tanks are so enamored of the past that they cannot solve this problem. All think tanks, all ideologies, all movements, currently seek to gain a majority of like-minded individuals under majority rule, rather than to construct a government where these groups can conduct exchanges. The market allows us to cooperate on means if not ends. The population will need a means to do so as well. And to do so where ‘cheating’ is prohibited. This is why government will persist: as a means of prohibiting cheating.

    For the first two reasons above, you should expect to see the eccentricity of the Rothbarian movement coming out of the Mises institute to be less supportive of heretical science, and more explicit in its use of arguments that discuss the differences in externalities between government and market solutions.

    I do not know if they will be smart enough to try to move from a Rothbardian criticism-dominated, to a Hoppeian solution-dominated framework, and therefor provide an institutional solution that is competitive to and superior to that of the classical liberals. And I can’t imagine that they would try to co-opt the classical liberal wing (where the money is), and by doing so suggest the entire spectrum of libertarian institutional solutions, but they are the people who could successfully accomplish it if they tried. I just can’t see them being that pragmatic. You do not build an ideology then become a pragmatist. That would take new leadership.

    The Heritage organization is data driven and has wide appeal. But it is not philosophically rigorous, and it does not recommend changes to the existing institutions that would accomodate contemporary reality. Cato is neither data driven nor philosophically rigorous, but corresponds correctly to classical sentiments. Rothbardianism and Hoppianism as well as Hayekianism are all philosophically rigorous systems of thought.

    But Rothbardianism is not going to ever be acceptable to enough people to gain office and change institutions. It is a brilliant ideological strategy. It worked. We shoujld all congratulate Lew Rockwell on his vision. But Rothbardianism is not an institutional solution. Because a Christian people will not tolerate the rampant cheating present in the ‘ethics of the bazaar’ that Rothbard advocates. and they’re right to reject it. They spent too many centuries trying to escape it, and build the High Trust Society. Perhaps the only high trust society that ever existed.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-07-20 13:27:00 UTC

  • You may not be able to envision a government without politicians and or bureaucr

    You may not be able to envision a government without politicians and or bureaucracy. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be better to live under.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-07-16 00:50:00 UTC

  • What Is Post-austrian Economics?

    1. I think these people are describing a sentiment that they sense in the libertarian movement, not an explicit set of works. (I consider myself one of the people working on post-austrian solutions.)  There are a number of factors that are driving that sentiment.
    2. We are no longer battling socialism but redistributive democracy.  The Austrian canon is not as suited to the current battle as it was to the previous battle.
    3. “Austrian” has been appropriated by the anarchists, as a means of claiming legitimacy, and this has been advocated by the Mises Institute in particular. And there is an attempt by the intellectual community to abandon the term ‘Austrian’ in order to distance itself from Rothbardian anarchism. I suspect that this is the reason you’re seeing the term float around.

    That’s my suspicion. If you pointed me to a few examples I’m pretty sure I could directly address it. It’s not like there are all that many influential people in the  movement.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-post-Austrian-economics

  • We Need A Very Different Government

    While we use it as such, Government is not a synonym for a bureaucracy that wields law with which it coerces others by the threat of violence. It is not government itself that people disagree with. It is government whose actions they disagree with. And those actions are only possible because we believe government must consist of a bureaucracy. Everything we disdain about government is a criticism of bureaucracy, and the iron law of oligarchy that is the unavoidable consequence of bureaucracy. We don’t need a bureaucracy. We dont need majority rule. We need a government where groups and classes can exchange with one another. We need something entirely different from what we have.

  • We Need A Very Different Government

    While we use it as such, Government is not a synonym for a bureaucracy that wields law with which it coerces others by the threat of violence. It is not government itself that people disagree with. It is government whose actions they disagree with. And those actions are only possible because we believe government must consist of a bureaucracy. Everything we disdain about government is a criticism of bureaucracy, and the iron law of oligarchy that is the unavoidable consequence of bureaucracy. We don’t need a bureaucracy. We dont need majority rule. We need a government where groups and classes can exchange with one another. We need something entirely different from what we have.

  • Libertarian Strategy

    We can solve for freedom by attempting to gain sufficient converts in order to create a religion – a means of rebellion against institutions. Or we can solve for freedom by attempting to create formal institutions as a means of preventing others from taking our freedom. The first assumes that freedom and its corollary, responsibility, are a majority preference. The second assumes that freedom and responsibility are a minority preference. Freedom as we understand it, is a uniquely western value, and is antithetical to traditional paternalistic and tribal social orders. So pick a religion, or pick a government, or pick both. If you pick a religion the state will defend itself against you. If you pick a government religions will rebel against you. If both, then you lose the balance of powers that places limits on either. So the choice comes down to whether you believe a majority of humans desire freedom and responsibility as individuals, or whether you believe the majority simply desires the benefits of the market economy as members of families, extended families and tribes. It becomes difficult to demonstrate evidence that the majority of people prefer freedom and responsibility. In fact, they seek it for themselves at the expense of others, almost universally.