Theme: Responsibility

  • THE ONLY TEST OF ETHICAL STATEMENTS The only test of any ethical statement is wh

    THE ONLY TEST OF ETHICAL STATEMENTS

    The only test of any ethical statement is whether all transfers caused by any act, are voluntary transfers – including involuntary transfers of goods, actions and opportunity, and including both direct involuntary transfers by externality, asymmetry of knowledge, fraud, theft or violence (in that order), and including reverse involuntary transfers caused by impediment, free-riding, rent seeking, or privatization (in that order). There is no other test of any ethical statement. There isn’t. Period.

    – Curt


    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-20 06:44:00 UTC

  • LIFE LESSONS 1) Make very few commitments. 2) If you make a commitment, then hol

    LIFE LESSONS

    1) Make very few commitments.

    2) If you make a commitment, then hold to it.

    3) If you do commit to anything, never within a definite time frame. All costs are opportunity costs. Fulfill any opportunity at the highest discount.

    4) Search for every possible opportunity.

    4) Failure indebts you.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-03 11:50:00 UTC

  • THE CEO MIND I think all if us are the same. I don’t want to be in charge. None

    THE CEO MIND

    I think all if us are the same. I don’t want to be in charge. None of us do. Its hard. Everyone wants to be in charge until they are, and realize that it sucks.

    A good ceo doesn’t really want to be in charge. He is just afraid that everyone else is even worse than he is.

    🙂


    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-31 02:22:00 UTC

  • I know we men are an incomprehensible challenge to women, and I know t

    <Rant On>

    I know we men are an incomprehensible challenge to women, and I know that for almost half of women who have to ‘settle’ they’re carrying someone who may not carry his fair share. But the fact of the matter is that there are just as many women who are either ‘crazy’ or vampires or elegantly sophisticated prostitutes or all of the above. And I think that’s even worse that some unemployed guy who sits around drinking beer and watching sports on television. I mean, women can get rid of us by walking away. For some reason, we’re supposed to give permanent transfusions to vampires. Argh.

    <Rant Off>


    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-22 08:59:00 UTC

  • Propertarianism As The Solution To The Problem Of Ethics

    VS ROTHBARD: ARISTOCRATIC VERSUS GHETTO ETHICS [T]he aristocratic egalitarian ethic requires all able men capable of bearing arms, deny access to power, to anyone and everyone. I usually refer to this (erroneously) as the warrior ethic, since it originates with the Indo European warrior caste. The ethic of the bazaar or ghetto (incorrectly referred to as the slave ethic), requires only that we fail to engage in trade with those who would seek power. It is a form of ostracization. Rothbard returned to his cultural history to develop his ethics when he could not sovle the problem of institutions. And in doing so, he regressed ethics into that same ghetto by ignoring the aristocratic ethical requirements of a) symmetry of knowledge, b) warranty that provides proof of that symmetry of knowledge, and c) a prohibition on external involuntary transfer.

    [callout] Propertarianism is the solution to the problem of the incompleteness of Misesian and Rothbardian praxeology, and explains the causal property of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics, rendering it descriptive, not causal.[/callout]

    All three of these ethical constraints are necessary to create the high trust society. Yet they are also insufficient. The fourth constraint appears to require d) outbreeding by forbidding cousin-marriage. Outbreeding creates a universalist ethic, which in the west we call ‘christian love’ but which means treating all humans regardless of family origin with the same ethical constraints as you would the members of your immediate family or even tribe. [T]his is why libertarianism under Rothbard failed to gain the same level of traction that it has gained under Ron Paul. Ron Paul is promoting Aristocratic Egalitarian Ethics (even if he does not know how to articulate such a thing) while Rothbard was promoting the ethics of the Bazzaar and ghetto (even if he did not understand his actions in this context.) Humans are not terribly bright when it comes to rationalism. But we can sense moral patterns and status signals and ‘feel’ positives and negative moral reactions due to those patterns whether or not we can analytically separate and articulate those moral instincts and reactions. Propertarianism allows us to articulate these moral instincts as reducible to different concpets of property rights. Propertariansm makes moral differences commensurable. If you can grasp that idea, you may eventually understand that Propertarianism is the solution to the problem of the incompleteness of Misesian and Rothbardian praxeology, and explains the causal property of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics, rendering it descriptive, not causal. This explanation then, in turn, provides us with the tools to solve the 2500 year old problem of politics that the greeks, and the english, and the americans failed to solve.

  • VS ROTHBARD: ARISTOCRATIC VERSUS GHETTO ETHICS PROPERTARIANISM AS SOLVING THE PR

    VS ROTHBARD: ARISTOCRATIC VERSUS GHETTO ETHICS

    PROPERTARIANISM AS SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS

    The aristocratic egalitarian ethic requires all able men capable of bearing arms, deny access to power, to anyone and everyone. I usually refer to this (erroneously) as the warrior ethic, since it originates with the Indo European warrior caste.

    The ethic of the bazaar or ghetto (incorrectly referred to as the slave ethic), requires only that we fail to engage in trade with those who would seek power. It is a form of ostracization.

    Rothbard returned to his cultural history to develop his ethics when he could not sovle the problem of institutions. And in doing so, he regressed ethics into that same ghetto by ignoring the aristocratic ethical requirements of a) symmetry of knowledge, b) warranty that provides proof of that symmetry of knowledge, and c) a prohibition on external involuntary transfer.

    All three of these ethical constraints are necessary to create the high trust society. Yet they are also insufficient.

    The fourth constraint appears to require d) outbreeding by forbidding cousin-marriage. Outbreeding creates a universalist ethic, which in the west we call ‘christian love’ but which means treating all humans regardless of family origin with the same ethical constraints as you would the members of your immediate family or even tribe.

    This is why libertarianism under Rothbard failed to gain the same level of traction that it has gained under Ron Paul. Ron Paul is promoting Aristocratic Egalitarian Ethics (even if he does not know how to articulate such a thing) while Rothbard was promoting the ethics of the Bazzaar and ghetto (even if he did not understand his actions in this context.)

    Humans are not terribly bright when it comes to rationalism. But we can sense moral patterns and status signals and ‘feel’ positives and negative moral reactions due to those patterns whether or not we can analytically separate and articulate those moral instincts and reactions.

    Propertarianism allows us to articulate these moral instincts as reducible to different concpets of property rights. Propertariansm makes moral differences commensurable.

    If you can grasp that idea, you may eventually understand that Propertarianism is the solution to the problem of the incompleteness of Misesian, Rothbardian praxeology, and explains the causal property of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics, rendering it descriptive, not causal. This explanation then, in turn, provides us with the tools to solve the 2500 year old problem of politics that the greeks, and the english, and the americans failed to solve.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-01-11 07:47:00 UTC

  • HOW TO TELL A CHILD ABOUT THE TRAGEDIES THAT RESULT FROM MENTAL ILLNESS CHILD: “

    HOW TO TELL A CHILD ABOUT THE TRAGEDIES THAT RESULT FROM MENTAL ILLNESS

    CHILD: “What does mental illness mean?”

    PARENT: “That’s a great question. I’ll try to do my best to explain it.

    “So, do you know how when you first wake up from a dream that you aren’t sure what’s going on? And how you can’t tell whether the dream or what you are seeing is real? and how the mood from the dream stays with you for a long time after you are awake? Well, mental illness is sort of like that. There are ideas like dreams in people’s heads and they can’t make the dream or the mood go away. Sometimes they can take medicine to help the feeling go away. But not always.

    “Do you know how, If you get sick that you will not always think the same as you do when you are well? This just means your body is not working right while you are sick, and when your body doesn’t work right it affects your brain. For people with mental illness, they are usually sick in some way or another that affects their brain. Some of this sickness they are born with. And some of it they develop over time because of illness or an accident.

    “Do you know how when you are tired, or sick or have a headache that you have no patience? And then you get angry at things that would not make you angry if you felt well? People with mental illness feel angry and have no patience like that all the time, and it never goes away. So, just like you might be frustrated or angry because you’re tired or don’t feel well, they become very frustrated and very angry because they don’t feel well, and they can’t make the feeling go away.

    “And do you know how you can even get made at people you love, like your mother when you are sick, or tired, or frustrated, and how you say things you don’t really mean, or do things that you feel bad about afterward? People with mental illness say and do things to others because they are tired, or frustrated or sick and they want to fix their pain, and because they aren’t thinking the right way, they often choose bad ways of trying to fix their pain.

    “For some of these people, medicine can help them. For other people we don’t yet have medicine to help them. And for many people they don’t like the medicine so they don’t take it.

    “We decided a long time ago, back in the 1960’s, that it was’t right to lock people with mental illness in hospitals. Partly because it is very expensive to care for them. And when we did that we decided that it was better to risk having a few tragedies than it is to lock people in hospitals. But we still aren’t sure we made the right decision.

    “Does that help?”

    CHILD: “…..um… I think so. They are sick, they are tired of being sick, and they are angry, and they aren’t’ thinking right, so they try to stop the pain they feel the wrong way”. “And we don’t want to put them in hospitals so it’s expensive. So we let them kill children in schools to save money…..”

    PARENT “Now, go explain it to some adults. They don’t get it either. :)”


    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-24 10:59:00 UTC

  • TRUTH AND PROPERTY 1) Property requires we make only true statements in order no

    TRUTH AND PROPERTY

    1) Property requires we make only true statements in order not to create acts of fraud.

    2) The only test of true Statements is warranty.

    3) The only means of issuing warranty is upon informational symmetry.

    Human beings detest involuntary transfers. Any definition of property that permits involuntary transfer is an attempt to sanction theft by fraud. And therefore any definition of property that does not include warranty and symmetry is in fact, an act of fraud.

    Property( Warranty( Symmetry)) = TRUTH.


    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-19 02:31:00 UTC

  • PROPERTY, IN ALL ITS FORMS RENDERS ALL HUMAN ACTION MORALLY COMMENSURABLE. While

    PROPERTY, IN ALL ITS FORMS RENDERS ALL HUMAN ACTION MORALLY COMMENSURABLE.

    While PREFERENCES and SUBJECTIVE VALUE are not commensurable, that does not mean that moral actions in favor of, or against, NORMS are cannot be commensurable.

    Norms are a market. They are, perhaps, our first market. And our commercial market exists, as an analogistic response to it. This is somewhat supportable by comparing the normative economies, political economies, and commercial economies of different civilizations.

    If I can distill the significance of propertarianism down to something I can communicate this simply, then it will serve a function that we have been searching for, since the invention of politics.


    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-15 13:01:00 UTC

  • TRUTH ABOUT THE MCDONALD’S HOT COFFEE CASE And how evolutionary law is superior

    http://latentparadigm.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-mcdonalds-coffee-case-is-wrong/THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MCDONALD’S HOT COFFEE CASE

    And how evolutionary law is superior to legislative law.


    Source date (UTC): 2012-10-22 18:14:00 UTC