Am I just arguing for a higher and stricter standard of truth? I think so.
Operationalism in cooperation
Operationalism in science (causality)
Operationalism in mathematics (relations)
Operationalism in numbers (identities)
Operationalism in logic (words)
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-03 16:06:00 UTC
ON CERTAINTY
“Thou cannot be sufficiently certain of anything that you can use argument to demand my agreement. Thou canst only seek to obtain my consent by eliminating the possibility or desirability of my position in contrast to yours.”
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-03 13:22:00 UTC
THE ART OF DEBATE
One of the things I gave up on a long time ago was focusing on people’s stupid errors unless they start to rely on ad hominems.
Disputes can almost always be reduced to a central argument, which is either one of taste, utility or truth.
If people use ad hominems I try to call them out and then return to the central problem of the argument.
And I don’t really even like focusing on their errors. I just try to restate their words in the context of the central argument.
One tactic that I do use, is to taunt people in order to obtain their participation. I probably shouldn’t do that, but when the opposition is so ready to rely on every rhetorical fallacy in the book, it just seems …. fair…. and warranted. 🙂
But the best advice is to stay in the context of the central argument.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-03 10:04:00 UTC
To self: New Year. I wanted to know. I do. That is enough. Truth is not a matter of agreement or consent. It s not a matter of popularity or acceptance. It is merely greater correspondence than all known alternatives. That is all. And that is all it can be. The rest is vanity. And truth has no place for vanity.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 17:01:00 UTC
THREE POINTS PROVE A LINE – IN PHILOSOPHY TOO
In propertarian methodology I have explicitly argued in favor of an expanded version of the golden mean: that is that definitions of states or objects or properties are not testable unless they are described in the context of a spectrum (or axis), either end of which the concept fails to meet the criteria of the axis.
This habit, like equilibrial thinking, is not terribly natural. Humans tend to gravitate to the simplest mode of comparison: ideal types, just as they tend to gravitate to finite states instead of equilibrial thinking.
So, whenever I define something I try to construct the axis.
In the propertarian method, what little I’ve written about it, in the few examples, I suggest the simple method of collecting as many related terms as possible, and arranging them into axis by playing what thing is like the other and not games so to speak.
This allows us to construct the equivalent of supply demand curves for human concepts and behaviors.
I find that most philosophical error comes from either:
(a) failure to state human concepts as human actions (as if they are geometric, or platonic, rather than praxeological).
or
(b) definitions (like ‘knowledge’) that are specious by construction, because they describe a fixed state rather than a spectrum.
or
(c) Failure to account for equilibrial processes
or
(d) Failure to account for opportunity costs.
This (geometrization) is a curable habit in human cognition, by training us to be less solipsistic and increasingly sympathetic and then autistic in our understanding of the world.
Now, this might be a little deep for the mind to grasp, but the reason we make these mistakes can be accounted for by a particular spectrum as well:
The Increasing Abstraction Of Point Of View:
1) Self (solipsism) – Awareness
2) Other (the insight of introspection) – Comparison
3) Categories (the insight of numbers) – Numbers
3) Relationship (the insight of geometry) – Measurement
4) Independence from the self (the insight of calculus) – Motion
5) Equilibria (the insight of economics and physics) – Systems
6) Opportunity (differences in multiple ‘worlds’) – Possibilities
Each of these increasingly complex ideas places a higher burden on us by requiring that we make comparisons against less perceptible and intuitive objects of consideration.
A loose spectrum is more precise than the most precise definition, whose spectrum must be assumed.
This is the value of the “golden mean” in virtue, but it is a generic test of any concept: if you don’t state the properties of the spectrum, you must assume them.
In most of western philosophy, like all philosophy, despite being rational, the assumptions are unstated. The virtues are stated but without axis. The logics are stated but without axis.
But one needs axis. We are terrible at conceiving more than one flight of an arrow. But We are terrible at it. But no question of consequence consists of a single arc.
And no definition consists of a single state.
Because no such arcs or states are sufficiently testable, and therefore are loaded with metaphysical assumptions.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 06:42:00 UTC
ON GLADWELL’S SATIRE
When we agree to enter into discourse, debate, even polemic, we grant each other the right of free speech, in pursuit of the truth, for shared benefit.
Otherwise, if we do not agree to the pursuit of truth, there is no reason to lay down our weapons: we simply substitute the honesty of violence for the deception of words.
Satire and ridicule are forms of deception. They are theft. A crime. A moral crime. And the majority of us sense it is a moral crime, even when we disagree with it. You cannot get around this logic.
Satire and Ridicule, unless they are, like the greek drama, directed at ourselves, rather than others, are a violation of the contract for cooperation.
So one can state how and why we use satire. But one cannot legitimize it. It’s not possible.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-30 19:48:00 UTC
(sketch) (morality of logical methods)
Infinity is a property of the set. It’s imaginary. Operations are not imaginary, nor infinite. Operations, even imaginary operations, must be performed. I cannot perform any operation indefinitely, and so no operation can be performed infinitely.
Likewise, no infinite set can be constructed. It can however be imagined we are told. But this is not true. No human imagination can demonstrate infinity. We can only construct imaginary operations where the scale is greater than our perception.
We can imagine the flight of an arrow, and when we imagine infinity we do precisely the same operation. The arrow leaves our vision, the scope of measurement leaves our imagination. The trajectory is all we remember in either case.
Even in the vaulted pairing off examples we are not measuring the size of anything, because for anything beyond our perception, that size is unimaginable. Instead, we generate more operations more frequently with some pairing offs, than we do with other pairing offs. So we may say that the operational members of any function, occur with greater frequency or higher density, but we cannot make an argument as to size, since no end is possible in the infinite, but no infinite is possible.
The net result is that mathematicians arbitrarily alter scale, because while mathematical relations are constant, the scale is arbitrarily defined, and its correspondence with reality is likewise arbitrarily defined. As such, all mathematicians do is alter the PRECISION of any model at whim.
The reason is that scales are utilitarian. In the sense of measuring real world objects, such scales are limited by some meaningful amount of precision. If I cut a piece of wood or metal there is some limit to the necessity of precision, and that precision determines the point of demarcation between one unit and another.
Mathematics cannot rely on externally defined precision so they rely on sets and the excluded middle to accommodate what is in reality their arbitrary use of precision, given their arbitrary use of scale.
I actually find this kind of cute really. Like children inventing magical causes.
But it’s not cute. It’s magian really, and this kind of magical nonsense, or platonic fantasizing has created the pretense of mysticism that partly drowned the 20th century.
If we can hold the inquisition responsible for burning witches out of mystical ignorance, can we hold mathematicians and physicists responsible for the mysticism that was the 20th century? Or do we blame it on the introduction of the proletarians to the demands of education and the work force?
I don’t know who to blame. I just want to fix the problem.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-28 18:03:00 UTC
I LOVE HUMAN BEINGS. REALLY.
Pretty much all of them. On the other hand, I have a job to do. And that job is to disabuse people of a certain category of myths that stipulate that the high trust society and the economic rewards that come from it, can persist if we dismantle the ‘rules’ that are the product of over four millennia of accumulated uncomfortable, but necessary truths.
And I must do this because our system of government, and our economy, and much of our five hundred year experiment, is very close to collapsing for the reasons that all civilizations collapse: (a) overextension (b) excessive credit (c) loss of founding moral narrative (d) failure of calculative systems that assist in cooperation and coordination while maintaining individual incentives.
Dark ages are not uncommon in man’s history. There is no reason that we could not have another. Or even something less catastrophic, like revolution, or descent into malignant tyranny.
But something is very surely going to happen in the next twenty years. And that is the end of the west as a people, as a civilization, predicated on the mythology of the enlightenment.
Perhaps as some progressives fantasize, technology will save us. But hope is not a strategy and faith is not a tactic.
SO it is left to those of us who will face uncomfortable truths, to construct the calculative sciences – the new means of cooperation and incentives – that allow us to preserve that aspect of the high trust society, at least in a caste or nation, such that innovation can persist, despite the collapse of the failure to create an Aristocracy of Everybody.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-27 14:46:00 UTC
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/12/22/propertarianism-vs-libertarianism-universally-descriptive-vs-preferentially-prescriptive-but-still-all-rights-as-property-rights/FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN UNDERSTANDING MY WORK ON PROPERTARIANISM
(Prior to its completion)
For some reason I’ve had a bevy of requests over the past week for help understanding my work. I know that people sense that I’ve produced some interesting answers that ring true, but how can they either learn, test or falsify those arguments?
Well, I’ve been working on a book for a while now. And just as I think I’ve completed it, I understand something new and significant enough, that I have to restate my arguments. This turns out, most of the time, to make the arguments more compact. But that compactness takes time.
I think the best way to look at what I’m doing is to correct and complete praxeology (cooperation), as a ratio-scientific system of thought, based on reproductive strategies and reproductive instincts, that can compete with reason (words), numbers (identity), measurement (relations), physics (causes), and money (economics), as the logic of cooperation. If I am as successful as I think I have been, then I will have completed Mises’ work in producing the only science that was not invented in the ancient world, and therefore, solved the problem of the social sciences that has eluded us for millennia. Mises identified praxeology with economics, which is only partly correct. It is instead the science of cooperation, of which economics is merely a component.
My original goal was only to provide conservatives with a rational language with which to articulate their preferred and habituated social order, by transforming libertarian property rights theory into a universal property rights theory. But the end result is that I have, I think, except for the formal arguments, completed praxeology.
An interesting side effect is that in ‘completing the set of sciences’, and incorporating ‘action’ via operational language into those sciences, I have also been able to ‘cure’ mathematics of platonism, and legitimize Scientific Realism as the only logically tenable metaphysics and epistemology that can survive scrutiny by all the scientific disciplines, from reason through cooperation.
This should, albeit differently from Mises’ intention, succeed in rendering the obscurant leftist language of kleptocracy, and possible, all competing languages for the discussion of politics and economics, archaic.
The greeks themselves, as an aristocratic class, had heavily loaded their philosophical language, and we have but persisted in copying that loading across the ages. In no small part because this loading was necessary for both the function of religion and state, in a period where the institutions of law, money and credit were not sufficiently universal to tolerate ‘honest discourse’ on the structure of cooperation. It was this persistence in us, and the problem of institutions, that prevented the solution to the social sciences – at least until Mises and Weber.
I will unfortunately have to refute the Misesian and Rothbardian categories that define praxeology as what they are: nonsense – or rather demonstrate that they are advocacy rather than science. However, this refutation will result in an extremely simple socio biological representation of human action as cooperation on reproduction given different modes of material production that are available, while accommodating the natural instincts that we posses from our ancestors.
The outcome of this confrontation of previous moral argument with scientific reality, and calculative necessity, is that different social orders – meaning allocations of property rights – benefit different groups differently based upon their relative abilities. But the underlying moral instincts that drive these multitudinous permutations of manners, ethics, morals and norms, laws, and property rights, myths, rituals and traditions, remains constant across all human beings.
The fundamental problem facing all groups is the increasing suppression of discounts, and their replacement by market competition.
Northern Europeans, Protestants, North Sea Peoples, The Outbred Absolute Nuclear Family Culture that developed out of Indo European Circumpolar people’s pastoralism, the horse, bronze, wheel and chariot, Manorialism, the church’s interventions, and natural trade patterns between the Mediterranean and the north sea, were the most successful at suppressing discounts in all walks of life. The result was the high trust society: the extension of in-group moral intuitions to all members of the local society, to whom they were closely related.
This is a selection of postings I’ve written over the past year.
MY FULL ‘ARISTOCRATIC’ READING LISTS ARE AT
www.propertarianism.com/reading-list/
ON THE ORIGINS OF THE ETHICS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
See Ricardo Duchesne: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization
ON THE ORIGINS OF OUR FAMILY MODELS IN LAND USE
See Emmanuel Todd
ON THE ORIGINS OF INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
Engels,Todd and Duchesne (Pastoralism)(Manorialism)
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/09/07/6480/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/the-moral-basis-of-red-and-blue-states/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11 26/the-reason-you-use-the-word-liberty-and-not-aristocracy/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/aristocratic-egalitarian-vs-rothbardian-ethics/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/19/diedre-mccloskeys-close-on-the-european-miracle-just-close/
ON THE ORIGINS OF THE RULE OF LAW AND ON THE ORIGINS OF THE COMMON LAW
(see hoppe and rothbard)
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/06/22/on-law-as-a-problem-of-calculation-coordination-and-dispute-resolution-in-the-face-of-necessary-ignorance-and-diversity-of-interest/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2012/07/31/justice-scalia-explains-textualism-and-originalism-without-explaining-why-we-must-rely-upon-them/
ON TRUST
Fukuyama: Trust, Various by Huntington
ON PROPERTY RIGHTS AS INCREASING SUPPRESSION OF DISCOUNTS AND FORCIBLE TRANSFER OF COMPETITION INTO THE MARKET WHERE THE RESULTS ARE VIRTUOUS.
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/12/22/propertarianism-vs-libertarianism-universally-descriptive-vs-preferentially-prescriptive-but-still-all-rights-as-property-rights/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/12/25/the-origins-of-property-as-increasing-prohibitions-on-discounts/
ON CHIVALRY AS STATUS THROUGH SERVICE
(can’t find any posts quickly)
ON THE STATE SUPPRESSION OF FREE RIDING AND THE RESULTING CONCENTRATION OF RENT SEEKING
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/why-doesnt-it-occur-to-us-that-we-dont-need-a-single-monopoly-government/
ON RACE AND DIVERSITY
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/core-on-race-and-diversity-in-libertarianism/
ON CLASS
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/propertarian-class-theory/
ON GENDER
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/the-female-arms-race-against-men-how-many-people-can-i-rally/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/10/genies-cant-be-put-back-into-bottles/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2012/12/11/single-women-now-rule-america/#.UrysYGQW3Wo
THE LIMITS OF MISESIAN CRITICISM OF ECONOMICS
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/12/25/on-the-limits-of-the-misesian-criticism/
ON THE REFORMATION OF PRAXEOLOGY, SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND THE MORAL SCIENCES
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/12/24/on-the-reformation-of-praxeology/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/12/24/propertarianism-the-formal-logic-of-cooperation/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/we-cannot-think-without-metaphysical-biases/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/the-problem-of-ratio-moral-versus-ratio-scientific-arguments/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/20/legal-equality-is-necessary-economic-equality-is-unattainable-and-genetic-equality-is-undesirable-your-genes-matter/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/17/logic-praxeology-and-science-dependency-and-demarcation-reforming-libertarianism-by-incorporating-scientific-argument-rather-than-relying-on-the-purely-rational/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/19/necessity-vs-preference-in-political-and-ethical-theory/
http://www.propertarianism.com/scientific-and-philosophical-realism-terms-working-page/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/01/the-purpose-of-philosophy-in-the-analytic-naturalistic-philosophy-of-action/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/14/on-realism/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/on-the-distribution-of-platonism-in-the-stem-fields/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/we-cannot-think-without-metaphysical-biases/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/27/the-cognitive-biases-in-the-empirical-fields/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/27/1-on-the-purpose-of-scriptural-versus-rational-and-ratio-scientific-ideologies-2-on-the-source-of-property-rights-and-liberty/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/10/the-incentives-of-scientists-and-philosophers-a-virtuous-competition-for-status
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/01/more-on-hoppe-et-all-vs-popper-from-elsewhere/
ON PROPERTARIANISM
http://www.propertarianism.com/defining-propertarianism/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/08/31/ethics-morality-defined/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/03/22/competition-is-the-only-sanctioned-involuntary-transfer/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/06/22/cultures-are-portfolios-of-property-rights/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/03/17/property-is-not-created-by-a-choice-or-by-a-belief-it-is-an-action-that-action-is-the-application-of-organized-violence/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/03/22/the-honesty-of-violence/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/12/putting-violence-back-into-polite-political-discourse-once-sentence-at-a-time/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/14/the-source-of-private-property-is-violence/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/10/reason-and-fact-are-insufficient-for-persuasion-because-myth-mysticism-and-falsehood-are-more-comfortable-truths/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/06/22/property-praxeology-and-violence/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/03/22/voluntary-transfer-is-the-only-testable-ethical-principle/
ON PROPERTARIANISM VS LIBERTARIANISM
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/10/notes-on-the-libertarian-reformation-revised-and-edited/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/12/internecine-warfare-as-evidence-of-intellectual-failure/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/core-on-the-utopianism-of-libertarianism/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/the-mythology-of-the-enlightenment/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/the-aristocracy-of-everybody-is-a-failure/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/09/15/a-critique-of-the-anarchic-program-compared-to-the-intuitive-and-conservative-programs/#.Uryd1GQW3Wo
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/11/26/dont-throw-out-the-libertarian-baby-with-the-progressive-bathwater/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/09/17/the-value-of-hoppes-anarcho-capitalist-research-program/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/09/01/property-rights-and-taxes-as-loans/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/07/10/rights-and-fuzzy-language-you-demand-rights-you-cant-have-them-without-an-exchange/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/06/23/dear-libertarians-join-the-21st-century-dont-fight-the-last-war-its-postmodernism-not-socialism/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/03/20/brian-caplan-is-wrong-on-immigration-like-most-libertarians/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/03/13/kinsellas-criticism-of-locke-and-my-explanation-of-lockes-reasonable-mistake-and-what-to-do-about-it/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/03/09/on-rent-seeking/
ON DEBATE
http://www.propertarianism.com/tools-and-techniques-for-political-debate/
http://www.propertarianism.com/2013/08/29/a-short-essay-on-the-moral-obligation-to-disregard-feelings-in-political-discourse/
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-26 17:37:00 UTC
“Mises’s contention came in setting the context for Human Action by explaining why people have had such a hard time accepting the validity of (Austrian) economics as a field of knowledge–it does not fit in with anything else.” – Konrad Love you man, but I want to clean this up a bit. And I hope you will forgive me for using your statements as a jumping off point to articulate this subject a little more clearly than is usual in our field. 2) The first is your statements (a) “put into context” and (b) “human action”. Praxeologically speaking, any statement regarding human action, not stated as human action, is untestable by praxeological analysis. As such, if you can’t say something in operational terms, then it is possible that you are mistaken, or misled, since only such operational language opens any statement to praxeological testing. Mises was trying to refute socialism. He was frustrated because there was not empirical means of demonstrating that it wouldn’t work. So he had to rely on rational deduction. He was attempting to show (as was popper by very different means) how socialism was impossible – particularly, the socialist method of production. Praxeology was his attempt to use the very clear, irrefutable, sympathetic test of the rational incentives of actors given their need to act in real time, to refute the theory that humans would act by the same means without money and prices. Without money and prices, and the incentives that they make possible, humans cannot rationally act. He suggested, and argued poorly, that humans literally could not think, in the same way that we would be radically impaired in our thinking, without the use of numbers, numeric operations, ratios, measurements, and the syllogism. As such, if people cannot cooperate rationally using property, money, prices and time, then in fact, no science of economics is therefore possible. We cannot conduct a science predicated on a unit of measure dependent upon property and prices, if neither property nor prices no voluntary cooperation exist. That is non-logical. We should note that this is an argument, now proven, both logically and by evidence, that the socialist method of production does not work, precisely as Mises predicted, because Calculation and it’s obverse, Incentives, are impossible. But this is a limited criticism. We must understand that the limit of Misesian criticism, is the socialist mode of production. It does not mean that progressive taxation, especially by simply increasing transaction costs at the high end, and redistributing the fees on those costs to consumers, or investing them into infrastructure violate the ability of people to think, plan, and coordinate their actions. The science of economics can in fact exist, if the logical method of measurement that it depends upon: voluntary cooperation using property, money and prices, does exist/ So the Misesian critique of economics as a discipline dependent upon human action is a refutation of the socialist mode of production, but it is not a refutation of the democratic socialist redistributive method of production. (Although I am not sure anyone else has said so this clearly. I haven’t run across it if so. Caplans ‘Why I am not..” is an obscurant, and meaningless argument which he later took the teeth out of himself : there is no difference between economic calculation and incentives. They are mutually dependent concepts. An argument which I forgive him for, and attribute to the folly of his youth. ) 2) The second problem you put forth is that people have a problem understanding Austrian Economics. And I’m afraid that’s just not demonstrably true. (a) the argument from the mainstream economics profession is that the insights of the Austrians have been fully integrated into mainstream economics. (b) The only remaining dispute that separates Austrian economists from mainstream economists today, is the theory of the business cycle, where by continuous distortions of the money supply, while long term neutral in affect on price, are non-neutral on the Sustainable Patters Of Specialization and Trade – largely due to little more than the fact that humans due to the process of youth, maturity, reproduction, decline in learning capacity (or increase in required repetitions), as well as normal aging, mean that not only are prices, and contracts ‘sticky’ but so are human lives and relations. And while we may ameliorate the problems caused by the stickiness of prices,we appear to have very little control over contracts, and the accumulated impact on individuals in the business cycle means that such cycles, the longer that they are perpetuated, force their members to become increasingly sticky, and if more than four years to nine years in duration, that it is no longer possible for individuals to transition at anywhere near the same quality of life. This may in fact be another argument against immigration which only exacerbates this problem severely. The last argument, and the one made by conservative advocates of Austrian economics, is not just the utility of the lost human capital, but the loss of moral capital, and the increase in demand for the state as insurer, now that the individual citizens have been placed at risk by the use of credit and insurance by the state, rathe than allowing the natural, and frequent cycle of PSST to discourage people from over-investing in any given pattern, and instead, developing dynamic risk protection given the constant reordering of such patterns. 3) The point being the one I articulated in my first response to your post: that the Austrian method makes visible the involuntary transfer of property, and the behavior of individuals within patterns of sustainable specialization and trade IF WE MEASURE patterns of sustainable specialization and trade as our category of measurement. (industry networks are the highest level of meaningful aggregation). And investment in trade policy and industrial policy should outweigh any interest in monetary policy. If only because those policies have been in use since the dawn of human cities, and appear to have worked well. Whereas, the use of Keynesian aggregates and monetary policy does not localize distortions and those distortions that are caused by such policy are not measured, or even measurable. Just as Einstein did not invent relativity(actually, constancy), Keynes did not invent his ideas either – he adapted them from Marx, and cut out the references to prevent criticism of what he had accomplished via even greater obscurant language than Marx: the forcible involuntary transfer of wealth and the consequential empowerment of the government as the vehicle for such transfer. All of which was justified as a means of decreasing unemployment. The sacrifice of the west for reduction of unemployment and facilitation of the expansion of the reproduction of the lower classes that had been held in check by private property and manorialism for more than 2500 years. The great weakness of human reason is our inability to disentangle multiple axis of complex relations. Only analysis of the voluntary transfer of property allows us to disentangle heavily loaded propositions and reduce what appears to be many competing and overlapping axes of causality to one simple factor: whether property, which is the necessary device for cooperation, has been voluntarily expropriated or voluntarily exchanged. CLOSING This is probably worth sharing or saving for later reference. Affections Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev