Great panel discussion today, with speakers on China, Turkey, Islam, Europe, and the Anglosphere.

The closing questions were largely to do with the changing world boundaries, and nationalism.

Summary by, I think, John O’Sullivan, was that, it certainly appears, that the small ethnic nation state is the most likely means of preserving individual freedom.

And the consensus was that neither China nor the USA had strong chances of maintaining political unity over the long term.

That is, the USA only has such chances if we return to federalism, devolving power to the states, rather than central authority.

We can only hope.

Someone asked me (again) today, why I waste my time on some silly online political debate group. And that’s a good question. But I know the answer. It’s a choice.

First, it’s not really very useful to argue with people who agree with you. I spent a good half hour last night at a dinner table overlooking the Aegean, arguing core libertarian ethical theory with Stephan Kinsella, who relies on preference and moral argument for his theories. If I agreed with him, what would I learn?

You know, it’s like this: The Athenian orator Demosthenes, who had a soft and stammering voice, said that he filled his mouth with pebbles and practiced over the roar of he waves until his speech was perfect.

I have a tendency to speak in high abstraction, making leaps between concepts that are too far apart in causal relation for most people to follow. About a decade ago, two friends, Ali from Iran, and Frank from the USA, abused me daily for this kind of lazy communication. I began to view this tendency as ‘my problem’. A form of impediment. And so for ten years I have worked, as Spinoza suggested, to “speak in a manner comprehensible to the common people”. Unfortunately, the common people will not debate, and are happy in their ignorance. But motivated ideological opponents, regardless of their motives, mental ability or character defect, are convenient foils for the improvement of one’s arguments.

So, this group, like most online forums, is my mouthful of pebbles.

I don’t seek to convert anyone. Although I do find friends occasionally. I simply seek to improve my argument. If others learn in the process than that is find with me. But my purpose is to improve my ability to express ideas.

In yet another debate with crooks masquerading as libertarians.

I ask “Define Moral.”

Bob replies “Moral = “Absence of coercion. Immoral = Presence of coercion (force or fraud).”

Then he teases me a bit for my usually turgid analytical analysis: “What’s your definition, Curt? We assume it’s gotta be a pretty complex definition or it’s not particularly impressive, correct?”

To which I reply: “Yes, you have the correct definition for interpersonal relations. However, the same method of analysis applies to shareholder relations. The problem lies in the process of decision making for transfers of assets, which are determined by the shareholder agreement. ie: “constitution”, whether discreet and written, or traditional and structured, or traditional and unstructured. Moral crimes include crimes against shareholder assets. ie: transfers that are possible because of increasing degrees of ignorance, and therefore without interpersonal coercion. Such transfers are not only possible, but easy and invisible, by the act of transferring opportunity costs:

“For example, imagine an island where having a child that you cannot support, and therefore must rely upon charity to feed, is an immoral crime. It is a forcible transfer of wealth, because the shareholder agreement forbids allowing a person or child to starve — and therefore the parent, by having a child, forced other shareholders to pay for the support of that child, otherwise the other shareholders would break the agreement themselves. This is an involuntary transfer.

Humans organize. Organizations consist of shareholders. Shareholders have responsibilities to avoid transfers. Any Propertarian analysis must include shareholder agreements and shareholder properties, because people do in fact create and live by those shareholder methods and processes. To ignore such organizations is unscientific. Or, worse, an immoral attempt to privatize opportunities, or externalize costs onto others. :)

“So I would state it like this (or as a graph):

Consequently:

1. The institution of property itself is a form of coercion. Of sacrificing opportunity costs according to a social contract. Therefore we cannot have property to transfer without the costs paid for self deprivation of opportunity – that’s without even considering the necessity for collective defense.
2. Narrowly Defining morality only as Interpersonal Moral actions is an attempt at appropriation, that is THEFT, by FRAUDULENT MEANS of the vast opportunity costs paid by all members of an organization, both past and present.
3. Non-conformity is a form of either expensive research programs, or theft, or forcible redistribution — depending upon whether the objective is to increase production (moral), or to conduct a transfer (immoral)
4. Humans conduct conflicts between their different organizations using these opportunity cost differences embodied in their different social contracts, to which we apply the terms “culture”. Wars can be conducted by direct violence, or economic competition, or by thefts of cultural opportunity costs. This is why religious cults, and class wars, and immigration can succeed in obtaining power. They steal opportunity costs.

“Is that OK? Because it’s right you know….. :)”

1. I use the term ‘symmetrical’ where most would use ‘equitable’, only because I am somewhat concerned about the loaded content of the word ‘equitable’ which is both imprecise and emotionally loaded for my purposes . [↩]

As Camus said, the first problem of philosophy is why we do not commit suicide. But that is followed by the first problem of political philosophy, which is not “how do we best get along?” It is “Why don’t I kill you and take your stuff?” I opt for freedom by advocating the organized application of violence against those who would take my stuff. Violence is a virtue, and the source of the institution of property. Without that violence, there is no property, only slavery to those who have either violence or property. So, property does not insure freedom. Violence insures freedom. Violence is a virtue not a vice. Property is simply a more productive use of freedom, because it allows us to develop fixed capital at lower risk, which then increases production and profits, decreases prices.

Yet, once we consider that there are differences in ability between individuals, and therefore their differences in ability to create and obtain property in real time, the question remains: if we ask people to forgo the opportunity for theft, murder and plunder, how do we compensate them for their costs? All costs are opportunity costs. A man who is very powerful, or a group of weak people who by their numbers are powerful, is most free from constraints if they can rape, murder and plunder at will. Since they sacrifice this freedom in order to respect property, then what is their compensation for it?

If people form a group, organization or corporation for the purpose of plunder, why should others not form a group for the purpose of preventing plunder and creating property and a market for exchange? Is that not exactly the course of development of these organizations?

But once these defensive organizations are founded, and power is concentrated in them the bureaucracy forms, and corruption and predation upon the property of others replaces violence against their ‘person’, people, and things. We then attempt to regulate corruption, rather than replacing bureaucracy with market accountability. We replace violence against the barbarians with bribes so that they will respect our property: redistribution is payment for conformity to the standards property definitions of the organization which defends property.

Since all costs are opportunity costs, and there is a cost born by those who respect property, each person who respects property is therefore a shareholder in the market. One could say instead, that access to the market is paid for by the cost of forgoing opportunity to rape, murder, pillage, and plunder, thieve and fraud, deceive and lie. And that might be true. But the question is, whether access to the market is SUFFICIENT compensation for the ongoing cost of opportunity paid by respecting property. And whether this is quantifiable or not, people ACT as though it is insufficient, and they rebel against the constraints.

Radical individualism is a rational construct for epistemic purposes. But fundamentally, people ORGANIZE to achieve cooperative ends. Individualism is not enough of a solution to the problem of politics.

In effect, propertarianism is an upward redistribution of opportunity costs from the lower to the upper classes. Anarchism is an effort to avoid paying costs of creating organizations that create property and create the market. Anarcho capitalism is a research program that has demonstrated the failure of bureaucracy, and suggested private and competitive rather than public and monopolistic means of achieving group ends. But the question then, is who are the shareholders of this organization that is so costly to implement? The answer is all that forgo opportunities for coercion. And what is their return on their forgone opportunities?

I am a libertarian by epistemic method and a classical liberal by institutional method, and a conservative by social class and time preference. And I do not want to privatize the costs of others, and participate in corruption, by failing to compensate others for their forgone opportunities, from which I benefit. I simply want to stop corruption in the bureaucracy, and to privatize everything. I do not want to steal from others. Therefore redistribution of some sort is mandatory, because without redistribution, we cannot say that we respect property.

The problem then becomes how to make this process calculable. The answer is simple. Run the government like a business network. Make it an EMPIRICALLY CALCULABLE DECISION process rather than a RATIONAL AND RHETORICAL POLITICAL DEBATE process: “Loans Not Laws.” Laws are loosely calculable. Loans are narrowly calculable. Laws are rational. Loans are empirical. There is only one law, and that is property. Citizens are shareholders. And as shareholders they are due returns on their investment in opportunity costs.

This is the grownup version of libertarianism. Most of which has degenerated into a Rothbardian religion supported by Friedman’s monetary analysis.

From Peter Gordon, referring to an article in the Atlantic.

“The LA metropolitan area is actually spread over parts of five counties and includes twice as many cities as writer Conor Friedersdorf cites. The Orange county-LA county boundary is invisible to most of us. And even granting Friedersdorf’s view of the world, trading the 88 cities he acknowledges for even more authority accruing to the LA County five-member Board of Supervisors would be no great boon. These five already have much more power and money than they can wisely administer.”

“There are many good reasons that Americans migrate to the suburbs and one of them is home-rule. Another one is a measure of local government choice. The City of Bell and some others have been found to be corrupt. But the fact that the bad guys have a small jurisdiction to steal from rather than a big one is a good thing.”

When people disparage the private sector and seek services from the government what they really mean is one or more of the following:

1) DISCOUNT ON RESEARCH / RISK REDUCTION: “I am not able to judge the services in the marketplace, and unable to determine which of the inexpensive choices at my disposal in the market is optimum, and therefore I wish to circumvent the market in exchange for having the same services available to all.” – ie: the ‘roads and sidewalks’ analogy wherein, “I have a right to use the same common goods as everyone else.”

2) PROFIT REDISTRIBUTION: “I am not a desirable customer by any company and therefore, I wish to circumvent the market in order to obtain services that are greater in value than what I produce for exchange in the market by servicing others.” - The redistributive strategy. (To some degree this is a legitimate concern, since there will always be some that it is not worth the effort to serve other than by charity.) The basic idea is that if one conforms to social norms, and pays the high cost of respecting property, that one should get some return on one’s investment.

3) STATUS REDISTRIBUTION: “For any company to whom I am a desirable customer, I will be given services in a manner, and of a quality, that is less than I desire, or which is substandard to my self perceived social status.” (This is redistribution of social status is as important to many on the bottom half, as is monetary redistribution – and to some, more important.) It is particularly important for the lower two quintiles. It is this perception of status redistribution that creates ‘enfranchisement’ in the social order. Or rather, it is participation in the middle class, as a consumer, that people desire in order to consider themselves a ‘citizen’ who supports the social order.

4) ENCOURAGE GOVERNMENT COMPETITION WITH PRIVATE SERVICES: “I can more successfully petition the government for redress than I can a company, because I am a more valuable customer to the government than I am to any private company.” (There is increasingly truthful content to this perception – an argument which is beyond addressing here, but which is the increasing performance of public market, and public-credit companies, acting as bureaucracies because they can afford to rely on credit and prices rather than care of customers. Again, this is difficult, but there are in fact, ‘evil corporations’. It’s just that the government cannot change it by regulation of business performance.)

Note that in listing these choices, I am relying on an assumption that differences in human ABILITY. I have not included the options that simply result from laziness. Laziness as a reason to circumvent the market is not redistribution. It is a form of fraud. (Although this is a longer argument.)

If someone posits an argument that the government would better serve them, you can easily control the conversation by making the discourse about their individual preferences, and keep asking questions until you identify wich of these four positions, strategies or meanings, the person is relying upon in their arguments.

Fundamentally, assuming you were intellectually honest, if you were to spend the next twenty years of your life studying political science, with the goal of long term stability and prosperity, then you would come to these conclusions:

0) The Problem

a) Time:
b) Space (distribution):
d) Acting:
c) Choosing an Action:
d) Memory:
e) Limited Knowledge:
f) Planning:
g) Opportunity Costs:
h) Learning (imitation):
i) Choosing What To Learn (Alphas)

a) The Necessity Of Resources
b) the Plasticity Of Resources
c) Uniqueness of Objects:
d) Competition:
e) Cooperation:
f) Property

a) Subjective Value
b) Marginal Value

a) Life Curve: air, water, food.
b) Learning Curve:
c) Forgetting Curve:

1) Mankind:

a) Acquisitiveness
b) Social Status / Hierarchy / Value to others:
c) Inequality/Diversity:
d) Tribalism:
e) Sentiments:
f) Mating:
g) The Genders:
a) Men
b) Women
c) The Rest – homosexual and androgynous

2) Society

a) A Society is it’s Market. A market is not part of society. Markets are constructed by elites in each culture. And the success of each culture economically is a function of it’s market.

b) Productivity: Economic Productivity over the long term, and a stable predictable and empirical system or cooperation are the sources of prosperity for a people, a nation, and a government. ¹

c) Division Of Labor and Knowledge:

d) Generations:

e) Quaternum (last living memory)

f) Charity in group and out group:

g)

3) Institutions: There are a number of necessary properties of a society that is highly competitive – regardless of it’s territorial resources. A Social Order can be territorial and dependent upon fixed and built capital, or it can be Diasporic/Nomadic and dependent upon human, relationship, and liquid capital. :

Cultural-Forgone Opportunities: The first group is incorrectly referred to as psychological, and is instead a system of values that consist of “forgone opportunity costs” that must be paid by citizens in order to create the network of habits that humans can identify as their social order by conforming or non conforming to them. These principles effectively form the basis of manners, ethics and morals. ²

a) Time Preference: The first most complex problem in any society is to extend the time preference of it’s members, such that they increasingly prefer longer, more complex, and consequently, more productive outcomes.

b) Suppression Of Corruption: Corruption is privatization of opportunities using one’s role in political organizations. The use of information to redirect opportunities or property from the citizen’s desired end, to that of the bureaucrat.

c) A System Of Property Definitions: while we tend to think of property as a western concept, all societies have property definitions. However, the more complex a set of property definitions and the more ‘liquid’ they are without ‘exporting’ assets or privatizing profits from collective efforts, the more productive will be the society. All societies have some set of property definitions and some set of shareholders in each category of property. The question is whether the system consists of corruption or not. In the west, our unstated view, is that one can only profit by serving others, so if someone profits by the use of property he is rewarded for the service of others.

c) Metaphysical Objectives: subvert the market, avoid the market, tolerate the market, or compete in the market. Our religious traditions hold the same principles in different logical structure: anarchic, magical, communal, cooperative, and competitive. The east and west are rational, the rest are not. The east avoids conflict because it is potentially destabilizing, and the west sees it has socially constructive and exploratory. These are complimentary social orders, although a competitive order invents market solutions faster and more frequently.

Administrative and Procedural: The second group consists of processes:

d) Cooperative Institutions: The outcome of this complexity however, is that humans increasingly need means of coordinating their activities. Their activities can be coordinated by prices, organizations

e) Meritocratic Rotation of Elites / Denial Of Non Meritocratic Access: To remain competitive, the leadership in society must rotate by meritocratic means. Just as important is the fact that non-meritocratic access to power must be denied. A point not considered, is that most societies prosper when there are vast private property rights, but few political rights, because group-competitions must be conducted in the marketplace and are to the advantage of citizens, whereas political competition occurs outside the marketplace and is universally at the expense of citizens. For this reason, as long as all members of a society have property rights, there is very little value in their possessing political rights. Therefore it is often better in a homogenous society to possess some democratic institutions, but in a heterogenous society, to limit access to politics, so that the commercial market serves as an outlet for group competition with the government only playing referee.

f) Recognizing New Rules (ethics, morals, manners, and property definitions)

g) Coordinating Of Group Investments:

h) Means Of Resolving Differences:

i) Limits On Power : Religious, Philosophical, such as Natural Law, Or Constitutional.

4) Government: That a class-based division of government with a hereditary monarch (with veto power), a ‘Lottocratic’ ³ aristocracy (responsibility for commerce and trade), and a democratically elected common house (responsible for redistribution of benefits), with some minimum criteria of conformity in order for a citizen to vote, is probably the most effective form of government that man has yet invented – because self-interest, desires and skills are aligned with delegated powers. The world was clearly a better place under the monarchs – even Russia under the Czars had political parties and trade unions. The unexpected rapidity of the impact of the industrial revolution, and the social dislocation it created, created opportunities for our ancestors to undermine our nearly ideal governments.

a) Monarchy: Monarchs have a very long “time preference”. That means, that they tend to prefer ‘the long term outcome’ rather than short sighted ends. (This is the opposite of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ wherein people have incentives that are entirely short term.) You can look up both of those terms. Monarchs also support tribal and nationalist concepts. They also prohibit access to power – and in particular, access to power by non-economic means.

b) Military:

c) Judiciary:

d) Senate:

e) House:

f) Bank:

5) Rule Of Law:

a) That a written constitution with specifically enumerated limits on the government is the source of freedom from oppression by government. Most importantly, constitutions are empirical. They are calculable. All human life in society is calculation. It must be. Because it is too complex to evaluate by the use of our senses alone.

b) Than at independent judiciary, dependent upon “The Common Law”, and fully adherent to the constitution, in whatever its form, is the only necessary and safe body of lawmaking.

c) And that men – and that means government – cannot make laws, only regulations, or loans, or appropriations. But not laws. Laws are discovered, not made:

a) “There is only one law and that is property.”
b) “We have laws because we have property. We do not have property because we have laws.”

6) Redistribution: That a society enumerates property rights so that it is possible for people to divide the labor of production, service and invention, does not mean that society may not appropriate taxes and fees on property transactions as a ‘commission’ for administering the marketplace, and to redistribute to the society’s ‘shareholders’ – shareholders who have invested in the system of property definitions by adherence to the ‘rules’, consisting of:

a) Property Definitions
b) Manners, Ethics and Morals

which we call our society, or social order.

7) Failure: Governments and empires fail for these reasons:

a) Debasement: because of the corruption of their currency, almost exclusively due to debasement,

b) Overextension: the overextension of their obligations, largely through the pursuit of wars of expansion, or the pursuit of symbolic monuments such as the parthenon, but also including subsidies of the proletariat such as rome or contemporary western europe.

c) Birth Rates: insufficient or excess birth rates – excess men creating revolution, insufficient men creating economic and military weakness.

d) Money: shortage of money and credit,

e) Trade Routes: changes in trade routes,

f) Calculative Institutions: size in excess of their system of incentives and calculation for determining the use of resources – insufficient calculating technology such as accounting, property rights, and individual accountability.

g) Irrationalism: the degradation of political debate from the practical and empirical, first to rational then to moral – as the system of calculation breaks down.

h) Cultural Habits/Opportunity Costs: the dissolution of the system of opportunity costs that are codified in property definitions, manners, ethics and morals – due to largely to immigration, or religious or ideological revolution – in other words, an ideological conversion of the system of property rights and it’s consequential impact on production and trade.

i) Externalities: external military shocks and invasions,

j) Disasters: losses to the capital structure from natural disasters.

8) Three Types Of Coercion

a) Physical
b) Moral
c) Remunerative

9) Social and Economic Classes

10) Human Failure:

a) Violence
b) Theft
c) Fraud
d) Corruption

11) Failures Of Political Discourse
a) the multitude of transfers

12) The Hierarchy Of Argument

a) sentiments
b) analogy
c) history
d) reason
e) science
f) economics

13) Personal Ethics
a) Speak The Truth, and at worst say nothing
b) Do Nothing To Others You Would Not Want Done Unto You
c) Engage in no exchange wherein the other party will ever regret his purchase.

15) Social Problems In Advanced Society
a) The Loneliness and Anonymity Of The Division Of Labor and The Affect On Society
b) The Difference Between The Urban And The Rural
c) The Status Competition Between Groups who will seek political power to alter their condition.

The utility of different governments can be determined by historical analogy, by articulated reason, by empirical study of economic performance, and by demonstrated stability against revolution, adaptability to external shocks, and the temporal duration of the system of rules itself. Under those criteria, only the class-tiered system of government survives scrutiny. In particular, democratic governments are temporary, and the result of extraordinary wealth created by conquest of new territory or trade routes. And totalitarian governments are impoverishing, regardless of circumstances. It is the combination of all forms of government so that the different social classes have institutions wich allow them to achieve their ends without detriment to the institutions of the society that is superior to forms of government that reflect the desires ONLY of certain classes of society. Our western error has been that we feel we must enfranchise everyone into the same structure without accounting for differences in our knowledge, skill, ability and preferences.

Unfortunately, the horrors of the world wars caused westerners to question their civilization’s principles, rather than the rate of technological evolution and the rate of population growth, and our inability to EXTEND our system of western government fast enough to accomodate them, and instead we have, quite wrongly, thrown out the entire system rather than improving it by ADDING to our rather empirical system of government. The consequences of marxian collectivism, coinciding with feminism, the debate over slavery, and the immigration of non-western people’s, was far greater than our system could tolerate. And the reason our system could not tolerate it, was because we were still relying too much on moral religious doctrine rather than fully articulated reason: we simply did not understand the reasons our western form of government was superior.

1. Productivity means the amount of profit created per hour of effort. It is measurable. [↩]
2. There are plenty of other manners: such as cleanliness. [↩]
3. Lottocracy: where citizens are chosen by lot. [↩]

Over on Real Clear Politics, Whoopie Goldberg says she’s Playing The Race Card.
To which I reply:

It’s not about race. It’s about the welfare state’s collectivism vs classical liberalism’s individualism.

Three Rules of Politics:

• RULE 1: “People will not tolerate rulership by someone who despises them and their values.”
• RULE 2:“People will not tolerate taxation when the proceeds are used for purposes with which they disagree.”
• RULE 3: “Everyone reverts to group persistence under duress. EVERYONE. So people have racial, cultural, class, and genration biases. They are biased for their group under duress, and egalitarian under prosperity. This is basic behavioral economics. There is no data, anywhere, that supports an alternative view.

If someone despises you, and uses your taxes for purposes that you disagree with, and you’re under economic duress, then that’s all that’s required to understanding their political position. People despised, and continue to despise Jimmy Carter for the same reasons as they do Obama.

FACT 1: Whites pay the vast majority of taxes. While the government does everything it can to obscure the fact that taxes are primarily a white burden, the fact remains, that taxes are almost entirely a white burden. This violates Rule 2 above. And under economic duress it invokes Rule 3 above.

If anything is racially loaded, it’s that whites are unique in the world, and in world history, in preferring classical liberalism’s individual freedom and responsibility over the alternatives offered by other, less successful cultures.

If race is involved, it’s because Obama demonstrably disdains white people. I didn’t use the word ‘hate’. That’s a loaded word for silly people. But, why else would he call a meeting with a board of six like minded economic advisors this spring without a single white person among them?

If race was involved why would whites try to draft Colin Powell, and why would whites be such avid supporters of black conservatives?

So, it’s not about race. It’s about being anti-American. American being defined as a class of rights that white, anglo-germanic people invented, and codified in a constitution, and who have consistently extended those rights to other peoples. And have fought wars to extend to other peoples. And born sacrifices to carry to other peoples.

So if you want to make it about race, and we actually get the data out during the election cycle, it will have quite the opposite effect that advocates of ‘playing the race card’ will intend. That’s because white people are beginning to act like the minority that they are becoming. And in that process, they have, and will continue to cease feeling guilt over slavery, or their dominance over the expansion of the institutions of prosperity that we call capitalism, and will increasingly act as does the Jewish lobby: in self interest. And for African Americans, if whites lose their guilt and become a minority, and act as diasporic capitalists like the Jews, how is the rest of the world going to treat Africans and African Americans?

Playing the race card is a losing proposition.

So lets just stick with having the argument over the welfare state and collectivism versus classical liberalism and individualism.