It would be painfully easy to make a career out of criticizing the left. Plenty of people do it. It’s entertaining but it doesn’t further the cause.

Unfortunately I have real work to do, and can’t sign up for a daily routine.

Maybe now and then I’ll just make the rounds.

Brad takes issue with Chris Caldwell’s assertion that the republican party is not where wealth votes:

It takes a somewhat weird failure to look at the cross-tabs to arrive at the conclusion that the Democratic Party is the party of "billionaires, academics, minorities and single women" and the Republican Party is the party of "landscape gardeners, construction workers, truckers." For one thing, landscape gardeners throughout much of the country are now overwhelmingly Hispanic, and less and less likely to vote Republican with each passing day…

via Brad DeLong.

But Brad is using a convenient play on words. High finance is in bed with the democrats, and big oil is in bed with the republicans. “Billionaires” was a bad choice of pejorative language. He should have said “high finance”.

So brad is just feeding the fires of dishonest discourse rather than correcting it.

That said Chris is still off-base. Republican party is becoming the white party. which is why there is a clock running on its future. And further, it’s why we are not going to have a peaceful resolution of our class warfare: because it’s going to become race warfare.

The libertarians have a solution but it’s too late to enact it. Bush was the last president with the opportunity. When one republican defected and ruined his chances of reform, the die was cast.

Sometime in the not too distant future it’s going to get very bad here in the states.

March 5th, 2012 Posted by CurtD

Krugman jumps on the Kochs bandwagon today:

I replied:

Of the libertarian think tanks, Cato is the most policy oriented. The Kochs want to move it more into policy and further away from theory in order to help the republican party platform. (Which doesn’t necessarily bother those of us who are members of more radical think tanks.)

While I understand that you have an agenda, it is perfectly reasonable to purge language that polls unfavorably. But you will rarely find a conservative engaging in deceptions on the scale that do liberals.

Conservative have a higher standard. The public holds them accountable to a higher standard because they profess a higher standard. But that said, voter manipulation, association with global finance, violence, and systemic corruption are by far predominantly liberal activities.

So are we supposed to hold you to the liberal standard? Or the conservative standard? Because you claim a high standard, but by your statements contradict it.

Crises, however, are not fables. They do not exist to teach us lessons or help us learn to mend our ways. The forces at work are utterly indifferent to the narratives we attach to them. Like everything else, they are simply a chain of events. One damned thing after another. Our task is to understand how this chain is likely to unfold and uncover what, if anything, we can do to mitigate the damage.

via On Europe: Tyler and I « Modeled Behavior.

To which I replied:

Again, love you and your work. But you are artificially narrowing the scope of inquiry to suit your biases and calling it truth rather than preference.

A longer time preference would argue for different policies, lower fragility, and better individual planning. You have a shorter time preference which suits your bias toward redistribution and allowing increasing birth rates among the lower classes.

The average European as a lower IQ than in 1850 for a reason. You are the reason. Actually women are — but you’re a product of that thinking. (Ashkenazim have remained constant from the medieval average, while Europeans have declined.) There are hard conceptual barriers at 105, 122 and 140. And the composition of a population determines its possible norms.

Ideas have consequences. In particular, your ideas have consequences.

Paul Krugman writes that the right wing strategy is based on false principles. But he misses the point:

There were some technical problems with my earlier post on GOP deficit phoniness, although not in any way that changes the message. So, here’s an update. I use the intermediate-cost estimate from CRFB (pdf) for the four Republican plans, and for consistency, I use CRFB’s own estimate (pdf) for Obama. … So it remains true that all of the proposals, except maybe Ron Paul’s (which contains huge and probably impossible spending cuts) would lead to higher deficits than Obama, based on a common assessment. … So let me rephrase my question: what conceivable evidence would convince people that supply-side magic doesn’t work?

Paul,

1) The conservative strategy is to starve the beast as the only hope of preserving their freedom and their culture. In that context, their approach is entirely rational for Schumpeterian reasons: in the battle between the public intellectual who would undermine their culture, and the entrepreneur who would preserve it, they are funding the entrepreneur. Again, this is an entirely rational strategy. It is absolutely straightforward. Just as it is rationally Schumpeterian that the public intellectuals like yourself seek to fund the state.

2) There is no community of common interest in the country any longer. The combination of immigration, relocation, the dissolution of the family, and the consequential abandonment of traditional values by the lower classes, when combined with the evolution of technology that rewards those who can process and use abstract rules and principles has guaranteed a permanent and irreversible conflict of values.

This is a religious conflict. This era is a battle of the communal religion of the secular state, and the aristocratic religion of the traditional classical liberals. The left’s strategy is to enable the lower classes to have a beneficent lifestyle. The right’s strategy is to constrain the reproductive ability of the lower classes and concentrate investment in the middle classes. Even if they must suffer hardship to obtain their political ends. There is nothing new about this conflict of visions. Its the female sentiment and male sentiment writ large.

Progressive economists are terrible historians and worse political philosophers. You cannot have consensus on policy in a divided electorate. Arguing over technicalities is simply a self congratulatory distraction.

I cannot tell whether you are intellectually honest. You are framing the debate under a false assumption that is contrary to the data. Since you’re doing that, it’s either an accident or an intentional misrepresentation. I don’t know which.

But by falsely framing the discourse, you do a disservice as a public intellectual, and hinder the resolution of the underlying conflict.

Demographically, your side will win within thirty years assuming there is no unforeseen change. But it will not because you convince anyone.

Liberty is purchased with the tip of a spear, the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun. It is maintained by a hard constitution, the common law, and the mastery of the violence required to prevent its subversion. Righteous indignation is litte more than sound and fury signifying nothing, and those who congratulate themselves on their conviction are merely hiding behind a facade of convenience and cowardice. Violence is a virtue not a vice. We lend our leaders our violence in exchange for liberty. If they do not give us our liberty we must take back our wealth of violence and use it until we can give it again to those who will.

Causality, like all human concepts, is a product of the necessity of humans to act, in order to alter the course of events, so that they can consume the difference. Causal understanding is then bounded by human perceptive ability, processing power, in real time. And from this perspective, whether something is causally replicable on one end, or correlatively positive but causally uncertain at the other end, is only as relevant as the cost and risk of the actions necessary to achieve the outcome.

We often confuse truth in the abstract, with truth-for-action. Truth in the abstract is a metaphysical tautology. Truth-for-action is simply scientifically pragmatic. Evolution works by trial and error, and so do we.

On Hillsdale Natural Law Review, Tyler O’Neil suggests that many conservatives aren’t libertarians despite using the term. Because Kinsella posted about it being a bit sloppy, I thought I’d use it as an excuse to try and write something definitive.

THE LIBERTARIAN SPECTRUM

“Libertarian Party” vs “Libertarian philosophy” vs “libertarian movement” vs “libertarian sentiments”

A) “Libertarian Party” : The name of a political party that makes use of Libertarian philosophy in its policy platform.

B) Uppercase “L”-Libertarian = Libertarian in the narrow sense: The self identifying name “Libertarian” has been appropriated by members of a the majority faction of the broader group of libertarians and requires total observance of the twin concepts of Property Rights and the Non Aggression Principle. This of necessity places a Libertarian as an advocate of either minimal state, private government, or anarcho-capitalist forms of creating a social order. And it specifically excludes Classical Liberals and Neo-classical Liberals for whom enforcement of norms is a necessary and beneficial defense of political shareholder property rights.

C) Lowercase “l”-libertarian: Libertarian in the broader sense: A movement consisting of multiple factions, employing a rationally articulated set of arguments, each of which include or exclude certain secondary properties in addition to the twin concepts of property rights and the non-aggression principle. Those additional properties consist of a)the scope of property, and b)the scope of the ethics of exchange, and c) the scope of institutions necessary to establish those property definitions, those normative ethics, as well as d) to provide a means for the resolution of disputes.

D) “libertarian sentiments” (Or “libertarian-like” affiliations): A general, abstract, sentimental preference in which political decisions err on the side of individual property rights, small government, and individual responsibility for making the best of one’s lot in life.
In colloquial language, ‘libertarian’ is a self-identifying synonym for anyone who uses anti-statist arguments which may include social, religious or martial conservatives. One can possess “libertarian sentiments” and not be either cognizant of, able to articulate, or self identify as an ideological “libertarian”. Classical liberals and neo-classical liberals possess ‘libertarian’ sentiments. They do not possess a fully articulated philosophical framework.

In technical terms the libertarian sentiments are used by that category of people with conservative classical liberal ideologies who have integrated libertarian commercial ideas into their conceptual framework as a means of combating encroaching statism and bureaucracy, but who have no material knowledge of libertarian philosophy, nor would they apply the libertarian constraints upon their ideology if they could articulate it.

Therefore “conservatives” possess libertarian sentiments, but do not subscribe to the social implications of “libertarian” philosophy. This is because ‘conservative classical liberals’ believe an entire suite of norms to be a form of ‘property’: an asset in which they are shareholders that is depreciated by a failure to observe and adhere to those norms. And political failure to enforce those norms constitutes an involuntary transfer of assets from them to others.

THE TWO TRADITIONS

Two dominant traditions divide the “libertarian” movement roughly reflecting B and C above:

1) The Anarchic tradition specifically articulated by Rothbard in The Libertarian Manifesto, as well as the Ethics of Liberty. In contemporary parlance, “Libertarian” means unlimited adherence to Rothbard’s Manifesto’s single principle of non-aggression.

2) The Classical Liberal and “Hayekian” tradition. Hayek adopted the term “Libertarian” because the term “Liberal” had been appropriated by the left. Hayek sought to maintain and expand the classical liberal tradition under then name “Libertarian”. The classical liberals hold libertarian sentiments but are not libertarians. The current big-’L’ Libertarian movement has so successfully dominated the political discourse that the neo classical liberals are only now beginning to form an ideology. Unfortunately, they have failed to understand Rothbard and Hoppe’s ethics well enough to articulate Neo Classical Liberalism in Propertarian terms. (A problem I am slowly trying to correct.)

In no small part, the two libertarian traditions reflect the religious and social strategies of the authors from each tradition, with the Christian authors maintaining the concept of a collective ‘corporation’ in which all citizens are shareholders, VS the Jewish diasporic religious and social strategy of creating a ‘kingdom of heaven’ independent of the norms and institutions necessary for land-holding. It is this difference between the martial landholding Christians and the diasporic capital holding Jews that gives each branch of the movement its preferences. And it is the inability of the two movements to find a compromise position that precludes current ‘libertarians’ from forming a sufficient political block with which to alter the political discourse by incorporating classical liberal, social, religious and martial conservatives who have unalterable landholding sentiments without which ‘community’ and ‘norms’ are impossible to conceive of.

I. MANDATORY PROPERTIES OF LIBERTARIANISM:

1) Non-Aggression Principle (A negative which is often stated in its positive form: Voluntarism, meaning all exchanges of property are voluntary).

2) The institution of Private Property initiated by “homesteading”: acting to transform something not property into property, over which one has a monopoly of control. 3) By implication: All human rights can be reduced to property rights.   No human rights can exist where they cannot be expressed as property rights. It is an impossibility due to scarcity and incalculability under complexity.

II. VARIABLE INDIVIDUAL PROPERTIES (Limited to common properties)

1) symmetrical-knowledge ethics (classical liberals and christian authors), VS asymmetrical-knowledge ethics (anarchists and jewish authors) Rothbard and Block are asymmetrical advocates. Most classical liberals lack the knowledge of Rothbardian/Hoppian ethics necessary to articulate their values in Propertarian terms. However, the classical liberals as well as the Hayekians, both advocate symmetrical-knowledge ethics whether they articulate the ideas effectively or not. “in any exchange the seller has an ethical obligation to mitigate fraud from the asymmetry of knowledge”

2) Implied Warranty (classical liberal and Christian authors), VS expressly denied warranty (Anarchist and Jewish authors). Rothbard and Block deny warranty. Classical liberals imply warranty. Implied warranty is a derivation of 1, above. “in any exchange the seller must warrant his goods and services to prevent fraud by asymmetry of information.”

3) Prohibition against all involuntary external transfers (classical liberal and Christian authors), VS prohibition only against state involuntary transfers (anarchist and Jewish authors). “No exchange, action or inaction may cause involuntary transfers from others”.

III. VARIABLE INSTITUTIONAL PROPERTIES
1) Shareholder Property Forms (classical liberal and Christian authors) VS Prohibition on Shareholder Property Forms (anarchists and Jewish authors). Whether intentional or not, Rothbard all but places a ban on organizations with geographic monopolies on rule making. Block expressly advocates geographic rule making, although he only expresses it in individual rather than organizational terms.

2) Norms as Arbitrary VS Norms as Shareholder Property. Since norms require restraints from action (forgone opportunities), and property itself is a norm paid for by restraints from action (forgone opportunities), then all those who adhere to norms, ‘pay’ for them. Therefore norms within a geography are a form of shareholder property, and violations of norms are involuntary transfers (thefts) from norm-holders to norm-destroyers.

3) Preferred Institution: Classical Liberal State, Minimal State, Private Government or Anarchic “Religion”.

4) “Markets Evolved” and regulation is a form of theft VS “Markets Were Made” and regulations by shareholders or their representatives are an expression of property rights. In practical terms, this is a derivation of principles 1, 2 and 3 above, since regulation is an attempt to solve the problem of involuntary transfers, fraud due to asymmetry of information, and fraud due to external involuntary transfers.

5) Artificial Property VS No Artificial Property (Intellectual Property VS no intellectual property. ) In practical terms, this is a derivation of 8 above, since if markets were made their owners have a property right to create artificial forms of property – (because different portfolios of property types are artificial norms that vary from group to group.)

IV FURTHER DIFFERENCES

Beyond the points listed above, “libertarian” becomes arbitrary and loses its distinction from “Classical Liberalism” and “neo Classical Liberalism”, since any discussion of the state, government, or shareholder returns on shareholder investments is alien to big-L Libertarianism because they believe that it violates their concept of the non-aggression principle. (I argue otherwise but that’s a longer topic.) Hayek, Popper and Parsons all failed to develop an articulated ethical language capable of expressing the logic of classical liberal sentiments in a rational ethics. Rothbard did it. Hoppe nearly finished it. No one on the conservative bench has so far seen to adopt it, and the classical liberal and conservative movements are trapped in Kirkian moralistic reasoning. Which is useless against encroaching statism. (Hence why I’ve formed the Propertarian Institute.)

V CONSERVATIVES IN PERSPECTIVE
The term “Conservative” describes a reaction to the status quo. As does progressive. In the USA, the status quo is what remains of American classical liberalism. So conservatives are American Classical Liberals who cannot use the term, because ‘liberal’ has been appropriated by the left. They are classical liberals, who DO have libertarian sentiments, but are not Libertarians because they disagree with the Libertarian prohibition on shareholder-community, and denial of norms as property.

That is a “propertarian” analysis of the political spectrum. The fact that propertarian reasoning allows us to differentiate by concept of property rights rather than institutional ‘beliefs’ is just one illustration of the explanatory power of propertarian ethics.

Thanks
Curt Doolittle

“Ben Bernanke has said that he could not save Lehman because it would be have been in violation of the law. My response is that it is not his responsibility to enforce the law. It is his responsibility to safe guard the lives of millions of people. … When the Capitol Police haul him away in chains then his responsibility to prevent the Great Recession ends. Until that moment the choice not to act, is his choice alone. … The constitution is no shield.” – Karl Smith, Modled Behavior

Thus begins all violent ends.

Government consists of institutions. People have the institutions that they choose to. People deserve the consequences of those institutions. They learn from those consequences. People choose or choose not to alter institutions to prevent repeats of the past. People deserve the consequences of choosing or not choosing to alter those institutions. Political externalities are so vast, economic consequences are a trifle by comparison.

Politics is the exercise of power. Power is the ability to alter the probability of outcomes. It is the ability to transfer, or deny the transfer, of opportunities and rewards between groups.

Let’s see what this economist has done: 1- The scientistic fallacy. 2 -The fallacy of goodwill. 3- The false consensus bias. 4-Fallacy of collective terms. 5-The denial of externalities. 6- The fallacy of the short run.

So he errs. And in that error would open the door to far greater horrors than the one we suffer now.

The west is unique: it is the only social order that employs the competition between organizations with competing interests who must enact rules which are used by ordinary people who run institutions to conduct the affairs of the polis. It is a ‘game’ form of government for a ‘game’ marketplace. It is the only instance of that model to survive. and as a consequence it breaks the consanguineous bonds that determine the fate of all other civilizations.

So, Fix the laws. The rule of law is all we have. Without it, we cannot have a high trust society, and would quickly devolve into either india or south america.

Politics is more complex than economics. Political externalities have greater consequences than economic externalities.

And Scientistic hubris is legion.

Last night, a wonderfully intelligent Canadian I’ve recently met referred to me as a ‘free marketer’. Which in Canadian lingo is a synonym for Libertarian. (We clearly need a Mises chapter up here in eastern Canada.)

And, I’m fussing with writing a page the separates Propertarians from Anarcho Capitalists. If it was possible to regulate trade intelligently, I don’t have a problem with it per se. I have a problem with market regulation because its not possible to regulate it without causing harm. I don’t see regulation as an abstract ethical question, because I see markets as intentional not natural constructs. (Which I’ve addressed elsewhere.) I see it as a time-knowledge problem.

That’s a long way of stating that it’s kind of interesting to be referred to by a property of one’s classification, where the property is tangental to the classification. :) I’d prefer to be called a conservative or libertarian. I want freedom on principle. The economy is just a tool.

Propertarian reasoning says that we cannot do certain things. It explains why we must do certain things. It allows us to do stupid things if we want to. It allows us to do beneficial things if we want to. We pay or gain the consequences either way.

Just like any other corporation.