Monthly Archives: April 2014

“free-ride-a-tarian”

From a FB argument:

“If libertarians continue to insist that 1) libertarian ideas are deep abstractions with only distant and complex relationships to the tangible world 2) that violence is a vice instead of a virtue 3) that society can be build upon the non-aggression principle alone.

Then libertarians will continue to 1) fail 2) make fools of themselves.

They are trying to achieve liberty at a discount. They are fraudulently pretending that they live on Robinson Crusoe’s Island, sheltered by the violence of an ocean.

The best they’ll achieve (if lucky) is free riding on the effort and sacrifice of people more willing to defend the social norm of property — the aristocrats. I would not call such people ‘libertarians’ I would call them ‘free-ride-a-tarians’ or ‘parasite-arians.'”

***

To put it another way, my criticism is that it’s unhelpful to pretend the private property rights are somehow “natural” or extensions of our biology or given to us from “nature or nature’s God.”

Nature is a very harsh place. Property rights are fought for and won and protected.

It is unhelpful to pretend otherwise.

IPCC Insider Rejects Global-Warming Report

Richard Tol, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and an expert on climate change, removed his name from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. While he considers much of the science sound and supports the underlying purpose of the IPCC, Tol says the United Nations agency’s inflammatory and alarmist claims delegitimize the IPCC as a credible and neutral institution.

“In the SPM [Summary for Policymakers], and much more largely in the media, we see all these scare stories,” Tol tells National Review Online. “We’re all going to die, the four horsemen of the apocalypse . . . I felt uncomfortable with the direction [the IPCC report] was going.”

m.nationalreview.com/article/374986/ipcc-insider-rejects-global-warming-report-alec-torres

ADDING KANT TO HISTORY’S MOST DESTRUCTIVE MINDS

Curt Doolittle:

ADDING KANT TO HISTORY’S MOST DESTRUCTIVE MINDS

I’m going to add Kant (obscurant anti-realism), to the ranks of history’s most destructive minds: Cantor(obscurant Pseudoscience), Freud(obscurant pseudoscience), Marx(pseudoscience), Napoleon (total war), Constantine(christianization of Europe), Plato (the Republic), Abraham(monotheism), Zoroaster (divine scripture).

Intellectual Sainthood
– Aristotle
– Machiavelli
– Bacon, Newton and Leibniz
– Smith, Hume and Jefferson
РJevons, Menger, Walras, Marshall, B̦hm-Bawerk, Wieser;
– Pareto, Durkheim, Weber and Hayek.
РPoincar̩, Mandelbrot, Brouwer, Bishop, Taleb

Now, if I could get Hoppe off his Continental and Kantian platonism, then he would have be the first person to succeed in reducing all rights to property rights. Even if his definition of property is incomplete he would have done it. He managed to articulate the morality of states, but not the morality of polities necessary for the voluntary organization of production. And possibly, that was his only goal. Whereas with propertarianism, I’ve illustrated the definition of property necessary for the formation of a polity capable of voluntary organization of production in the absence of a state. But he isn’t a candidate for intellectual sainthood if he’s stuck in Kantian nonsense.

Failing that I’m stuck with doing it myself. And while I feel I have mastered ethics better than anyone else, I do not feel the same for philosophy proper. And while I’m getting there, I’m not there yet. I’m getting there. But the standard of measure is not my own comprehension, but the structure of my arguments. And I am just getting, after a year of solid hard work, to where I feel I can construct those arguments.

Einstein was right (even if a plagiarist) that most of doing something innovative is just working at it longer than anyone else.

Rothbardian Ghetto Ethics

Rothbardian ethics is parasitic, argues Curt Doolittle:

1) Ghetto ethics only require that the exchange is voluntary.
2) They do not require that the exchange is productive, only that parties are satisfied. (blackmail for example is not productive.)
3) They do not require fully informed exchange backed by warranty. (they allow lying and cheating and information holding)
4) They do not prohibit profiting from harm, or causing harm (Usury for example.)
5) They do not require that the exchange is free of externality.

Parasitic ethics of rothbard require only the first, but the high trust ethics of Protestant require all five criteria. High trust ethics (and human in-group moral instinct) require that we eschew free riding (parasitism) and the only means of doing so, is to require exchanges be internally and externally productive.

Under rothbardian ethics it is possible to profit without contribution to production, and to exist entirely parasitically. ie: his ethics are parasitic.