Tag Archives: Austrian School / Libertarian Theory

NAP is justification of immoral behavior

Curt Doolittle:

WHY? THE FALLACY OF NON AGGRESSION AS JUSTIFICATION.

Why would you develop an ethics of non-aggression rather than an ethic of non-theft, for a philosophical framework that purports to reduce all right to property rights, for some reason other than legitimizing deception and forbidding retaliation for deception?

You see, cosmopolitanism is merely a philosophical framework for justificationism.

Eli Harman on Altruistic Punishment

ALTRUISTIC PUNISHMENT: “I will bear a cost in order to impose a cost on someone for imposing costs on others.”

Directly, no one wins, it’s a lose/lose/lose; costs all the way around.

Indirectly, we all benefit from the maintenance of a normative commons that discourages people from imposing costs, negative externalities, on others or refraining from contributing to benefits, positive externalities, which are shared.

This is a common human behavior and it is impossible to understand human behavior, or the evolution of societies and polities, without understanding altruistic punishment.

Should we use violence against liars?

Eli Harman:

It’s very simple.

The bullshitters can bullshit faster than you can shovel. So if you don’t want to drown in the stuff, you had better make them stop.

Free speech was a nifty idea. It didn’t work.

People can make war upon you, your freedom and your property with verbalisms, moralisms, pseudoscience, sophistry, shame, obscurantism, loaded questions, false framing, and 101 other kinds of lies.

When you catch them at it, punish them.

When people do violence to you with their words, do violence to them.

DUCHESNE : RE-NATIONALIZE CLASSICAL LIBERALISM

DUCHESNE : RE-NATIONALIZE CLASSICAL LIBERALISM
—–
Evolution is now being played out in the arena of cultural conflict, but there are still winners and losers in the strict Darwinian sense as Western lands are opened up to all the peoples of the world.

Duchesne concludes that

–the way out of the crisis of Western nihilism is to re-nationalize liberalism, throw away the cultural Marxist notion that freedom means liberation from all identities not chosen by the individual, and accentuate the historical and natural-ethnic basis of European identity.–

I couldn’t agree more.
—–

On the culture that creates wealthy people

Well, as a former member of that set, the thrill of the competition in one’s field, despite that much of it is a lottery effect, is exceeded only by the excitement of meeting and working with increasingly interesting rather than tedious and mundane people, on projects and ideas that are increasingly interesting rather than tedious and mundane.

Nassim dealt with the (exasperating and epistemically challenged) financial sector, but engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, athletes and artists tend to be fairly interesting – and they fill you with awe and humility. And that experience is as awe inspiring on a daily basis as is the feeling of revelation one experienced from one’s most profound professors.

So we tend to forget that what separates the west from the rest is heroism. Egalitarian heroism. And the absurd excesses of the upper economic classes are a minor side effect of the cultural processes that create them. And that cultural process is what produces, when not suppresses by authority or mysticism, the rapid evolution of western civilization, despite its status as a small, poor, backward people on the margins of the bronze age.

Be glad we produce such extremes, because of the benefits we obtain from the cultural process that creates them.

Revel in it. If there is anything in man that approaches the divine, that is it

On Rationality vs Post Modernism (from a Facebook discussion about the correlation of IQ and upward mobility)

And Pavel, this isn’t about me. It’s not personal. It’s a question of how we treat the world. Does truth/reality exist? Will we face it courageously or succumb to the secular religion of post-modernism, which follows in the Zoroastrian / Abrahamic tradition of attempting to create reality by chanting desirable lies? Universities are the churches and academics are the priests — bitterly denouncing heretics as they’ve always done. It is mysticism threatening to overturn the Enlightenment. It is poison.

Let’s not abandon empiricism, logic, rationality, but “strive to seek to find and not to yield.” We’ll all be better off this way.

Curt on I. Science-> II. Philosophy-> III. Ideology -> IV. Religion

PHILOSOPHY AND IDEOLOGY: TRUTH IS ENOUGH.
The Job of Scientists, Philosophers, Ideologists, Activists and Priests.

I. Science-> II. Philosophy-> III. Ideology -> IV. Religion

Science is a purely descriptive discipline. Philosophy consists of constructing true statements that assist us in ethical action. ideology consists of inspirations to act to obtain power, and requires only the minimum truth necessary to obtain power. Religion consists of rituals and myths that bind us together pre-cognitively, and in religion, true propositions are unnecessary – and largely undesirable.

Therefore, truth content of each discipline: science, philosophy, ideology and religion – varies significantly.

***Now, if we merely sought discretionary power as do most, then it wouldn’t matter if our arguments were constructed scientifically. But since we are proposing an order that lacks discretionary authority, and where discretionary authority is prohibited, and where economic prosperity is the promised common good, then ideas and actions must correspond with objective reality rather than subjective command, law must be rationally calculable, and truth (correspondence with reality) is required of us. Truth is the only ‘rule’ that we can ‘rule’ by.***

This does put us at an ideological disadvantage: our messages are harder to convey. We promise no free rides. Offer no eternity. No certainty.

But that said, for some minority of us, truth, liberty, prosperity, and reality are desirable enough for us to act, and act with the threat of violence, to obtain them.

Our ideology then, consists of the truth, the promise of liberty and prosperity, the organized application of violence to obtain them, and the moral justification whereby moral men feel that their actions are morally sanctioned.

Therefore, the job of a philosopher, like myself, is to produce the truth. The job of ideologists, is to provide moral sanction. The job of activists, is to distribute moral sanctions. The job of shamans is to bind us together through shared experience, ritual and myth.

Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine (writing from L’viv)

What Libertarians, Conservatives and Progressives have right!

WHAT LIBERTARIANS HAVE RIGHT AND WRONG

WHAT WE HAVE RIGHT
1) Property + Voluntary, fully informed, warrantied, exchange, free of negative externality.
2) Contract + Common Law + Universal Standing
3) Competing Insurance Companies for the purpose of Regulation.
4) Economics: Voluntary organization of Production + Incentives + Competition

WHAT CONSERVATIVES HAVE RIGHT (AND WE HAVE WRONG)
1) Morality (‘Durkheimian Man’) requires many institutional means of coercion into respect for, and observation of, and enforcement of, property rights.
2) The Nuclear and Absolute Nuclear Family as the minimum organizational unit of any social order.

WHAT THE PROGRESSIVES HAVE RIGHT (AND WE HAVE WRONG)
1) Observance and enforcement of the property rights necessary for the voluntary organization of production, when one is not ABLE to participate in it, requires compensation for the effort of observance and enforcement. (Although they would never articulate it in this manner. The right of exclusion must be respected, but respecting it is a cost.)

Putting Violence back in Libertarianism

Asking people to forego parasitism (if they’re weak) or predation (if they’re strong) is asking them to bear a substantial opportunity cost. They will only do so if someone stands ready to impose a higher actual cost for choosing to engage in them.

This is what Curt Doolittle means when he says “liberty must be manufactured by violence.”

Libertarians love to sing liberty’s praises, and there is much to be said in its favor. But it does not follow from this that liberty is always in everyone’s best interests. There are many people who stand to lose more from liberty than they would stand to gain. (And not just because they misperceive the situation.) There are still more people for whom the uncertainty over what they would stand to gain or lose would make desiring liberty irrational.

The incentives that favor liberty do not exist by default, they must be proactively created. And in order for this to happen there must be people likely to benefit from liberty, strong people, capable people, wise people, intelligent people, responsible people, farsighted people; in short, aristocrats. And they must organize to impose liberty on the remainder by force, and in many cases, to their detriment, or to their enduring resentment.

If liberty is thus to be manufactured, the problem of free-riding must also be overcome by institutional forms that deny the benefits of liberty to those unwilling to participate in its manufacture, and that preserves the benefits for the exclusive enjoyment of those so willing.

Curt: THE FALLACY OF STARTING WITH THE ASSUMPTION YOU HAVE PROPERTY RIGHTS RATHER THAN NEEDING TO CONSTRUCT THEM

THE FALLACY OF STARTING WITH THE ASSUMPTION YOU HAVE PROPERTY RIGHTS RATHER THAN NEEDING TO CONSTRUCT THEM

If you have no property rights, but only permission from the state, to use its property in certain fashion, then the state cannot aggress against your property – nor can anyone else, except to the extent determined by the state.

To defend against this argument you must counter that natural rights exist like a soul, or are merely an allegory to contract rights, envisioned out of necessity for flourishing – or some other magical concept. Despite the fact that, contradictory to universal claims, nowhere on earth do private property rights exist. They are profoundly unnatural.

All that is necessary for cooperation is the institution of property. The scope of property is not defined by the means of transgression against property. We can only possibly hold a right that we have obtained in contract. The contract for property rights in the absence of a state can only be constructed by individuals exchanging the promise of defense in response to transgression, and the means of aggressively constructing those rights . The only means of preventing the universally extant violations of those rights obtained in such a contract, and reciprocally insured via that contract, is the organized application of violence against the state.

So it is an erroneous assumption, and a convenient one, that you start from a position of liberty, rather than start from a position of needing to construct liberty.

Intersubjectively verifiable property is a fallacy. Aggression is a fallacy. Natural rights are a fallacy. Crusoe’s Island is a fallacy. Man evolved from consanguineous bands by suppressing free riding, thereby pressing all into participation in production. Property is the natural result of suppressing free riding. At all points and at all times property is constructed by resisting free riding. Property results from the suppression of free riding. The origin of private property as we understand it occurred when Indo European cattle raiders were able to concentrate extraordinary wealth under pastoralism, by way of organized violence and they kept what they obtained in those raids. This is the origin of property: the organized application of violence against free riding.

People who are unwilling to enter the contract for organized violence in order to construct property rights both in contract and in daily practice (as a norm), are merely free riders (thieves) from those who are willing to act to construct property rights in contract and in daily practice (as a norm).

In other words, by claiming you have ‘natural rights’ you’re not only demonstrably wrong, but just trying to obtain property rights at a discount by free riding on the efforts of those who do construct property rights.

So, you’re not only wrong, but a dishonest, free riding thief, like statists you condemn are.

As far as I know this argument is bulletproof.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
Kiev Ukraine

“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.