—-”Is there a strategic reason Trump has alienated our traditional trading partners (Europe, Canada, Mexico) while simultaneously saying Russia should be allowed back into the G7 making it the G8?”—-

OF COURSE.

In Trump’s Own Words:

“We’re like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,” Trump said. “And that ends.”

“The European Union is brutal to the United States and they know it,” Trump said, adding that other leaders acknowledge as much in private.

“It’s like the gig is up,” he said. “They can’t believe they got away with it.”

He said the size of the U.S. economy means other nations can’t win a trade war. “We win that war a thousand times out of a thousand.”

EXPLANATION

Keep in mind that all democratic countries have voters to appeal to so they must at least make a visible attempt at resisting changes that would eliminate trade, economic, and military privileges. So these public disputes are necessary for the service of voters even if european politicians understand that ‘the gig is up’.

1) We spent decades and vast amounts of money helping Europe recover from their civil war. But they kept on parasitically extracting from us. We have absurd trade deficits while American workers suffer from it. But when we started this battle we had a much greater share of the world income and its economy.

2) We spent a long time and vast amounts of money preventing the suicidal ideology that was communism, then socialism, and currently postmodernism, and now, in addition, Islamism. And slowly the world learned. And those that didn’t still suffer (Venezuela), and those that changed prosper (china). But when we started this battle we had a much greater share of the world income and its economy.

3) Europe virtue signals against us all the time, but when there are problems no one but Italy can supply even two planes, and when there is military action only the UK can contribute whatsoever. So we spend 4% of our (massive) GDP and they spend 1% (the same as Switzerland), and play games with us (especially France – who has always been our enemy ). Russia is a paper tiger on all but narrow paths into Moscow, and her declining nuclear inventory is all that makes her other than a third world country – she has the same sized economy as Texas and Italy.

4) Americans are sold virtue signals while the middle class has been hollowed out and the manufacturing has been hollowed out. Originally we hollowed out manufacturing in order to prevent the democratic party and unions working together to implement socialism here in the states and drag us down the same path as other socialist countries. Now we are struggling to return the money, workload, technology, and capital investment to the country.

6) Trump’s tax reform was the most important first step. His trade policy the second, And the forcible redistribution of world military costs to europeans the third. And as a consequence, the end of european virtue signaling that encourages Americas, the American academy, and the American bureaucracy, to follow the suicidal route that european countries have, but which now must abandon their postwar experiments and pay their own way independent of American subsidies.

7) The reason this is important is that we are very shortly going to go through a catastrophic demographic and economic shock that will mean the only competitive advantage between nations is the demographic distribution of the people. In other words, *every point of IQ* is the only difference in competitive ability. And this is the current threat to America, because we have already lost one point in the past twenty years, and almost the second. When five points makes the difference between wealth and relative stagnation, we cannot afford to lose demographically (immigration) or in overpopulation, or in export of wage-level jobs.

TRUMP, RUSSIA, AND THE RESTORATION OF THE BALANCE OF POWERS

8) By including Russia he adds the only country with any military capacity to the discourse, and adds an other voice against one-world-government. Putin, The Slavic Countries, Italy, and now Russia, are trying to contain the french-german social democratic suicide of Europe so that it does not spread.

9) By weakening, conspiring against the people of, and invading Ukraine, Russia threw away her potential to restore the economic and population structure of the soviet union, which was necessary for Russia to remain a world power. The clock ticks. And it takes 350M to 500M people in a block to finance a world power status.

10) The sanctions do their work, and as of this year Putin has redirected expenditures from the military to the economy – which is what is necessary for Russia to unite with german against the anglos, and allow the Intermarium (West Slavics: Poland, Ukraine, Slovikia, Romania…) to evolve into a balance of powers between anglo, latin, germanic, west slavic, and east slavic (Russian ) lands – restoring ‘the States of Europe’ again. And thereby Restoring Western Civilization.

11) By forcing Europe to rearm, and eliminating ‘parasitism’ upon the United States, Trump is ending the redistribution of American wealth to post-war European states necessary for their restoration, and ending subsidy to developing nations that were a risk of ‘going communist’.

Trump is ending the Marxist, Bolshevik, Trotskyist, Democratic Socialist Globalist program, which sought to create a single world government (and a communist one) out of the united nations, and instead is restoring Europe, and the international balance of powers that has been successful throughout modern history.

12) As any strategist will tell you, you never state your strategy. You merely pursue all options by which to bring it about. Simple people plan. Sophisticated people negotiate and seize every available opportunity.

Trump knows exactly what he is doing.

And all he has to do to achieve it is *demand fair deals*.

That alone will restore the balance of powers.  And end the conflict of civilizations.

Start with (key reading):

Top of the list: Pinker, Steven (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Viking.

Harris, Judith Rich (1998). The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Free Press. Revised and Updated edition, 2009.

Harris, Judith Rich (2006). No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. W.W. Norton.

Cochran, Gregory & Harpending, Henry (2009). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Basic Books.

Frost, Peter (2011). Human nature or human natures? Futures, 43, 740–748.

Clark, Gregory (2014). The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Princeton University Press.

On biological sex differences:

A video of a debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke – Edge: THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE (2005)

The video from the above site has been removed, but can be found here. The above text contains a transcript of the debate and each presenter’s slides.

A RECONSTRUCTION OF PRAXEOLOGY AS ECONOMIC INTUITIONISM FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH RATIO-EMPIRICAL SCIENCE

I. PURPOSE:
1) To restore credibility to Austrian Economics by transforming it from Rationalist and pseudoscientific, to consistent with all scientific and logical disciplines.

2) To quash rationalist and pseudoscientific fallacies that have discredited Austrian economics, discredited the quest for moral economics, distracted from the quest for moral institutions through moral constraint on political economy, and cast the quest for liberty itself as the province of ‘the lunatic fringe’.

3) To provide a language for dividing economics into moral (Austrian operational economics) and immoral (Keyensian redistributive economics) disciplines.

4) To provide a scientific and critical rather than ideological and justificationary discussion of Austrian Economics (at least the German wing) as a method for testing the truthfulness and morality of economic theories – and to advocate restoring morality and truthfulness to economic science.

What follows is a series of posts I have written in the past few months as I have worked on Propertarianism. It may require that you have a non-trivial understanding of philosophy. And your average passionate advocate of political ideas does not have that understanding. But hopefully you will glean some ideas from it, and provide me with some useful criticism.

Thanks

II. BACKGROUND TERMS:

0) BASIC TERMS (And yes, you probably need to read these rather than assume you know what they mean.)

– Rationalism vs Empiricism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

– Intuitionism in Mathematics
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism/

– Operationalism in Physics
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/

– Operationism in Psychology
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/199/1/operat.htm

– Instrumentalism (Eccentric Usage)
I am a scientific realist, however, I use the term “instrumentalism” (probably a bad choice of words) in a much narrower sense: to refer to our use of logical and physical instruments to reduce phenomenon to that which we can somehow experience and compare, contrast, qualify, quantify or decide.

III. CONTENTS:

CONTENTS OF THIS DOCUMENT

The first post summarizes the argument. The remaining articles expand the Introduction take you from basic philosophical concepts, through a series of short essays

1) REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS IS NECESSARY (To return the dialog to truthful and moral Austrian economics, and deceptive and immoral macro economics)

2) WHY ARE YOU REFUTING MISES, ROTHBARD AND HOPPE? (To Save Austrian Economics from the lunatic fringe)

3) PRAXEOLOGY AS MISES FAILURE TO DEVELOP ECONOMIC OPERATIONALISM (Restoring Austrian Economics To Compatibility with Ratio-empirical science)

4) MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

5) THE STRUGGLE TO PRODUCE A MORAL ECONOMIC SCIENCE

6) SCIENCE IS THE DISCIPLINE OF SPEAKING TRUTHFULLY

7) MORAL CONSTRAINT FROM LAW THROUGH MATHEMATICS

8) CRITICISM: EMPIRICISM, INSTRUMENTALISM, OPERATIONALISM, FALSIFICATIONISM VS JUTIFICATION: RATIONALISM

9) JUSTIFICATION AS ADHERENCE TO CONTRACT, CRITICISM AS ADHERENCE TO DUE DILIGENCE

10) SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IMMORAL INFORMATION DISTORTION EQUAL TO THE INFORMATION DISTORTION OF KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS.

11) TRANSLATING KANTIAN RATIONALISM INTO SCIENTIFIC TERMS

12) WHICH IS MORE LIKELY: A PURPOSEFUL DECEPTION OR ANTI-SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM?

13) THE ANTI ROTHBARDIAN CANON

14) A LIST OF HANS HERMANN HOPPE’S ERRORS

15) LIBERTARIANISM IS JUST COMMON PROPERTY MARXISM

16) THE REFORMATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT

17) THE ONLY MEANS OF ELIMINATING THE STATE AND CONSTRUCTING A CONDITION OF LIBERTY

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
– “Praxeology and Its Critics” by Bruce Caldwell.
http://public.econ.duke.edu/…/Praxeology%20and%20Its%20Crit…
– Do We Reason When We Think We Reason, or Do We Think?
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/…/peop…/associates/miller/lfd-.pdf
– The Objectives of Science
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/…/…/associates/miller/poincare.pdf
– Truth Defined
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/…/associa…/miller/TruthDefined.pdf

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine

YES, REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS IS NECESSARY

—“Calling Mises pseudoscientific is the typical positivistic criticism to Austrian Economics. It adds nothing. The young Austrian economists who are pupils of Don Lavoie had been working on Popper, Lakatos, Machlup and Hayek for a long time.”—Gabriel Zanotti, Philosophy Professor at Austral University

Gabriel

Let me see if I can summarize the argument and put an end to rationalist obfuscation of economics:

1) Calling science positivistic (justificationary) is a typical Rothbardian/Misesian misrepresentation of the scientific method, which is critical not justificationary.

2) Calling a logic (axiomatic, prescriptive, complete) a science (theoretical, descriptive, incomplete) is simply false. (And adds nothing, other than casting Austrian economics as a source of ridicule). Models can be built out of axioms or laws, but all axiomatic deductions are tautologies, producing proofs of operational possibility, while all laws remain incomplete and therefore non-tautological, producing additional hypotheses, which are candidates for theories and laws. But all theoretical statements remain theoretical. The reason being that all non-tautological premises remain forever theoretical.

3) The ‘axiom’ of purposeful human action tells us precisely nothing since it may constitute a test, but not an axiom since it tells us nothing of the scope of possible purposeful human action. We can instead say that any economic hypothesis, theory, or law, must be reducible to a sequence of rational human actions, (operations) in order to be existentially possible.

4) This difference is why we rely upon ratio-empiricism, not rationalism, and not positivism for scientific (truthful) investigation. Logical arguments test internal consistency but not external correspndence, and external correspondence does not tell us about the internal consistency of our arguments, and without operational-intuitionistic testing (operational definitions) we cannot know if what we imagine is existentially possible. And without falsification, assuming we are both internally consistent, externally correspondent, and existentially possible, we have not tested our internal, external, and operational theory for parsimony – leaving open the possibility of error, bias and deception in all three.

5) The differences between mainstream (orthodox) economics, and Austrian (heterodox) economics, are (a)that manipulation of credit is disinformation (lying) which produces cumulative effects of disinformation (lying), and (b) that as an act of disinformation (fraud), manipulation of credit produces involuntary transfers (immorality), because it lacks fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchange, free of externality (moral constraint).

6) Rationalists tend to be, and by definition, must be, justificationists – they are not critical. Justification in rationalism, is indifferent from positivism in science. They are identical propositions. No matter how much justification we do, we are merely engaging in confirmation bias. Instead, it is irrelevant which method we use to construct a theory. The means of constructing a theory are irrelevant. Justification is irrelevant. Truth candidates (internally consistent, externally correspondent, operationally possible, and ultimately parsimonious, yet incomplete statements) are produced by criticism: whether they survive scrutiny: testing.

7) One *CAN* however, work through purely rational, non-positivistic processes, however, this is not to to say they are not working empirically (through observation). As far as I know this is impossible. But that does not mean they are not working ratio-empirically. It merely means that they are engaging in tests of internal consistency given current knowledge, and working using operational possibility (existential possibility), but that they are not criticizing their work through tests of external correspondence – although as far as we know, no one makes theories without tests of external correspondence, because that would mean we were not explaining economic phenomenon – which would be somewhat fruitless.

8) This ‘Austrian’ (heterodox) investigation remains ratio-empirical, and consistent with all other scientific investigation. However, so does mainstream economics (orthodoxy). And the ONLY DIFFERENCE between mainstream and Austrian economics then, is that the mainstream seeks to lie to us, and Austrians seek to speak the truth. So the difference is not methodological – it is whether we attempt to find improvements to institutions of cooperation that retain the western principle of truth telling, or we engage in lying. Keynesian economics is dishonest, not necessarily unscientific. Austrian economics suggests only that economics must be practiced scientifically (ratio-empirically), not axiomatically or statistically: that sequences of operational possibility actions, informed by incentives, each of which is subjectively testable, is necessary to make a truth statement, while statistical correlation ignores these choices. Ergo, economics is indifferent from all other sciences: ratio-empirical discipline. The question is only whether we seek to tell the truth (Austrian) or to lie (Keynesian).

9) And it is equally dishonest and pseudoscientific to state that an axiomatic system is identical to a theoretical system, and equally dishonest to cast mainstream economics as methodologically flawed. Particularly when Austrians have contributed nothing to the study of economics in nearly a century, while in the past twenty years alone, the orthodox community has expanded our knowledge of general rules and insight into our existing economies with regularity.

10) The Cosmopolitan thinkers, like the german rationalists, are exceptional at this kind of deceptive conflation. A few of us think that it is a natural consequence of talumudic authoritarian dual ethics in the jewish community, and kantian authoritarian conflation of truth and duty in german philosophy. However, Mises and ROthbard and to some lesser degree Hoppe, have all tried to assert fallacies that cast the difference as possible, logical and methodological rather than as moral. Meanwhile the social democrats continue to justify the morality of takings (involuntary transfers) rather than treating every ‘taking’ as a lost opportunity for productive voluntary exchange – and therefore returning us to manorial era constraints upon the behavior of the unproductive classes that contributed to the rise of the west.

CLOSING

I hope this helped you understand my position. In my view I am attempting to restore Morality and truth telling to economics. But that will not be done using fallacious arguments in the rationalist tradition. It will be by demonstrating that moral action using institutions that do not engage in lying, produce superior economic conditions: greater prosperity without the fragility caused by decade after decade of institutional lying.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
L’viv Ukraine

MISES’ PRAXEOLOGY AS THE FAILURE TO DEVELOP ECONOMIC OPERATIONALISM

MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY?

Mises Human Action as Cosmopolitan Stoicism.

[H]e was almost right. If Rothbard and the Rothbardians had not damaged his legacy so severely, he would not be ostracized by the main stream intellectual community. At present any mention of his name associates a public intellectual, an economist, or philosopher, with the pseudoscientific lunatic fringe.

Praxeology is a failed attempt at Operationalism, sure – but no one ELSE came close to developing economic operationalism but Mises. I only did it because I have the luxury of a century of additional development in computability (especially Turing), and because it’s clear now that the analytic program (attempt to convert philosophy into a science) has been a failure, and that the success in reforming both science and psychology has almost entirely been because of Operationalism.

Had Mises joined with Brouwer and Bridgman, the three of them might have saved us from a century of pseudoscience. But without a philosopher of ethics to unify them, Popper in the philosophy of science, Mises in Economics, Brouwer in mathematics, and Bridgman in physics all failed to come to the correct conclusion: that they were not in fact articulating logical constraints – because there is no logical constraint to theory-development. The logical constraint is only in the statement of promise (that you are telling the truth) that such a theory can be expressed existentially, as a sequence of operations (actions) or operational measures of observations. And as such, one’s theory, in any discipline, is free of content that was added by error, imagination, or deception. Man can testify to observation in the execution of recipes – all else is imagination. As such the practice of the sciences (or rather, the practice of *disciplined testimony* which the sciences developed, but which consists of nothing unique to the physical sciences) is a moral one, with ethical constraints.

As such, praxeology, mathematical intuitionism, operationalism, operationism, Popper’s critical preference, and the scientific method, as well as the discipline of science as currently practiced, are moral constraints, not logical ones. One can intuit a theory by whatever means possible. One can believe whatever he wishes to justify. But one’s promise of testimony to the actions that did or may produce consequences is a moral one, not a logical one.

[A]s far as I know, the only meaningful reason to study economics for use in ethics and politics, is to justify the rule of law (Nomocracy), under the single rule of property rights, where property rights is as defined under Propertarianism, as property-en-toto (demonstrated property). And where that body of law suppresses sufficient involuntary transfer of property-en-toto, that the formation of a Nomocratic polity is possible. And where the formation and perpetuation of that polity is possible, because transaction costs are sufficiently suppressed that a rational choice for Nomocracy is possible, over a rational choice for statism. And that the normative preference of nomocratic rule over statist rule is maintained by the constant exercise of that body of law in daily life, rather than a phillosophical-rational, religio-moral, pedagogically-instructional, or normatively-habituated means of persistence.

If we look at his human action as an attempt to develop an economic version of stoicism – a mental discipline – I think it is probably a better frame of reference for his work than as economics or analytic philosophy.
As such I see him as creating a Cosmopolitan version of stoicism (economic/intellectual character) rather than western (Aryan if you will) stoicism (political/craftsmanship character).

Both forms of stoicism are early attempts at operationalizing philosophy for disciplinary action as an individual member of a complex division of labor in which we possess fragmentary information.

Since I quote him endlessly for his analysis of money and fiduciary media, which again, he (“a sequence of human actions” = “operational observations”) correctly uses operational analysis to isolate and articulate the causal rather than normative properties – I am clearly an advocate. But I am not an advocate of the misuse of Mises’ errors – his failed attempt to develop economic operationalism – to justify Rothbardian libertinism – an outright assault on the production of both high trust, and the commons – both of which are the primary competitive advantages constituent in the western indo-european (Aryan if you will) evolutionary strategy.

[I] walk by Mises’ childhood home every day. It has tempered my criticism. I see him making natural errors of Cosmopolitanism – as Hayek said “a victim of his upbringing”. Just as the Germans have made endless errors in conflating religion and philosophy to preserve their hierarchy and duty as a group competitive strategy. Just as British (Anglo/Irish/Scots if not the Belgae) have fought to preserve their island universalism despite the necessary suicide that results from universalism outside of their island (or the american island, or the Australian island.)

I will venture this post is one of the more important things that has been written about Mises in recent history, and my arguments, if not my criticisms will assist us in RESCUING Mises from the lunatic fringe, and RESCUING his work for use in intellectual discourse – as the first attempt at saving Economics through operationalism, the way that science and psychology (if not also mathematics and logic) have been saved by operationalism.

**I see myself as rescuing ALL of the Misesian/Hoppeian program from the fruitcake fringe: by laundering German, Jewish and British enlightenment fallacies – the attempt to universalize local evolutionary strategy – rather than simply adopt scientific epistemology (operationalism) as the only neutral tool for the use of studying group evolutionary strategies.**

Although it is, I am sure, somewhat difficult for those religiously devoted to immoral, libertine, Rothbardianism to either understand or accept.

I am quite sure I do not err in this analysis. A statement which I am aware further taunts libertines. But which my fellow aristocrats (libertarians-proper) both understand and expect from me as a promise. Because the anglo-empirical model of truth telling, quite opposite from the cosmopolitan, is that truth is the name for testimony. And as such I testify that to the best of my knowledge my statement is true. And that I bear the reputational consequences of my promise that this statement is true. This is the polar opposite of the Popperian, Analytic, and Cosmopolitan version of true: that truth is the unknowable province of god alone, and as such we can only ‘do what we can’, and as such are unaccountable for our words.

This ethic, this definition of truth, as performative – as operational, is what Kant was searching for, but could not find. And it is why both Jewish and German philosophy are dead ends. And it is why english philosophy became lost through its influence by the germans and the cosmopolitans.

We lost a century of philosophy to cosmopolitan pseudoscience in economics, politics, ethics and logic. Germans lost centuries to pseudo-philosophical religio-moralism. Mises can be seen in context as the most successful – if still failed – attempt to rescue german and cosmopolitan thought from its religious constraints.

– Cheers.

Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine

RATIONALISTS JUST HAVE IT BACKWARDS – JUSTIFICATION RATHER THAN CRITICISM.

“The Silver Rule Wins over The Golden Rule Too – for the same reason.”

Macro economic phenomenon are emergent and non-deducible even if they are explainable. As such economics is no different from any other constructed upon laws : theories of arbitrary precision open to constant reformation. For economic theories to be testified as true, we must demonstrate that they are open to construction by sympathetic tests.

As such, just as the golden rule is backwards, and the silver rule is correct, Mises just has praxeology backwards, it’s that we can’t claim something is true unless we can explain it as rational actions, but that does not mean we cannot rely upon observations and instrumentation to help us observe and criticize emergent phenomenon. Empiricists claim that other than some intrinsic simple intuitions (grammar, intention, status signal, and empathy etc), all knowledge is gained from sense experience, and this includes all deductions (cognitive science agrees with this hypothesis). This is obvious to people educated after 1980, when cognitive science began to replace psychology, and accelerated after 2000, when pinker restated cognition.
Instrumentalists argue, correctly, that phenomenon must be reduced to stimuli open to human sense experience and comparison. This is also obvious.

But then how do we test our hypothesies? We cannot subjectively test physical phenomenon, nor can we reason with the first principles of the universe – we don’t know them.

So for physical phenomenon we must create experiments to test our hypothesis, where in human phenomenon the same test results are obtained by introspection: if subject to the same stimuli would a reasonable person come to the same conclusion? We could not judge intent or trust others if we did not have this ability so we are marginally indifferent in our ability to judge intentions if possessed of similar (symmetric) knowledge. (This is why informational symmetry is so important.)

So in matters of human action where we know the first principles, all phenomenon, whether deducible or emergent, must be explainable as a sequence of rational human actions each of which is subject to subjective testing by means of information and sympathy – or it cannot be true. Just as all measurements (observations) of physical tests must be possible to perform in order for the claims of the test to be true. (Bridgman). Just as all mathematical proofs must be open to construction via basic mathematical operations for them to be true. Just as any propertarian law must be constructed from productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers free of negative externality.

So all scientific disciplines are identical in dependence upon empirical (sense experience) instrumental (reduction to sense experience) operational (existentially possible) constraints.

THE COUNTER-PROPOSITION
No one disagrees that if economic phenomenon are not explainable in rational terms that the theory cannot be true.

The question of economic science is how we can take advantage of emergent phenomenon to bring forward productivity and consumption (wealth) as a means of improving the commons. This is the purpose of credit and interest. But this principle can be applied in hundreds of permutations throughout the economy.

The moral (German Austrian) implication, is that this study must eschew immoral manipulation (thefts) and work only to improve the institutional means of moral cooperation without the conduct of thefts.

The immoral (anglo empirical) implication is that this study should seek Pareto optimums (Rawlsian ethics) by reframing ‘harm’ by discounting loss of choice by some to redistribute choice to others.

I agree with the German thesis, and expressly disagree with the anglo universalist fallacy which has gotten us to this state entirely because anglos were able to seduce the germans into the world war.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine

JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN NORMATIVE CONTRACT VS WARRANTY IN EXPLORATION INDEPENDENT OF NORMS

First, what do we mean by “knowledge”, and of those things we mean, what is merely allegory, and what is necessity?

Little of the universe is absent regular patterns. However, some are very noisy and difficult to find. Some are very subtle and hard to find. Some are either too large or too small to observe without relying upon instruments, and others must be deduced using logical instruments. We call these regular patterns ‘information’.

Humans can modify the real world in a variety of ways, leaving information behind. We can do this as simply leaving evidence of passage through a forces or field, or in archeological evidence. We can do this intentionally with cave paintings and writing. And we can do it with our architecture, monuments and earth works. We can do this by the memories that we transfer between generations through repetition of experience, advice and story.

A computer must run a program to create the experience we see before us when using it. Information must mix with memories, to create the experience we call ‘knowing’.

Knowledge is reconstructed from information by mixing with existing memories, just as meaning is transferred by the use of analogies to transfer properties. So information exists without a knowing subject. And that information may be very good, or very bad at producing the experience of knowledge in a subject.

But in colloquial language we seem to have an intellectual bias that wants to separate untrue knowledge from true, or at least tested, knowledge thereby conflating QUALITY of knowledge and EXISTENCE of knowledge. We can forgive philosophers this common error, since they are concerned most often with the persuasive quality (truth) of propositions.

And if we look carefully at the discussion of ‘knowledge’ we find philosophers conflating (a)existence/awareness, (b) risk/willingness to act, (c) truth content.

And moreover, truth content consists of two additional properties: (c.i) persuasive power assuming an honest participant, and (c.ii) parsimonious correspondence with reality (what we mean by ‘true’).

The reason that discussion of knowledge is problematic is that this term is a sort of catch-all for these separate properties. And so like many concepts, argument is a problem of conflating properties, each of which exists on a separate spectrum.

“Knowing” could mean ‘awareness gained through experience’, or ‘given what we know from experience, I am willing to act upon it’, or knowing could mean ‘through experience we believe this is true’.

So I think that the only POSSIBLE meaning of the category ‘knowledge’ is ‘awareness of a regular pattern that allows us to predict something, even if it is only to predict in the sense of identifying something as part of a category – the most simple prediction possible.

And then we have the persuasive power of knowledge in convincing the self or others, first to state something is possible, then second to state something is worthy of action (risk).

For example, no one ‘knows’ how to build a computer (or a cheeseburger for that matter) in the sense that they possess knowledge of construction of the constituent parts. So some knowledge can never be centralized except as a hierarchy of abstractions – trust in one another’s claim to actionable knowledge.

For these reasons (the number of causal axis in the category we call knowledge), I think we cannot improve upon casting knowledge as:
(a) awareness (existence) of a regular pattern combining information and memory to create an experience, which we then also remember.
(b) all knowledge is theoretical, and open to revision (no premises are certain)
where theoretical propositions contain both:
(d) truth content(parsimonious correspondence with reality).
(c) persuasive power (sufficiency) in an honest discourse(risk reduction/reward increase),

JUSTIFICATOIN VERSUS CRITICISM = CONTRACT VS TRUTH
So I my problem is that ‘justified true belief’ is not false under the test of risk, but is not meaningful under the test of analytic truth. In this sense, it depends upon which thing we are talking about: willingness to act (justified true belief), willingness of others to insure actions (contractual justified true belief), and analytic truth (parsimonious correspondence with reality).

If a man gives witness in testimony and later on we find a video of the events, and it turns out that he is wrong, but that it is easy to understand how he was mistaken, we do not consider his testimony false. We only warranty what rational man is capable of warranting.

In science we warranty that we have done due diligence: we have criticized our own arguments. We testify that we have done due diligence – we have criticized our own position.

In this sense both justified true belief is necessary for contractual propositions, while critical rationalism (warranty) is the only epistemological possibility we can rely upon.

The fact that argument evolved out of law (debate in the polis) probably explains the origin of conflation of contractual justification according to the norms of the polity, with the pursuit of analytic truth in epistemological exploration.

The fact that most human action is contractual, and very little of our lives epistemic, explains the persistence of both the contractual (justificationary),and epistemic (critical scientific) as method, and the conflation of the term knowledge as a general term covering both contractual and epistemic uses.

Norms guide most human actions. Norms are habituated and therefore reduced to intuitions to function. The norms are contractual (justificationary – so that we avoid blame). Science by contrast, produces not actions but testimony. The problem is inverted. In science all we produce is testimony regardless of normative rules. In normative relations we produce actions that we justify as according to the normative rules of society.

So we testify that we were justified according to norms in contractual relations, and we testify that our statements are free of norms, imaginary, error, bias, habituated deception and outright deception, in science.

This is why science is a luxury good: it’s terribly expensive, and scientific testimony is terribly expensive. Justification allows us to use scientifically tested or evolutionarily tested general rules in real world actions – contractual relations.

And must. We cannot create general rules out of justificationary testimony, only out of critical testimony. For this reason, both justificationary and critical testimony will persist forever. While our warranties must be given by critical means, our testimony is forever justificationary. (I think that is fairly profound).

As far as I know, albeit in brief, this is the most accurate statement of our extant understanding of the question of knowledge, and why it has been so troublesome a concept.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine

SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IMMORAL INFORMATION DISTORTION EQUAL TO THE INFORMATION DISTORTION OF KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS.

Occam’s razor:

Is it more likely that German rationalism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, both of which were intentionally designed as obscurant anti-scientific deceptions to re-impose their culture’s authoritarianism as a replacement for the faith needed to maintain group competitive evolutionary strategy, are correct in their classification of economics as an axiomatic logic (logically operational system), and that such a discipline is somehow not subject to the same moral and epistemological constraint in demonstrative method, as are all disciplines that claim to construct laws?

Or is it more likely that all disciplines – economics and mathematics included – seek to produce laws from which they can construct models – and that the hypotheses, theories, and laws within those models, require the same moral constraints in demonstrated method regardless of discipline – logical(internally consistent), experimental (externally correspondent), operational(existentially possible), intuitionistic (subjectively testable), and moral (constrained to voluntary transfers) – BUT (and that BUT is important) that each discipline requires only some subset of such properties given the domain of inquiry?
In other words, do not the moral rules developed in science constitute a universal method of moral inquiry into the production of true statements, regardless of discipline? Or are there no universal laws of moral inquiry for the purpose of developing truthful statements?

Is it more likely that more complex systems require greater moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and less complex systems less moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and that whether we require more or less constraint prior to making truth claims, depends upon the properties from which any given system of reasoning is constituted?

COMPARISONS

So lets compare the different approaches on just a few axis:

1) Some economic laws are deducible VS Economic Regularities are explainable by deduction, and thus those hypothesis obtain the status of theory, and when all marginally impactful permutations are identified, these theories can be claimed truthfully as laws.

2) All economic laws are deducible VS Some economic laws are deducible perhaps, but that does not they are not empirically based (obtained through observation). It means only that no instrumentation other than human-sense-perception is needed to make those observations and deductions. While most non-trivial economic phenomenon and the hypotheses theories and laws we use to describe them are ONLY instrumentally and empirically observable. But once observed, with the assistance of further empirical observations, they are also explainable by deduction using sympathetic testing.

3) Economic laws are deterministic VS Economic Laws are imprecise general rules of arbitrary precision, that demonstrate the greatest variation in outcome, of all general rules of arbitrary precision in all systems dependent upon the operational use of regular patterns (other than language), in all the logics (identity, mathematics, physics, economics, and language) with the least (precise) determinacy of the logics; because:
(a) humans act to bend such laws constantly, for personal gain, and;
(b) humans attempt to mitigate determinacy (equilibrium) by constructing various permanent disequilibrium that they can continue to extract benefit from, and;
(c) because causal density (opportunity) is so high, any equilibrating effect can be offset by any other equilibrating effect, and often function in combination, and;
(d) because non-regular events, outside the normal distribution (shocks/black swans) are more influential and less predictable than regular patterns.

4) that economics is unique methodological area of inquiry VS economics benefits merely from the fact that we can subjectively test first principles, whereas in physical science, as yet, we do not know the first principles, while in identity, naming, mathematics, we do. Even if we do not know it *yet* in physics, economics, language, and imagination. If we know the first principles of any system, we can in fact, explain all phenomenon using those first principles. Even if we cannot imagine or deduce or hypothesize all consequentially emergent phenomenon. And since we cannot deduce all economic phenomenon (there are many unsolved problems of economics, as well as mathematics, and certainly of science). It may be possible that in any complex system we will never exhaust all emergent phenomenon (although this certainly seems unlikely if the universe is deterministic).

UNDERSTANDING ARBITRARY PRECISION IN GENERAL RULES

(note: this sequence is a particularly interesting new idea)

The meaning of “arbitrary precision” across disciplines must be understood:
(a) The predictive precision of Identity (laws of categorization) remains tautological no matter what we do.

(b) The predictive precision of naming (laws of numbering) remains operational and tautological no matter what we do.

(c) The predictive precision of Mathematical laws (laws of relations) remains constant independent of physical scale. But since mathematics is an axiomatic system, we cannot take action to alter the consequences of mathematical systems (grok that for a second).

(d) The predictive precision of Physical laws (laws of causality) currently varies dependent upon physical scale because we do not know the first principles of the physical universe – yet. And we can alter the course of physical events and benefit from them – in fact the purpose of human action is to predict and alter the course of physical events in order to benefit from them.

(e) The predictive precision of Economic Laws (laws of human cooperation) varies considerably, and we constantly alter the course of events to benefit from them, by attempting to outwit the altered course of events.

(f) The predictive precision of Linguistic laws (laws of communication/negotiation) are extremely imprecise,demonstrating extraordinary variability, with only a few general, and somewhat deterministic rules such as the evolution toward song, or tonal speech, which requires less effort from the speaker, but the meaning of such speech appears both functional (increasing in information density while gradually losing earlier meaning).

(g) The predictive precision of Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can imagine things) is unknown, but at least if operationally limited, appears to be FUNCTIONALLY unlimited. (A function is the name for collection of mental operations reduced to a general rule that obviates the need for performing more primitive operations – a mental habit that we can trust.)

(h) The predictive precision of Inverse Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can describe categories that we cannot imagine), even if we can ever construct such a set of laws, is nearly useless except as a check on our claims of Laws of Imagination. This is because functions (general rules of arbitrary precision constituting deterministic results of complex operations) even if we cannot conceptualize the content of those functions (cannot operationalize them), appear at present to be infinitely scalable even if decreasingly precise.

This is the problem with economic laws – they are extremely imprecise compared to physical laws, although possibly more precise than linguistic, imaginary and inverse-imaginary laws. Predicting the future location of water and gas molecules in real world phenomenon is almost impossible except at very loose degrees of precision. Predicting the future actions of man in real world scenarios is even less precise. We can explain, historically, what man accomplished, but we cannot predict what any individual will experience.

Because of the time and complexity of human phenomenon, just as in physical phenomenon, we can act to alter the course of events to some degree, within the bounds of those imprecise laws.

Now there may be consequences to these actions: saving and interest have positive cumulative consequences, and expansionary credit has negative cumulative consequences. But that is not to say that we cannot distinguish between those actions that we can take to alter the course of events that produce positive and negative consequences. And that we cannot act to profit from the positive, and avoid actions that are negative. Banking and interest are economic actions. Weights and measures are positive economic actions. Laws that suppress free riding in all forms are positive economic actions. States as Insurer of last resort appear to produce a mix of positive and negative but overwhelmingly positive results. All these institutional actions constitute good policy – the production of beneficial commons that facilitate cooperation and prosperity.

Furthermore, the extension of organized suppression of free-riding into the bureaucracy, and into the system of representation, by eliminating the monopoly bureaucracy, and eliminating political representation, and eliminating legislative law, might be an additional institutional improvement that would facilitate human cooperation and prosperity.

Now we can argue that the Keynesian attempt to distort the monetary information system by involuntarily increasing everyone’s risk through ‘lying’ about demand, and therefore increasing employment and consumption is a terrible means by which to interfere with the economy. It is only slightly better than the destruction of the information system by which we cooperate in the economy by socialist and communist folly. But we may not say that there are other economic institutions that we could experimentally construct that would provide improved means of cooperation, and prosperity that would not constitute lies, any more than credit and interest constitute lies.

For example,
– To create an urban market, members (shareholders) must suppress the profitability of raiding and conquest of their market by those who are not shareholders.
– If tribal raiders and herdsman want to participate in an urban market then they must eschew theft and raiding for entry into the market. That is a voluntary exchange.
– If farmers work the land, and want to participate in the market using their excess production in order to buy goods that they cannot produce themselves, they must obey the rules of buyers and sellers set by the shareholders of the market.
– If people wish to abandon self production, and work entirely within the market they must adopt the behavior of shareholders and defend the exclusive means of their sustenance.
– If people no longer can work in self production, nor can they work in the market in order to obtain their sustenance, then they have no means of survival so continuing to participate in the shareholder agreement is no longer a rational exchange.
– If people who cannot work in the market are willing to work to maintain the shareholder agreement for shareholders (maintain the commons, including the commons of property rights, which makes the voluntary organization of production possible) then it is rational to pay them to construct the voluntary organization of production and to return to being consumers within that market – their contribution being not the consumption, but the production of the voluntary organization of production itself. However it is also rational to limit those people to one child so that they both can reproduce, but not commit the immoral act of imposing costs upon those who are productive, by generating additional offspring. This then constitutes a voluntary exchange and productive work, even if those people are not participating in the production of goods and services, they are participating in and being paid for the effort of constructing the voluntary organization of production.
So to say that it is not rational or scientific or necessary to experiment in the economy, or that such experimentation is not empirical (open to observation and measurement), is clearly false. It is merely that there are moral and immoral means of doing so, and that monetary policy as we currently practice it is immoral – and not very intelligent. It produces the predicted results. So it is clearly scientific and ‘true’. But that does not mean it isn’t immoral and harmful. And the cumulative effect of this policy is empirically genocidal by all extant measures.

SO BACK TO OCCAM’S RAZOR:

Isn’t the purpose of Rationalist and Cosmopolitan arguments of the heterodox so-called, Austrians, merely convoluted verbal justification for rebelling against political experimentation in the manipulation of the economy for the purpose of producing commons? Isn’t all their obscurantism just pseudoscientific justification for the desire to justify non-contribution to the commons? Isn’t it just an elaborate excuse for free riding?

Isn’t the more simple answer that each logic that we have developed was developed to test certain subsets of properties, and that each subset of properties requires testing against error, bias and deception. And that as the complexity of the phenomenon increases we must test or not test those properties intrinsic to the system that we seek to test?

Isn’t our fascination with the rules of mathematics simply because the means of deduction and the means of explanation are nearly identical: mathematical operations? Whereas mathematical discovery, all conclusions are assumed in the axioms and state-independent, whereas the result of human cooperation is determined more so by externalities than by the general rules? And that for any individual, events they experience are kaleidic and economic laws are only predictive in the aggregate?
Isn’t all the information necessary for prediction in an axiomatic system present at the definition of the axioms, while limited and insufficiently predictive information is present in economic laws? Aren’t economic laws the equivalent of bell-curves, rather than demonstrated tails? Isn’t the information necessary to predict tail events many orders of magnitude higher than predicting events in a regular distribution?

So the demonstrated evidence in the history of rationalism, the obvious incentives of rationalists as authoritarians, and the logical conclusion we must come to, is that deductive reasoning is non-predictive. Because deduction did not produce general economic rules, and it cannot identify candidates for general rules. It can only test whether general rules are true regardless of their origins, and explain those general rules as a set of operations.

Because we are not scientifically testing, experimenting with, those laws of human behavior, but we are scientifically testing the interactions of those various laws of human behavior in kaleidic action, and taking advantage of altering those phenomenon of human activity just as we take advantage of altering the course of events of physical phenomenon. We are not testing first principles but the interaction between emergent phenomenon caused by the use of those principles in real time.

The laws of the physical universe and of man, appear to be trivial, but the emergent phenomenon of those simple rules appears to be infinite and unpredictable, even if they are explainable.

The physical universe and man, may in fact, follow predictable regular rules. Those rules are only interesting and useful in so far as we can learn how to bend them, and break them, for our use.

Property rights for example, bend and break human behavior. Credit and interest for example let us bend and break human behavior. Monogamous marriage lets us bend and break human behavior. The extension of property rights and the prohibition on inbreeding bent and broke the human behavior that made high velocity economies possible. First principles of human behavior may exist but novel means of manipulating it for the production of prosperity are always available to us.

THE PURPOSE OF TRUTH IS TESTIMONY – OUR INFORMATION SYSTEM
Just as we may not interfere with the monetary system because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by informational distortion, we may not interfere with the ‘truthful’ information system created by verbal error, bias, distortion and deception, because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by error, bias, and deception.

There is no reason we must hide our group evolutionary strategies, other than for the purposes of parasitism – lying. And if we wish to understand the law of human cooperation, it is that cooperation is only rational in the absence of parasitism, and that only truthful, fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality constitutes ‘true’ information. And that all else is, just as monetary information is,

THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER SOMETHING IS EMPIRICAL OR RATIONAL, BUT WHETHER IT IS TRUE, TRUTHFULLY STATED, AND WARRANTED.

And there is but one universal moral principle:
(a) truthfully stated
(b) fully informed
(c) productive
(d) warrantied
(e) voluntary exchange
(f) free of negative externality
And there is but one universal moral warrant: that any statement is:
(a) internally consistent (logically tested)
(b) externally correspondent (evidentially tested as meaningfully predictive and/or explicative)
(c) falsifiable and falsified (tested for parsimony)
(d) existentially possible (operationally defined)
(e) moral(independent of immoral transfer)

As such, since German Rationalism, and Jewish Cosmopolitan Rationalism is not warranted, truthful speech, and cannot constitute a moral, voluntary exchange, and is equal in immorality to economic disinformation created by distortion of the money supply.

It’s not that Keynesian economics is unscientific it’s that it’s immoral. It’s not so much that German Rationalism and Jewish Cosmopolitan rationalism are not simply a backwards-expression of intuitionism and operationalism under empiricism, despite it’s inability to produce insights and only explain them. It’s instead, that the rationalist position is an attempt to intellectual outlaw investigation into emergent economic phenomenon – which is the purpose of scientific investigation, just as much as experimental psychology is the discipline that investigates first principles – and which has discovered the reason for our long list of cognitive biases that produce non-rational actions not anticipated by the classical model.

There is no need for German and Jewish dishonest Rationalism, any more than there is a need for Keynesian dishonest economics. Liberty is possible under science, because science is the language of morality – of truthful speech free of involuntary transfer, by fraud. Liberty is a synonym for objective morality.

Our solution is neither British Keynesian immorality nor German and Jewish immorality, nor anglo-american pseudoscientific immorality (neo-puritanism), but truth speaking, and moral, voluntary exchange across peoples with different evolutionary strategies.

Truth, Science, and Morality are synonyms.

And we would all be better off without all the immorality, pseudoscience, rationalism, and lying.

Voluntary exchange is enough.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine

THE REFORMATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT

Science as we understand it is an attempt to create a discipline of truthful speech.
Science as we understand it does not ‘recognize’ this attribute of science.
Science as we understand it does not include those properties we call costs.
Science as we understand it does not include those properties we call moral.
Science as we understand it can be extended to include those properties we call costs and morality.
Science as we understand it can then be restated as the discipline of constructing moral truthful speech.
Science then is identical to epistemology in philosophy, and philosophy en toto as a discipline is begun, as its first purpose, with ethics (morality), not metaphysics.
Law can now be scientifically constructed.
Truth, science, law, morality are now identical.
All else currently masquerading as philosophy, is no longer categorizable as philosophy, but as theology, psychology, or deception.

Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine.

TRANSLATING KANTIAN RATIONALISM INTO SCIENTIFIC AND TESTIMONIAL SPEECH

Lets translate Kantian Rationalism into scientific and testimonial speech.

I’m going to teach epistemology by using economics in order to repair much of the damage that has been done to epistemology by the Platonists(mathematics), and the Rationalists (Kant etc), and the Analytic Philosophers (Just about all of the 20th century).

*Reality consists of a limited number of actionable dimensions and by using economics we are able to include all of them, and therefore avoid the errors that the platonists, rationalists, and analytics have introduced into philosophy.

“DEFINITIONS AND SERIES”

1) Empirical:
Based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. “From Observation”.

2) A Priori:
“independent of observation.”
There are three dimensions to claims of a priori truth claim:
i) Aprioricity vs A posteriori,
ii) Analyticity vs Syntheticity, and
iii) Necessity vs Contingency

Therefore we can produce at least the following spectrum of a priori claims.
(a) Analytic A Priori: tautological: 2+2=4 and all deductions thereof.
(b) Synthetic A Priori : Increasing money increases inflation.
(c) Necessary Synthetic A Priori: Childless women will have no grandchildren.
(d) Contingent Synthetic A Priori: “all other things being equal, as a general trend, increasing demand will increase supply, although we cannot know the composition of that supply in advance, we can identify it from recorded evidence.”

This produces a an ordered spectrum of declining precision:
(a) Identity(categorical consistency) – Analytic A Priori
(b) Logical:(internal consistency) – Nec. Synthetic a priori
(c) Empirical: (external consistency) – Gen. Synth. a priori
(d) Existential: (operational consistency) – Cont. Synth. a priori

Which corresponds to the testable dimensions of numbers.
(a) identity (numbers)
(b) logical (sets)
(c) empirical (ratios)
(d) existential (constructible)
(e) time is unaccounted for in the a priori model.

Which corresponds to dimensions of physical reality
(a) point
(b) line
(c) shape
(d) object
(e) time (change)

Which corresponds to a subset of the dimensions of actionable reality , the full set of which we express in fully express in Testimonialism as:
(a) Identity(categorical consistency)(point)
(b) Logical:(internal consistency)(line)
(c) Empirical: (external consistency)(shape)
(d) Existential: (operational consistency)(object)
(e) Volitional: (rational choice of rational actor)(change)
(f) Reciprocal: ( rational exchange between rational actors)(changes)
(g) Limited: (Limits: At what points does the description fail?)
(h) Fully Accounted: (Have all costs and consequences been accounted for – defense against cherry picking and special pleading.)

Which together account for the totality of actionable reality (by man) that we currently know of (and its quite hard to imagine anything else is possible).

DEDUCTIBILITY FROM A-PRIORI PROPOSITIONS
Ergo, while one can claim the tautological truth (the Analytic A Priori), and one can claim the ideal(logical) truth (the Necessary Synthetic A Priori), one cannot ever know the non-tautological(identity, The Synthetic A Priori), non-ideal(Contingent Synthetic A Priori ) truth, because we rarely possess sufficient information to do so.

What does this mean? It means that we can deduce from Analytic A Priori and Necessary Synthetic A Priori, but we cannot deduce from General Synthetic A Priori, or Contingent Synthetic A Priori Statements because we cannot know if such deductions are true (for specific cases).

So the problem with making a priori claims in economics is that you can say statements about statements but not about consequences in reality. You can only say ‘all other things being equal’, we should observe this effect. You cannot say, “we will always observe this effect’. Why? Because we don’t always observe such effects, and economics is rife with examples, the most commonly cited being unemployment does not necessarily increase, and prices are sticky – and for good reason.

(NOTE: Now that’s sufficiently complicated that I almost confused myself, and I might need a day away from it to make sure I didn’t screw up what someone might read into those last two paragraphs, but otherwise it’s correct.)

The innovation that menger brought to the table was to bring the principle of relative change from calculus to economics. The principle contribution of hayek was to transform transform the use of materials to the use of information as the model for all social phenomenon. The principle contribution of Popper was to bring the information model to philosophy, and in particular the philosophy of science and to model scientific investigation on a market. This followed the transition in physics from the use of electromagnetic fields to that of information. Which then brought physics and mathematics into full correspondence.

What Hayek and popper and the classicals and the keynesians all missed and brouwer in math, bridgman in physics, and mises in economics, and the entire analytic and continental movements missed was that man cannot make truth claims.

For example, we did not think the ideas of time(velocity of change), length(distance), and space(volume) varied. Einstein’s discovery was the same as mises’, brouwer’s and bridgman’s: that all our pretense of axioms are false. If our idea of length and time can be false, every other idea that is obvious to our senses and reason can be false.

The difference between economics and physics is in :
(a) volition vs determinism
(b) reciprocity vs transformation
(c) sympathetic testing of rational choice vs entropy.

THE SCIENTIFIC (UNIVERSAL EPISTEMOLOGICAL) METHOD

“DEFLATION”
(0) The purpose of the scientific method is to eliminate ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, and deceit from our statements about reality.

“DIMENSION”
(1) We can make:
(a) statements about experiences(metaphysical), or
(b) statements about statements(ideal), or
(c) statements about existential properties(existential/real), or
(d) statements about existential cause and effect(change).
(e) statements about volition

“CLOSURE”
(2) No test of any dimension can be completed without appeal to the subsequent dimension. (ie: godel. this is profoundly important. no dimension can provide a self-test.) Ergo, all speech is deflationary.

“CRITICAL RATIONALISM”
(3) All descriptive propositions of existential cause and effect (change) are contingent.

“CRITICAL PREFERENCE”
(4) The only method of decidability between two or more non-false cause and effect propositions(change) is cost. This is a clarification of Occam’s razor. And appears to be true, for the simple reason that nature cannot but choose the least cost method, and man generally chooses the least cost method – even if we cannot know the full causal density of his considerations.

DUE DILIGENCE AGAINST IGNORANCE, ERROR, BIAS, DECEIT
(5) The only method of making a truth claim is to perform due diligence in each dimension of reality (a ‘premise’ of the consequential dimension) applicable to the cause and effect phenomenon. (ie:physical world can’t engage in rational choice, or voluntary exchanges)
Again, those dimensions are:
(a) Identity(categorical consistency)(point)
(b) Logical:(internal consistency)(line)
(c) Empirical: (external consistency)(shape)
(d) Existential: (operational consistency)(object)
(e) Volitional: (rational choice of rational actor)(change)
(f) Reciprocal: ( rational exchange between rational actors)(changes)
(g) Limited: (Limits: At what points does the description fail?)
(h) Fully Accounted: (Have all costs and consequences been accounted for – defense against cherry picking and special pleading.)

“DARWINIAN SURVIVAL OF IDEAS”
(6) All propositions (facts, propositions, theories) must survive the markets for criticism at the observer-mental-testing, observer-action testing, market application testing, and market survival testing. In other words, the universal epistemological method follows this lifecycle:
(a) observation
(b) *Free association* (F -> observation)
(c) test of reasonability (F -> free association )
(d) *Hypothesis*
(e) Perform Due Diligence (a-h) above. (F -> free association )
(f) *Theory*
(g) Publish to the market for application
(h) Survival in the market for application(F ->observation – of failures )
(i) *Law*
(j) Survival in the market for refutation (F-> observation – of failures)
(k) *Habituation into metaphysical assumptions*

“SPECIAL CASES”
7) This universal epistemological process is universal despite the fact that various results can be identified with it. Because just as we find prime numbers largely by trial and error we find special cases of statements by trial and error. But when we find these statements we have to ask ourselves what is it we are finding?
(a) Sensations: statements about experiences(metaphysical), or
(b) Logic(analytic): statements about statements(ideal), or
(c) Fact: statements about existential properties(existential/real), or
(d) Theory(Synthetic): statements about existential cause and effect(change).
(e) Morality: statements about volition
(f) Testimony: statements about the fully accounted change in state of a given instance of the statement we are making (I have a credit card report that shows John Doe, on 1/1/2018 at 4:06:32 exchanged $2.00 for a hershey’s candy bar at Don’s newspaper stand then existing on 225th and Main in Cityname.”)

EXAMPLES
The most common special cases that we find are those that are impossible to contradict at the same dimension. (a,b,c,d,e) above.
(a) Sense(Metaphysics): we cannot sense a ball is green and red all over at the same time.
(b) Logic: If I issue credit on fractional reserves, I will increase the supply of money.
(c) Fact: The differences between commodity money and note money include but are not limited to: liquidity, demand, exchange fee or interest gain, portability(weight/volume), reserve risk, vendor risk.
(d) Theory: All other things being equal, if we increase the supply of money, prices will eventually increase accordingly and lower the purchasing power of payments against debts.
(e) Morality: All other things being equal, when we force majoritarian decisions on the polity by using representative democracy, we create a monopoly out of the market for the commons, and eliminate the possibility of cooperating on means even if we pursue different ends.

“ECONOMIC LEVERS”
Polities can generally use this series of levers to affect the economy.
-Near Term-
(a) Monetary Policy
(b) Fiscal Policy (Spending)
-Medium Term-
(c) Trade Policy (import export policies, foreign trade policies)
(d) Regulatory/Legislative Policy (also includes price controls etc)
(e) Immigration-Deporation policy / Expand military, WPA etc.
-Long Term-
(f) Human Capital Policy (Education policy)
(g) Institutional Policy (laws, regulations, bureaucracies, institutions, banks)
(h) Strategic (military) Policy

“SCHOOLS OF ECONOMICS”
The schools of economics reflect the culture and class of their origins. These groups do not acknowledge that their strategies and biases are as I”ve stated them here but their research evidence states the contrary. So I have tried to provide a general Spectrum of the institutions by what I understand is their culture/class bias.

a) “Austrian / Rothbardian” (“Jewish”, Separatist) : Rule of Credit, Parasitic Optimum, Separatist / Anarchism.
+Financial Class Bias. Anti-Commons Bias.
(As far as I know, no university teaches the Jewish Austrian method.)

b) “Mason-ism” (“Anglo Libertarian”, Right ) : Optimum Rule of Law, Nash Optimum, Minimal State / Christian Monarchy
+Entrepreneurial Class Bias.
(the only University I know of using this program is George Mason.)
The “Mason-Libertarian” school places greater emphasis on maximizing the voluntary cooperation of individuals and organizations through reduction of impediments to ethical and moral cooperation.

c) “Classical” (“Chicago”, Anglo, Center Right), Rule of Law, Insured Nash Optimum, Parliamentary State / Classical Liberalism.
+Middle classes bias. (I would argue ‘not biased’)
All other things being equal, the Chicago school places greater emphasis on policy that insures against error and failure by seeking formulas and rules that investors, businesses, and consumers can predict, thereby preserving rule of law, and maintaining the prohibition on discretionary rule.

d) “Mainstream” (“Saltwater”, Center Left) : Mixed Discretionary Rule, Pareto Optimum, Social Democracy
+Working Class Bias, Consumer Bias, Female bias(anti-male bias). Minority(anti-white) bias. Underclass Bias (anti-entreprenurial bias).
All other things being equal the mainstream seeks to optimize consumption at all times, using every lever available, and favors abandoning rule of law, and adopting rule that is increasingly empirical, reactive, and discretionary.

e) “Left Mainstream” (“Saltwater”, “Jewish left”) : Authoritarian Rule, Anti-Aristocracy(War), Extractive Maximum (Predatory), Socialism/Communism
+Underclass (outsider) Bias.
This is the Krugman/Stiglitz/Delong club of leftist economists maximizing both consumption and financial extraction as a means of undermining western aristocratic civilization and western norms and traditions and rule of law.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

–“…performative…”
You keep using terms that I don’t think you understand, which is why Kant invented those terms: to conflate the empirical and the rational. He was afraid of the anglo empirical revolution. For good reason.

—“…morality…”—
Correct. Morality (reciprocity) requires inter-agent action. So does all economic activity. Economic activity can consist of moral (reciprocal) and immoral (unequal, irreciprocal) actions. We can make a claim that statements about irreciprocal (involuntary) actions in economics are immoral or we can claim that they are false. Whether you understand it or not, Mises is saying that its false not immoral, when he says ‘it’s not economics’.

—“That you can verify something in reality doesn’t mean you need to empirically test it.”—

We cannot solve the problem of ‘all other things being equal’ in order to understand why predicted phenomenon either vary widely, or do not exist.

The neutrality of money does not appear to exist, because relative changes can propagate into various niches that absorb those changes, just like pennies being lost in landfills (so to speak).

—“I can observe that two plus two equals four but I don’t need to design an empirical test to prove it.”—

Yes but then it’s a tautology, whereas the nearly all economic phenomenon are only general rules.

—“Likewise, I can observe that minimum wages increase unemployment all other things being equal, but I don’t need to conduct an empirical test to prove it.”—

That’s just the thing, we aren’t trying to prove that it should increase unemployment, only that it turns out it that a lot of the time it doesn’t. Or rather, that the consequences of it are externalized and invisible. So where does it go? Well first it increases prices to consumers in the case of minimum wage workers it maintains employment but it prevents rotation of new workers into the economy. And the question is, is that a net gain or a net loss for everyone? Well, it’s immoral to both conduct the test, and the consequences are immoral. But does that mean the those consequences are not empirically measurable and therefore whether the policy is net beneficial? That is what economists measure.

Secondly, if we think some good is achieved through raising the minimum wage, how can we accommodate the externality of lower rotation through the job pool? For example what if raising the minimum wage prevents least common denominator service economies? (Racing to the bottom). Is that something people prefer? In other words, would you rather have better service and higher unemployment (and greater subsidies for non-performers?)

The underlying question is this: if prices are increasing profits can we capture more of that increase for hourly employees than we do for management, owners, and investors (or creditors)?

So there is no difference between increasing the supply of money in order to temporarily increase consumer purchasing power at the expense of debt-holders, and increasing the minimum wage in order to capture a rise in prices for laborers at the expense of owners and investors.

Or stated even more simply: given that economies are always changing velocities, can we redirect changes in state between participants without ‘killing the goose’ (destroying the system of production).

Well the answer is a moral one, not a logical or empirical one.

And the reason to claim otherwise is to use the false pretense of ‘unscientific’ or ‘logical positivism’ or ‘a priori’ or ‘logical contradiction’ to create a straw man as a means of preventing investigation into the science of economic immorality: economic manipulation by the forcible involuntary transfer of property between individuals.

(Which is exactly what mises and rothbard were doing: shaming via straw man using obscurantism by overloading even well intended people with half truths that when fully expressed are false.)

That’s the question people ask with these issues. No one questions if it will increase unemployment. They question the limit before it increases negative unemployment. The same as taxation. No one questions that taxation will produce declining revenues. But empirically, what is the maximum taxation that they govt can achieve before that happens – and what are the consequences.

CLOSING

Now you probably have no idea how profound this bit of text is. And I suspect you could spend a few months integrating it into your thought process. But that’s in large part, the state of the art in epistemology.

THUS ENDETH THE LESSON.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine

WHICH IS MORE LIKELY THE CASE: A PURPOSEFUL DECEPTION OR THE POSSIBILITY OF ANTI-SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM?

That people “do things for reasons” tells us precisely nothing about the emergent effects of economic phenomenon, nor how to manipulate the economic information system such that we shift production and consumption forward.

That people do things for reasons tells us precisely nothing about the temporal relations between cause and effect, and whether we can manipulate conditions to mitigate effects or change time.

That people do things for reasons tells us precisely nothing about how to deduce emergent phenomenon. Scientists were borne out and praxeology abandoned: praxeology was unfruitful as a means of exploration. And it was unfruitful because the information necessary to perform a deduction (which what a deduction requires) does not exist in the axioms. THIS IS NON ESCAPABLE DEFECT OF AXIOMATIC PRAXEOLOGY – which is why Mises and Rothbard both had to admit that economics was both rational and empirical. One cannot deduce true conclusions from false premises. And incomplete premises provide insufficient information for the construction of deductive truths.

So what is more likely? That instrumentalism empiricism, operational definitions and intuitionistic testing are necessary in economics just as they are in all fields? Or that economics is somehow “unique”, and that rationalism is just another authoritarian program with a deceptive hidden agenda masked by obscurantist language?

Even if both propositions were demonstrably equally fruitful, which one is warrantable? In other words, if you will be put to death for being wrong, in a choice between a rationally deduced justification and a ratio empirically criticized definition, which do you choose to bet your life upon? It is one thing to make a statement of faith, another to review the history of rationalist thought, and particularly of cosmopolitan rationalism, and concluding that it has been and remains a failed enterprise.

Mises only wants to ban government interference in the economy so that he can persist in non-contribution to the commons, and systemic parasitism. All his work is a justification of that separatist ambition.

Mises suggests we create a model out of economic laws, but admits that we must use empirical evidence to identify those laws. So just as we create a model of physical reality without nowing first principles, we create a model of cooperative economic reality knowing first principles. But just as we may never deduce the full compliment of permutations and emergent phenomenon from simple physical rules (see Fractal logic) we may never deduce the full compliment of permutations and emergent phenomenon from simple behavioral rules. This is the nature of complexity. As such, while we can explain emergent phenomenon we cannot deduce it. And without instrumentation we cannot observe it.

I think the entire intellectual world has explained sufficiently that the promise of praxeology is nonsense. I think that we now understand the anglo, german and cosmopolitan errors. I think it is obvious that praxeology is a defense of cosmopolitan separatism – an attempt to prohibit the production of an economic commons that is inescapable by free riders.

I think the whole intellectual world has demonstrated convincingly that economics is practiced as a science, and must be practiced as a science, and that all insights of the German Austrians were added to mainstream economics, and the jewish Austrian movement was abandoned as unscientific (untrue). It is only recently that we know the motivations for creating an untrue proposition – or at least an unproductive pseudoscientific resistance movement. Just as marx, cantor, and freud were cosmopolitan pseudoscientific reactionaries, mises and rothbard were cosmopolitan pseudoscientific reactionaries.

I am trying only to demonstrate the libertine movement, like all three cosmopolitan movements, is an obscurantist and dishonest one, so that in the future others can outlaw all obscurantists attacks on high trust civilization by mystical, rationalist and pseudoscientific means.

I originally meant only to criminalize Postmodernism, until I understood that socialism, postmodernism, libertinism, and neo-conservatism had the same objective – the destruction of the western high trust ethic, and the western competitive advantage of creating commons, by preventing the construction of commons, licensing parasitism on any commons, and forcing the people to pay the costs of adventurism that is against their self interest but within their moral dispositions.

As such, all libertine arguments, like all cosmopolitan arguments, are either lies by their originators, or vectors for lies by unwitting fools.

As such it is necessary to construct an honest, truthful, scientific institutional model for the construction of a condition of liberty by the only means possible: expansion of property rights to prohibit all such forms of fraud and theft by obscurantist deception.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine

THE ANTI-ROTHBARDIAN CANON

(intellectual arms dealing) (retaking the brand of liberty from the lunatic fringe)

[R]othbardians are relying upon and spreading numerous fallacies: (a) the fallacy of the NAP/IVP as the moral and legal basis for an anarchic polity, (b) the fallacy of aggression rather than the necessity of trust, (c) and the fallacies of the origin of property rights as either intrinsic or augmentative, (d) and the fallacy that economics is aprioristic rather than empirical and operational.

And because of these fallacies, all Rothbardians – and in practice, all anarcho-libertarians who subscribe to these fallacies – expend politically wasted effort themselves, distract from more productive efforts of others, perpetuate ideas that have been demonstrated to fail in the market for political preference, materially harmed the brand of liberty, and hindered our possibility of obtaining liberty by confusion, misdirection and delay. Rothbardian ethics are objectively immoral under rational analysis, and the market has deemed them immoral by experience, consideration and intuition. All forward motion on liberty has been toward classical liberalism and classical liberal ethics, and decidedly against rothbardian ethics – contrary to the claims of rothbardians.

Since libertarian leaders have worked for and achieved a cult language and cult status that is insulated from criticism and innovation by faith in these principles; then the only alternative is to make rothbardian and misesian arguments intellectually embarrassing, and argumentatively impossible to use in public discourse, by arming opponents with the means to defeat them.

At the very least this will limit the damage that they can do. But it will also cleanse the liberty movement, and the brand name ‘libertarian’ of its acquired continental and cosmopolitan absurdity, and allow classical liberals, aristocratic egalitarians, and private government advocates, all of whom advocate for high trust societies, to return the discourse on liberty to rational, empirical, and historical grounds.

CONTRARY TO ROTHBARDIAN AND MISESIAN COSMOPOLITAN FALLACIES:

FREE RIDING
-free riding vs natural rights-
1) Upon agreeing to cooperate, one takes upon the moral hazard of free riding. Free riding is an logical antagonist to cooperation. If free riding is present, then it is not logical to cooperate. Property emerged prior to economic production as a prohibition on free riding prior to the division of labor and most likely as monogamy. The property rights constitute a precise, positive legal articulation of the general negative necessity of preventing free riding such that cooperation is a rational choice.

MINIMUM RIGHTS
– minimum necessary set of property rights-
2) The minimum necessary prohibitions on free riding include both the criminal and the ethical, with the option for negotiation on the moral. Otherwise transaction costs are too high for the rational choice of an anarchic polity over an authoritarian one. No ingroup polity of any kind exists without inclusively criminal, ethical, and moral prohibitions. It is possible to construct a federation of polities, as the medieval monarchies demonstrated, wherein cooperation between factions is limited to low trust – enforcement of merely criminal prohibitions – but it is not possible to form a voluntary polity without prohibition of at least criminal and ethical, if not some modicum of moral prohibitions. People demonstrate that they will demand an authority to suppress immoral action, or to mandate universal moral behavior, if the common law does not provide a means of preventing immoral behavior. (Where immoral behavior constitutes an involuntary transfer of costs by moral hazard, most commonly in the form of free riding.) In other words, the jewish quarter and the transient gypsies can only survive if they constitute small minorities at the will of an omnipotent host ruler – which we saw under both byzantine, muslim and aristocratic european societies. That is not liberty. That is merely a form of tolerance used to reduce costs.

INSUFFICIENCY OF NAP
– the NAP/ISV is insufficient in scope for the formation of a voluntary polity –
3) The NAP under ISV only prohibits criminal, but not unethical or immoral or conspiratorial, or conquest behaviors. For this reason it is insufficient basis for the discipline of cooperation: ethics and morality, and as basis for the institution of law: the definition of property rights.

Instead, property rights must address all ethical and moral conflicts that are necessary to eliminate market demand for authoritarian intervention. And since all objective moral arguments and corresponding property definitions, consist of involuntary transfers that violate the prohibition on free riding, we can construct no libertarian argument against it.

Unless the scope of prohibitions on free riding is sufficient, transaction costs render demand for the state preferable to demand for liberty.

IGNORING TRUST
-the degree of trust determines economic velocity: wealth-
4) Secure, and extensive Property rights, that suppress free riding, such that all are required to contribute to production, rather than survive off of parasitism, create trust: the ability to take risks, and to increase the velocity of production and trade, by reducing transaction costs.

The level of trust corresponds directly to the degree of suppression of free riding created by the scope of prohibition of property rights, enforceable under law.

The economic velocity of an economy corresponds directly to the degree of trust formed in a polity by the legal enforcement of property rights.

FAILED CONSTRUCTIVISM
-Mises’ legacy is that he failed to produce a constructivist argument-
4) During the late nineteenth century a movement to prevent a newly emergent form of logical mysticism (platonism) emerged under various names: intuitionistic and constructivist mathematics, operationalism in science, various linguistic movements in logic, and misesian praxeology in economics.

All of these movements correctly intuited some problem with the emerging platonic concept of truth, but failed to accomplish it. This is because, constructive proof, correspondent proof (testing) and correspondent hardening (falsification) were not understood as ethical prohibitions on truth claims – and that truth was performative. That the act of testimony required demonstration of construction (internal consistency) demonstrating knowledge of construction, in addition to correspondence (external correspondence which demonstrates knowledge of use), and attempted falsification (demonstrating knowledge of durability).

Mises intuited correctly, like intellectuals in other fields, that something was erroneous with the work of positivist (correlative, but not causal) economists. But he failed to grasp that praxeology was a problem of empirical observation, reduction to operations, testing those operations by sympathetic experience, before one could make a truth claim about any economic phenomenon.

Mises simply failed. He failed worse than the advocates of operationalism and intuitionism. Who only failed to overcome objections. But his failure was compounded by the fact that had he correctly identified the problem of performative truth – that the constraint upon economic statements was one of testimony (truth telling), rather than deduction from first principles, it is possible that the leaders of other fields would have understood their predicament, and correctly distinguished between performative truth, constructive truth, correspondent truth, and ultimate truth.

ETHICAL AND EMPIRICAL NOT LOGICAL
-praxeology is both an empirical, and an ethical constraint-
5) As such, praxeology, whether we constaint it to action (rational action), cooperation (ethics), or economics (the voluntary organization of production) is a scientific process like all other epistemic processes, where we make observations, construct a theory, test it for proof of correspondence, falsify it for proof of durability, test our knowledge of construction for proof construction, and testify that we have proofs of correspondence, falsification, construction, and therefore possess the ethical right to make a truth claim. Once we have made such a claim we have a theory. If we, as all specialists, cannot find a means of falsifying it, then we have a law.

All empirical concepts must follow this process. All technological innovation must follow this process. All acts of production must follow this process. All pursuit of knowledge must follow this process.

(Note: I am not sure if falsification is a test of parsimony or not. I think that may be the correct terminology – or something close.)

CONFLATION OF THEORETICAL AND SCIENTIFIC
-Conflation of Theoretically Descriptive Science with Axiomatically Prescriptive Logic-
6) The conflation of theoretical systems which are limited to their correspondence to reality, and axiomatic systems which are limited only to their statements. Theoretical systems consist of descriptive statements constrained by reality, and axiomatic systems consist of *prescriptive* statements, not constrained by reality. Mises claim that economics is both aprioristic, axiomatic and scientific is by definition a pseudoscientific statement, since the definition of a science is that which adheres to the scientific method. Models may be constructed by axiomatic declarations, but any correspondence with reality requires that we accept that those axiomatic declarations, constitute analogies to theoretical descriptions whose basis is always empirical.

FALLACY OF A PRIORISM VS EMPIRICISM
-Analysis of human behavior is an empirical pursuit-
7) Praxeology (the study of action) , The Logic of Cooperation (the study of ethics), and Economics (the study of the voluntary organization of production) meet the criteria for empirical sciences, under which, through observation, we can reduce to hypothesis, theory and law.

And with these laws we can construct axioms, for use in models, which function as logical instruments that allow us to contemplate what our limited cognitive abilities cannot contemplate without the use of various logical instruments: language, narrative, Operationalism, logic, numbers, mathematics.

We can then test the truth of these axioms operationally and attempt to deduce whether it is possible for rational actors to perform according to the hypothesis, theory and law. If we cannot operationally describe those actions, and validate them through sympathetic experience as being rational, then they are not true. (This is the technique used in intuitionist mathematics.)

-constancy of relations vs arbitrary precision-
While cooperative relations are inconstant, and arguably each action is unique, patterns of relations are not inconstant and unique, and because of chaotic distribution of information, information, incentives and actions (changes in state) organically distribute (evolve) at different rates. Therefore we can predict trends of patterns, but not individual actions, any more than we can predict the position of any given physical entity at the subatomic level.

That we cannot predict anything other than as a probability over a given period of time, does not render something unobservable, or unscientific. We need only be able to demonstrate that in fact, regularity exists at some given level of precision over some period of time. That is what determines whether a deductive statement is expressible as an hypothesis, theory or law: whether we can determine some regularity at some **scale** – some level of precision. Infinite precision is not possible, but the standard of precision is determined by the maximum utility we can obtain at the minimum level of regularity we can observe and describe.

This constitutes “the problem of arbitrary precision”: General rules (theories) require us to adopt the available level of precision. Pure mathematics uses completely arbitrary precision, which is why it scales infinitely. But once we apply any general mathematical rule, to any particular description of reality, we include the necessary level of precision in the context. Machining valve, sawing a 2×4, navigating a ship, navigating an interplanetary satellite, and measuring the distance to the farthest observable object require different levels of precision, and we can only achieve certain levels of precision. That does not mean we cannot perform those operations using the same mathematics. It merely means we must apply contextual precision.

-the scope of newton’s laws-
Newton’s laws for example, and geometry for that matter, remain constant at human scale. But at very large and very small scale, due to the problems of velocity and immeasurability these rules fail. There are no universal statements expressible as operations that are not reductio fallacies. All hypotheses, theories and laws are subject to increases in precision or loss of utility by replacement with other hypotheses theories and laws.

-the unpredictability of gasses-
We cannot predict the course of any particular molecule when releasing a gas, but that does not mean that we cannot predict the overall distribution of molecules upon their release, and the rate of its dispersion.

-the neutrality of money-
We argue that money is neutral, but only over long and unpredictable periods of time. Is that an empirical question, or a logical one? We can deduce it, and it appears logical, but is our evidence sufficient to consider it a Law, Theory or Hypothesis. At present it is merely an hypothesis. But it is certainly not a law.

-the minimum wage-
We argue that minimum wage increases unemployment. Is that a logical or empirical question but it does not increase unemployment for all of those employed, and it occurs over unpredictable periods of time.

-emergent phenomenon: the stickiness of prices-
We did not deduce that prices would be as sticky as they are. We discovered it empirically – by observation. Is the stickiness of prices sufficient to meet the standard of hypothesis, theory or law? At present it is a theory that is widely accepted.

-the non-deducibility of emergent phenomenon-
We cannot deduce nor have we deduced emergent economic phenomenon. We can validate economic propositions deductively by reducing them to a series of actions, each of which is subject to sympathetic experience, and as such open to a subjective test of rationality. But that too is an empirical test. We observe and sense our reactions.

ARGUMENTATION (I don’t state this well enough yet)
-The fallacy of argumentation ethics-
8) Argumentation Ethics are fallacious because the choice of the strong is always between the use of violence to obtain what one desires, or the value of voluntary exchange, or boycott of worthless interactions.

Human choice is always ternary: violence, cooperation or boycott, and never, under any condition, reduced to the binary choice of cooperation or boycott – argumentative contradiction is a fallacy since and agreement to temporarily cooperate on a given scope is merely utilitarian, and conveys nothing beyond the matter in question.

Whereas, a contract for cooperation consists of a gamble that long term cooperation will be more beneficial, even if it results in various profits and losses. Numerous authors have stated similar arguments in non operational means. But Operationalism tells us that argumentation is empty – because we never surrender our violence, and as such never enter into a contradiction, merely demonstrate a preference.

Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine.

Continue reading →