- The Evolution of Cooperation
- Time: Our First and Only Resource
- The Law
- Rule of Law
- Our Current Condition
- The Weakness in The Rule of Law: The Supreme Court
1. THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION
[T]he Evolution of Cooperation:
1) Acquisitiveness: To survive and reproduce, humans must acquire and inventory many categories of resources, and evolved to demonstrate constant acquisitiveness of those resources.
2) Demonstrated Interests: The scope of those things they act upon, or choose not to act upon, in anticipation of obtaining as inventory (a store of value), constitute their demonstrated definition of property-en-toto.* (See Butler Schaeffer) “That which and organism defends.”
3) Value: Human emotions evolved to reflect changes in state of property-en-toto.* As such nearly all emotions can be expressed in terms of reactions to property. (imposed costs here, pre-moral, but also pre-cooperation, and only defense and retaliation, not cooperation)
4) Non-Conflict: That which humans act to obtain without imposition upon in-group members they evolved to intuit as their property, and demonstrate this intuition by defense of their inventory, and by their punishment of transgressors.
5) Cooperative Production: That which humans act in concert with one another to produce. (Important take-away is that the purpose of cooperation is material and reproductive production.)
6) Moral (cooperative) Intuitions(instincts): Moral intuitions reflect prohibitions on free riding by members with whom one cooperates in production and reproduction. (This is where free riding enters.)
7) Distribution of Intuitions by Reproductive Strategy: Moral intuitions vary in intensity to suit one’s reproductive strategy. This intensity and distribution of moral intuition varies between males and females, as well as between classes and between groups.
8) Variation By Family Structure: Moral rules reflect prohibitions on free riding given the structure of the family in relation to the necessary and available structure of production.
9) Resolution of Disputes: Property rights were developed in law as the positive enumeration in contractual form, of those moral rules which any polity (corporation) agrees to enforce with the promise of violence for the purpose of restitution or punishment. Conversely, any possible property rights not expressed, the community (corporation) is unwilling to adjudicate, restore or punish, or has not yet discovered the need to construct.
10) Instrumentation: Property rights are necessary for the instrumental measurement of moral prohibitions because of the unobservability of changes in human emotional states, and our inability to determine truth from falsehood. And as such we require an observable proxy for evidence of changes in state.
11) Family: As a general rule, as the division of knowledge and labor increases, so must the atomicity of property rights, and as a consequence, the size of the family must decline {Consanguineous, Punaluan, Pairing (Serial Marriage), Hetaeristic, Traditional, Stem, Nuclear, Absolute Nuclear}.
12) Transaction Costs: As the division of labor increases, relationships increase in distance from kin, increase in anonymity, decrease common interest, and the incentive to seize opportunities rather than adhere to agreements increases. This decrease creates the problem of trust, which increases costs of insuring any agreement is fulfilled, and decreases the overall number of possible agreements and the number of participants in any structure of production.
13) Trust (ethics in production): As a general rule, for the size of the family to decrease, and division of labor to increase in multi-part *complexity* then trust must increase, and trust can only increase with expansion of property rights to include prohibitions on unethical actions. Mere ostracization, boycotting and reputation are insufficient to preserve agreements (contracts).
14) Moral Competition (ethics in political production): (morals property rights, cheating) As a general rule, the scope of moral prohibitions expressed as property rights, must increase to limit demand for authority.
15) Demand for Authority: As a general rule, if a delay in the production of property rights evolves, then demand for authority will fill the vacuum with some form of authority to either suppress retaliation (conflict) or to prevent circumstances leading to conflict, or both.
The Reasons for The Evolution of Cooperation
Ingroup vs Outgroup Cooperation
I) Ingroup Cooperation
1) The disproportionately high return on cooperation.
2) The differences in abilities at different ages.
3) The difference in reproductive role and strategy between the genders.
4) The differences in abilities among men.
5) The local structure of production: the division of knowledge and labor.
6) The local structure of the reproduction: family and inheritance rights.
7) The distribution of property rights between the individual, family, group and the commons.
8) The degree of suppression of, and intolerance for, free riding both in and out of family.
9) calculative, cooperative technology available for economic signaling and coordination. (objective truth, numbers, money, prices, interest, writing, contract, and accounting).
10) The use of formal institutions to perpetuate these constraints.
11) The competition from groups with alternate structures of production, family, inheritance, property rights, free riding, cooperative technologies, and formal institutions.
Ii) Outgroup Cooperation
12) The geographical distribution of nature-given factors of production. (note that this is last.)
2. TIME: THE FIRST RESOURCE, COMMODITY, AND WEALTH IS TIME
[T]ime;
1 – The only commodity we are born with is time. If we were not short of time, then we would need nothing. we have needs and wants because we lack the time to obtain them ourselves.
2 – Through cooperation in a division of labor we save time. A division of labor is so disproportionately productie that no other human ability can compensate for it. The problem is, people need a coincidence of wants in order to cooperate.
3 – Although we only know we have saved time if others will trade something with us for it. Until then we have spent and possibly wasted time.
4 – When people voluntarily trade, they only do so if they have more after doing so than they did before. People do not trade at a loss because it only encourages those who parasitically deprive others.
5 – Ergo, all value is created during exchange, at which time, time is saved.
6 – And All value consists of saved time.
7 – All goods obtained in trade therefore save time, and demonstrate a creation of value or they would not have been traded.
8 – Any goods obtained by trade therefore serve as a store of value (no matter how small).
9 – Money (commodity money) not only stores value but is in universal demand for the simple reason that it is in universal demand.
10 – Money reduces the cost of opportunities because it is both light, divisible, commensurable, and because of the formation of prices ‘production is calculable’, and as a consequence ‘plannable’. And risks can be taken to produce for the market.
The reason we err, is that we do not grasp that until we have consumed or traded for something we do not know if we have wasted time and the world’s resources – or not.
Rights to Time
Obverse: A prohibition on the imposition of costs against those categories of demonstrated interests that in-group members are willing to enforce by means of organized violence.
Reverse: a warranty by peers (right) that they will either enforce restitution for impositions of costs upon certain categories of your demonstrated interests, and/or that they will not retaliate against you for your acts of retaliation or restitution for such impositions.
Result?
(i) Demonstrated Interests (Property): that which we demonstrate that we have born costs to acquire without imposing costs upon others with whom we cooperate.
(ii) Cooperation: constructing an asymmetry of incentives such that we choose to concentrate efforts by dividing labor in order to obtain the disproportionate rewards of doing so versus the alternatives.
(iii) Morality: that which we require in order to rationally cooperate.
(iv) Right: Sanction of retaliation in case of abridgment. OBLIGATION: Requirement of performance.
(v) Law (Property Right): that which we promise to one another to insure.
3. THE LAW
[T]he Law;
Reciprocity
The Natural Law of Reciprocity: Thou shalt not, by display, word, or deed, or absence of display, word or deed, impose or allow the the imposition of, costs upon the demonstrated Interests of others (property-in-toto), either directly or indirectly, where those Interests were obtained by Settlement (conversion, or first use) or productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange in the absence of such imposition of costs upon the demonstrated interests of others. Therefore thou shalt limit thy display, words and deeds, and the display, words and deeds of others, to the productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange of demonstrated Interests (property in toto), free of imposition of costs upon the demonstrated Interests of others, either directly or indirectly.
The Proof
1. The first question of philosophy is and always will be ‘Why do I not commit suicide?’
The answer is: “Life – To Acquire Time.”
2. The first question of ethics is and always will be, “Why do I not kill you and take your things?”
The Answer is: “Cooperation in the Production, Acquisition and Trade of goods(things), services(actions), and information(knowledge)”
3. The first question of politics is ‘Why do I and mine not kill, enslave, or enserf, you and yours and take your things?”
The answer is: “Cooperation in the Production of Commons: association, cooperation, production, reproduction, commons, polities, and war.”
Answer those three questions. Doing so explains all that there is to explain.
To Acquire Time.
The Answer
1. Life;
2. Life’s Cost in Time;
3. Cooperation and its Returns of Time on Time;
4. Truth, Oath, Trust, Knowledge, Proximity, and Density increase the velocity of the Production of Time.
5. Reciprocity and its Enforcement Insures Cooperation in the Velocity and Production of Time;
Unless we are family or kin: You are not me. You are not mine. We are not family. We are not kin. We are not friends. We are not Partners. We are merely Citizens or Denizens extant in the same place and time. There is no common good other than the reciprocal benefit of cooperation on a coincidence of wants. As such we can cooperate on shared means if not on shared ends, and go our separate ways otherwise.
4. RULE OF LAW
[A]mong modern legal theorists, we will find that at least four common definitions of the rule of law.
1 – Rule of Law by Natural Law: a “Formal” (Logical) or “scientific” definition that must preserve reciprocity. All rights therefore derive from positive claims against negative impositions. As such all ‘rights’ are those violations of reciprocity that the court will specifically enforce, and do so only because they are violations of reciprocity.
1 – Rule of Law: a “Substantive” (Skeptical) or “thick” definition that must preserve certain rights – without stating the origin of those rights.
2 – Rule by Law: a “Formalist“: (Optimistic) or “thin” definition, that must not preserve any such rights, and;
3 – Rule of Man: a “Functional” (Fictional) or “ultra-thin” definition that requires neither formal process nor substantial rights be respected, and allows government officials great leeway.
The ancient concept of rule OF law can be distinguished from rule BY law, in that, under the rule OF law, the law serves as a check against the abuse of power. However, it protects against discretionary rule in general.
Under rule BY law, the law is a mere tool for a government, that oppresses the population a using legislation as justification for arbitrary commands – a means of violating rights.
Under Rule of Man, there are no checks on power to violate rights.
Rule of Law (By Rights)
1- Substantive (Skeptical) conceptions of the rule of law go beyond this and include certain substantive rights that are said to be based on, or derived from, the rule of law. The substantive interpretation holds that the rule of law intrinsically must protect some or all individual rights.
Rule By Law (Rule by Legislation)
2 – Formalist (Optimistic) definitions of the rule of law do not make a judgment about the “justness” of law itself, but define specific procedural attributes that a legal framework must have in order to be in compliance with the rule of law. The formalist interpretation holds that the rule of law has purely formal characteristics, meaning that the law must be publicly declared, with prospective application, and possess the characteristics of generality, equality, and certainty, but there are no requirements with regard to the content of the law.
In addition, some theorists hold that democracy(majority) can circumvent both procedure and rights, or construct new rights (rather than privileges).
Why Formalism? Formalism allows laws the pretense of claiming rule of law when rights are not protected by including countries that do not necessarily have such laws protecting democracy or individual rights in the scope of the definition of “rule of law”.
The “formal” interpretation is more widespread than the “substantive” interpretation. Formalists hold that the law must be prospective, well-known, and have characteristics of generality, equality, and certainty. Other than that, the formal view contains no requirements as to the content of the law.
Rule of Man (By Arbitrary Discretion)
3 – The functional (Fictional) interpretation of the term “rule of law”, consistent with the traditional English meaning, contrasts the “rule of law” with the “rule of man.” According to the functional view, a society in which government officers have a great deal of discretion has a low degree of “rule of law”, whereas a society in which government officers have little discretion has a high degree of “rule of law”.
Closing (Summary)
In other words, there is only one form of rule of law under which no one can override natural rights (life, liberty, property, reciprocity, truth, and duty). Rule by legislation allows either the state, or the body politic to override those rules. And rule by man allows arbitrary discretion on the part of officials (members of the monopoly bureaucracy).
5. OUR CURRENT CONDITION
1) Judges are forced to adjudicate between customary law, regulation, and legislation during a period of rapid social, economic, and political upheaval. In science for example, there is no temporal pressure to decide. In conflict there is temporal pressure to decide. The state has taken on the monopoly of the application of violence, and created a monopoly method of dispute resolution (courts), and created a monopoly body by which to adjudicate such conflicts (law, legislation, and regulation.)
2) There exists only one universal law of human cooperation. We call that law ‘natural law’. That natural law consists in reciprocity. Reciprocity requires satisfaction of the criteria (a) fully informed, (b) productive, (c) warrantied, (d) voluntary transfer, (d) free of imposition of costs upon the interests of others by externality. One can obtain an interest by bearing a cost (performing an improvement) for the purpose of obtaining an interest; and one can have no interest until one has born a cost to obtain such an interest.
3) This one law (reciprocity) provides decidability independent of opinion, preference, custom, or presumption of good, and is the reason international law is governed by reciprocity it is the only rule that provides reciprocal (equal) incentive against retaliation for the imposition of costs upon one another. Law evolved, from the first record, to the present, for the purpose of preserving the volume, velocity, and returns on cooperation, and preventing cooperation’s opposite: retaliation cycles that throughout history have produced the deleterious effects of feuds.
4) Customary Law (especially germanic, if not all european) consists of the discovery and accumulation of applications of this law of reciprocity that we call Tort law. Legislation (command) and regulation (prior constraint) have been given the FORCE of LAW by those whose profit interest – either the population (preservation of returns on cooperation) or the territorial rulers (returns from taxation).
5) The primary function of RULE has been the preservation of cooperation by use of organized violence to suppress impositions of costs upon the investments of others. This is the role of insurer of last resort of Personal Interests.
6) The primary function of GOVERNMENT has been the construction of commons and the extraordinary returns produced by commons, while insuring those commons from privatization of commons, socialization of losses into the commons, by the organized use of violence. This is the role of insurer of last resort of the Commons.
7) The primary function of the STATE, particularly with the advent of paper currency, and now fiat (unbacked) currency (our money consists of nothing but shares in the economy) has increasingly evolved to function as the insurer of last resort against the Hazards of the vicissitudes of nature (disasters, tragedies, accidents, disability, health, old age, and even war).
8) RIGHTS can only exist (a) by reciprocal exchange of the same obligation, and (b) when insured by a third party with sufficient organized violence to insure and reinforce them. Otherwise they are not rights but impositions by means of command. It is correct to say we create a market ‘demand’ natural rights, and we create a market demand for human rights, but those rights do not exist until we organize sufficient violence into roles and institutions to insure those rights: police, sheriffs, soldiery, and judges.
9) Human rights consist of AMBITIONS that we demand from the Governments of States in order to tolerate their retention of a monopoly of control over a territory. They exist as a postwar attempt to constraint governments to improving their territory, people, and assets by market means, without imposition upon their neighbors. Such rights, likewise, do not exist. But are merely an ambition.
10) The universal declaration of human rights contains a few provisions that were necessary to obtain the signatures of the then-communist states, that asserted positive rights (obligations to provide for one another without constraint on the reproduction that exhausts the ability to provide for others, and therefore results in the gradual dysgenic decline as we reverse thousands of years of upward redistribution of reproduction back down to the underclasses who are not able to produce sufficient market goods and services to exist without harming the reproduction of the middle and upper classes.) [note: we have reversed the flynn effect and have, even in china, been losing a third of a point of intelligence over a fairly short number of years. The productivity of a people is reducible to the median of the population’s cost of education and training, such that every point below what is today’s 105 and tomorrow’s 110 places an intolerable burden upon the rest of the polity.]
8) Our American constitution persisted the anglo saxon, germanic, proto-germanic (and possibly proto-indo-european) law of sovereign men limited to acts of reciprocity, and licensed the government to act in their interests to preserve their sovereignty (the original text being ‘life, liberty, property’). Unfortunately at the time the techniques of formal logic, strict constriction from first principles, were not known. We are no longer limited, and there is no reason any and every law cannot be constructed formally from the natural law of reciprocity, producing a complete, consistent, and easily falsifiable body of adjudicatable law. There is no reason any and every act of legislation, and any and every act of regulation, cannot be so constructed. The principle difference under such formal construction is that the one law, discovered application of the one law, regulation to limit hazards of those actions not open to restitution, and CONTRACTS for the production of commons would be consistent, and as such the government could only issue contracts under law, not edicts above that law. (This would destroy the left’s ability to usurp power by democratic means).
9) The uniqueness of western civilization is reducible to (a) a militia that constitutes the shareholders, (b) individual sovereignty of shareholders, (c) the demand for truth, duty, and reciprocity from one another in mutual insurance of our sovereignty. (d) And sovereignty results in the necessity of markets for association, cooperation, reproduction, production, commons, and polities. (e) such markets, adjudicated by the law of tort, adapt to change faster than all other methods of human organization. (f) it is this rapidity of adaptation and resulting insulation from corruption and rent seeking that made the west develop faster than the rest in both the ancient world and the modern, with the Abrahamic Dark Age of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim attacks on the great civilizations, providing the only hindrance.
Once north sea trade was reestablished, the saxon commercial order constructed in europe, and the atlantic opened to the age of sail, the west was finally, by the age of napoleon, able to return to Roman levels of institutional sophistication, and universal imposition of law. [note that the west had fertile lands and forests but no flood river valleys to concentrate production, concentrate people, and develop taxation.
So while the ancient world could form armies by taxation, western people had to form militias that relied on advanced (at the time) technology that required whole families to pay for. These militias (cattle raiders, sea peoples, vikings, pirates, european explorers ) organized expeditions (raids) but did so voluntarily. There was no other means of organizing other than contract. It was this order that led to our law, our debate, our reason, and from there our science and technology. Western excellence is due to our law – which elsewhere is not contract but command.
10) The progressives lie to mask what is merely theft – they rely on postmodernism (lying by sophistry), and they rely on marxism (pseudoscience) as well as freudian and boazian pseudoscience. So yes, the Progressives (socialists) lie, but the Conservatives (Aristocratics) cannot tell the truth: The truth is quite simple: the reason for the success of western and eastern civilization, and most obviously the ashkenazim, is the upward redistribution of reproduction, and the use of manorialism, taxation, and the vicissitudes of nature to limit the reproduction of the underclass until such point that surpluses are sufficient to continually increase the standard of living through continuous market competition and innovation. Man was not oppressed. The man self domesticated through the same process he used for plants and animals: breeding the best and culling the rest. This is the dirty secret of civilizations.
11) Sovereignty, Truth, Duty, and Reciprocity produce markets, and markets are eugenic. They are just a peaceful form of eugenics – meaning *evolution* – rather than war, enslavement, enserfment. By use of Sovereignty, Truth, Duty, Reciprocity, and Markets western man in the ancient world, and in the modern, dragged humanity kicking and screaming out of ignorance, superstition, hard labor, poverty, starvation, infant mortality, early death,
6. THE PROPER METHOD FOR THE SUPREME COURT’S DECISIONS
—” the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers mandates that judges anchor their analysis to the text as reasonably understood by the people of the time. If that leads to a violation of Reciprocity (Natural Law), then the proper avenue for redress is to amend the constitution so the text better and better codifies Reciprocity (Natural Law).”—
[I] assume, and the minority of strict jurists assume that the founding documents consist of The Declaration, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights. And if clarity of original intent is required then we resort to The Federalist Papers, or notes on the proceeds of the debate. Once the bill of rights was ratified, then the founding documents were complete.
1 – The Declaration contains the appeal to Natural Law as justification for secession(independence).
2 – The Bill of Rights codifies the natural law as they enumerated those rights at the time.
3 – The Constitution describes the organization and processes of the government.
I tell people to read them in that order: Declaration, Bill of Rights, and Constitution: from the reason for the secession: violation of natural law, to the articulation of the specific defenses of it, to the institutions that protect it yet still allow for the production of commons.
Unfortunately, first, reciprocity is not specifically stated as the first rule of natural law. Second, there is no requirement that the judiciary certify the constitutionality of legislation, and instead, all legislation ascends until falsified by the court. In other words, the market tests the legislation, and if conflicts arise the court corrects legislation.
This approach continues the no-prior-restraint of the Anglo Saxon (Germanic) law versus the prior-restraint of continental (french and roman) law. And this is yet another example of ‘markets in everything’.
Worse, without specifying Reciprocity, there is no means by which the initial rights can be limited, and therefore no means by which the court can limit the grant of rights rather than permissions and obligations.
Worse, there are no means by which the court can return the legislation to the legislature and demand correction. Nor are there means by which the court can suggest corrections or amendments to rectify the deficiency, and return to the legislature.
As such the court must, as the president must, choose ‘line item veto’ so to speak, or to veto the entire piece of legislation. So that is what the court does.
And the court members use different criteria for determining the power of the legislature:
1 – Rule of Law by Natural Law (Scientific) in which the legislature and the people may only act in concert with natural law (reciprocity), or ;
2- Rule of Law (Substantive) in which the legislature and the people may only act in concert with arbitrarily determined Rights, or ;
3-Rule by Law (Formalist) in which the legislature can do what it wants;
4-Rule by Law (Majoritarian), in which the majority of the people can do whatever they want.
In other words, there are always at least THREE parties to a matter before the court: Plaintiff, Defendant, and Legislature. And the court cannot demand remedy of the legislature. And that is the oversight.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
