Month: January 2015

  • Against Lester’s Verbalism – With Lee Waaks.

    An important new book by J. C. Lester, defending his own robust and ground breaking form of libertarianism – without foundations – in a critical rationalist manner: Explaining Libertarianism: Some Philosophical Arguments [S]igh, Except his ‘groundbreaking’ argument, deducing subjective value from the colloquial use of the term ‘liberty’, is a meaningless verbalism; and worse, his abuse…

  • The Central Argument To The Origin Of Morality: Cost vs Scarcity

    [S]carcity is a universal, unknowable, marginal indifference. It is praxeologicaly non-existent. I cannot know and act on it. Cost is particular, knowable, and decidable because of marginal differences. It is praxeologicaly existential. I can know and act on it.Scarcity is a necessary constraint between states, that need not reduce local transaction costs, but which must…

  • The Cure for Propaganda – And Western Civilization

    (second draft)(important piece) [P]ropaganda is intentionally defective product, produced for the purpose of obtaining power, delivered with intent to persuade by deception, using rhetorical devices including: conflation, loading, framing, overloading, obscurantism, straw-men, outright lying, and dependent upon repetition as a means of creating confirmatory “evidence”, to produce an intuitive rather than rational response. The traditional,…

  • Rule of Law Is Sacred to Western Man

    –“our prophet is sacred to us”– [R]ule of law is more sacred than our lives. Rule of law requires we speak, and understand the truth, not myth. The reason for the velocity of western advancement in all fields is that we tell the truth whether it hurts or not, whether it offends or not –…

  • Mises: “Human Operationalism”, Not “Human Action”

    [H]e was that close. I have more important things to do with my life, but if I had the time I could rewrite his tome Human Action as Human Operationalism, and instantly reform the debate from one between science and pseudoscience in which he has been outcast, to one that unified all fields, and restored…

  • Morality is a Problem of Cost, Not Scarcity

    [S]carcity and Property exist prior to cooperation. However, scarcity is an analytic concept. Humans think in terms of cost, not scarcity. Because scarcity requires knowledge we cannot possess other than through prices/costs. So we cannot know something is scarce any more than we can know something is analytically true. We can only know that it…

  • You Are Welcome To Your Privilege

    —“White privilege isn’t just for white people. It’s a privilege to live in a world with us in it.”— Eli Harman —“We tell the truth, seek the truth, trust one another, are worthy of trust, rely on property rights, the jury, the militia, and individual responsibility – all so that the rest of the world…

  • I Don’t Support Ron Paul Either

    (A Call To Classical Liberalism) [R]on Paul committed political suicide, in an act of profound moral cowardice, joining the Mises Institute in their decades of ideological suicide, by using the hardship of real people as an excuse to produce propaganda against the monopoly bureaucratic state – a fight in which the Ukrainians themselves are more…

  • Sorry That My Work On Truth Isn’t All That Interesting To You. 🙂

    (the importance of the work) [I] realize that I have spent a lot of time over the past twelve months on Truth. And that this appears (falsely) to be a rat-hole, that is not as interesting as attacking the argumentative follies of the political extremes. But I am working at an institutional solution to the…

  • 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 [G]abriel 1) Calling science positivistic (justificationary) is a typical Rothbardian/Misesian misrepresentation of…

  • If You Can Name A Thing You Can Kill A Thing

    [T]here is an ancient myth that has more than a grain of truth to it: if you can name a demon you can kill, control of dispel it. We all have true names. Meaning if we are fully understood we lose the power of deception. I am hot on the trail of a conceptual demon…

  • The 80/20 Rule of Western Genius

    [T]he Left’s Hatred of Dead White European Male (DWEM) Genius —“Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray (2003) makes clear that world-historical, genius level accomplishment is – or rather, was – numerically and proportionately a Dead White-European Male (DWEM) thing.”— Yes but I am pretty sure that I have stated WHY it was a DWEM thing: TRUTH.…

  • 2014 As Evidence Of Insurrection Under Complex Modern States

    [F]or those who have asked me about how difficult it is to create a revolution, it should be obvious from the evidence of 2014, just how easy it is to bring the state and the economy to its knees by the simple act of individual aggression against state enforcers. But one must have something for…

  • Deception: The Test of Aggression Instead of The Test of an Imposition of Costs

    —“Depending upon one’s conception of rights and what they logically entail or are incompatible with, it’s not difficult to see, for example, that the corpus of the libertarian program, in logical terms cannot countenance “add-ons” in so far as they are obligations that legitimate the use of force. The shortest, most concise illustration of how…

  • Improving On The Main Message – It’s Getting Easier

    (reposted from elsewhere) [T]he scientific method consists of a set of moral rules on what scientists must consider truthful testimony. Otherwise no ‘method’ exists. The scope of these moral rules has evolved during the twentieth century in ways that I think very few people, scientists included, understand. (I will go into this a bit later…

  • On Matt Breunig’s Criticism of Hoppe

    Regarding: Matt Breunig’s HHH, Libertarian Theoretical Historian? [M]att. Better criticism than is usually thrown at him. I think most of his justification can be seen as nonsense. I also think that at this point his primary contributions are: (a) the difference in incentives between the private german micro states and the corporate bureaucratic states. Fukuyama…

  • More Examples of Arguing With Well Intentioned But Misguided Folk

    –Still not a peep about: “Even though it is perfectly true and perfectly logical that humans are subjective beings there are some who cannot fathom a scientific subjective methodology.”– Bruce Koerber [T]he question is not whether we can practice a subjective methodology. Nor is it honest to use psychologism as a criticism when the question…

  • An Example of Confusing Positivism and Empiricism

    —“Empirical science requires controlled experiments. In economics no such experiments are possible. Even in physics the study of a lone particle does not give us enough information to predict its movement in a many-particle environment, which is basically indeterminate.”– Shivank [I]ntelligent response, thanks. But common errors. You are confusing Empiricism with Positivism (which is a…

  • What Does “Kaleidic” Mean? (In Economics)

    –“As a propertarian I’m assuming you follow the Lachmann rather than Shackle tradition in your appreciation of kaleidics.”— Chris Shaeffer (Note For Readers: Kaleidic, as used by Shackle, refers to the way groups and individuals in an economy rearrange, much like a kaleidoscope image, into new patterns – constantly, in response to changes, demand, innovations…

  • Fukuyama Continues His Justification of The Monopoly State

    (Note: I kind of wonder what will happen when people figure out that the difference between Fukuyama/Asian monopoly statism and western polycentrism, is TRUTH TELLING.  Chinese lie and deceive as a matter of course, whereas in the heroic model, we pay the high cost of truth telling as demonstrated contribution to the commons. – Curt…

  • Explaining “Sympathize With Intent”

    CURT: CAN YOU EXPLAIN “SYMPATHIZE WITH INTENT”? —“Can you please elaborate on this statement: ‘We know the first principles of human cooperation: we can sympathize with intent.’” —Chris Shaeffer [C]hris – Another good question. Apes cannot seem to sympathize with intentions to any degree, in the sense that they cannot imagine what we mean by…

  • A Definition of Economics?

    QUESTION: CURT: WHAT IS YOUR DEFINITION OF ‘ECONOMICS’?” (good piece) —“Hi Curt…I can relate to your comments. Perhaps you mentioned it and I missed it, but what in your definition of “Economics”. Is it sociological? A physical science? Something else?”—Lee Roesner [L]ee, Great question. Thanks. I think, that the scope of the term Economics is…

  • Learning From Debating Moral But Misguided People

    —“What is unscientific is the claim that a subjective being can be represented by a method that does not recognize subjectivity. No data can contain the information that it ‘supposedly’ contains. This is misrepresentation. And no person can interpret the data associated with another person since they are not that person at that time and…

  • Philosophy, Morality, Science, and Law Should Be Identical Propositions

    [I]f philosophy, morality, science, and law are not identical propositions then something is very wrong. Because philosophy morality science and law can be constructed as identical propositions. Because truthful, due-diligent, warrantable, speech is consistent regardless of the discipline in which we utter it.Propertarianism.

  • Turning Rationalism On Its Head

    (from elsewhere) [T]hanks Andrew: In regard to my statement: —“So no statement that is not open to sympathetic testing (falsification) by operational means (sympathetic testing) can be ‘true’, nor ‘scientific’ since ‘scientific’ refers to morally warrantable constraint upon one’s statements.”— You argue: –“It is important to consider if this statement itself is scientific or ‘true’…