Liberalism as a non-authority theory of authority

Liberalism treats the question of what authoritative discriminations in particular are just, as if it were a question of whether authoritative discrimination in general is just.

Maybe financial hermeneutics isn’t one of your talents

Re-posting this since the Parable of the Talents was yesterday’s Gospel reading.

A fungible error

A fungible thing is something which we habitually treat as interchangeable with different objects of the same kind and in the same amount.  A cup of sugar is considered a  fungible thing because we typically don’t care whether we are using this particular cup of sugar or that one: any cup of sugar with similar qualities will do.

Scholastics – academics who study the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and other medieval Catholic scholars – tend, like philosophers of any school, to adopt certain habits of mind.  One of the Scholastic habits of mind is to reflexively consider the nature of a thing as one argues or dialogs about that thing.  This is of course perfectly natural and salutary, but I suspect that it underlies a common error when thinking about usury.

Because when it comes to usury, what is central and essential is the nature of the contract not the nature of the property lent.  Vix Pervenit:

We exhort you not to listen to those who say that today the issue of usury is present in name only, since gain is almost always obtained from money given to another. How false is this opinion and how far removed from the truth! We can easily understand this if we consider that the nature of one contract differs from the nature of another.  [Emphasis mine]

Scholastics – unlike Aquinas himself – tend to approach usury as having something to do with the nature of the property lent, qua fungible thing.  But a mutuum loan is not, strictly speaking, a loan of a fungible thing: it is a loan of a thing which the contract treats as fungible.  Aquinas explains this in his discussions of usury; here he is in de Malo:

As the Philosopher says in the Politics, things can have two uses: one specific and primary; the other general and secondary. For example, the specific and primary use of shoes is to wear them, and their secondary use is to exchange them for something else. And conversely, the specific and primary use of money is as a means of exchange, since money was instituted for this purpose, and the secondary use of money can be for anything else, for example, as security or for display.

He goes on to explain that it is not the nature of the property itself, but the kind of use which is authorized by the contract, which is the essence of the mutuum loan and therefore the essence of usury.  A contract which treats the lent property as fungible — as alienable from the borrower — is a mutuum loan; and it is on this kind of loan that making any profit whatsoever is morally illicit:

But if persons lend their money to others for another use in which the money is not consumed, there will be the same consideration as regarding the things that are not consumed in their very use, things that are licitly rented and hired out. And so if one gives money sealed in a purse to post it as security and then receives recompense, this is not interest-taking [usury], since it involves renting or hiring out, not a contract for a loan. And the reasoning is the same if a person gives money to another to use it for display, just as, conversely, if one gives shoes to another as a means of exchange and on that account were to seek a recompense over and above the value of the shoes, there would be interest-taking [usury].

So Thomists and other thinkers who attempt to take the sinfulness of usury seriously would do well to follow the Doctor, and avoid the pitfall of confusing the fact that a usurious contract treats the property lent as fungible with something intrinsically the case about the property itself.

And Aquinas’s correctness on the doctrinal point – that usury consists in the nature of the contract, not the nature of the property lent/borrowed – can be easily confirmed by checking Magisterial sources, such as Vix Pervenit (cited above) and others (see here and here, for example).

The self-inflicted lobotomy of a society gone mad

There exist in our world what we might call ‘social beings’: institutions or communities which are composed of individual human beings but which are not reducible to nothing but the aggregation of individual human beings. Social beings transcend individuals in the sense that they are not reducible to individuals. I don’t have an overarching theory of these transcendent social beings, but I know that Italy is not reducible to the collection of all individual Italians, Catholicism is not reducible to the collection of all individual Catholics, etc.

We can refer to the good of these social beings as the common good.

Authority is a natural and essential organ of these transcendent social beings, much as the brain and nervous system are a natural and essential organ of individual human beings.

Liberalism is (as a specifically political doctrine), at least in its more advanced forms, an attempt to reduce this transcendent social organ (authority) to nothing but the collected free and equal wills of the individuals who make up a polity.  Opposing itself to natural authority as inherently tyrannical, liberalism insists that all authority must be mediated through the triumph of the human will. Authority as a real organ which transcends the consent of the governed is denied.

Liberalism is an attempt to build, if you will, a completely brainless and mechanical society in the name of emancipation from the privileges of natural authority: it is the self-inflicted lobotomy of a society gone mad.

The right to life, liberty, and cows

Modern people have been trained by centuries of usury (among other things) to have a hard time distinguishing between an actual thing and the mere idea of a thing.  

In the case of usury this failure to perceive the difference between real things and mere ideas shows up in how contracts for profit are secured: as St. Francis Xavier put it, “in the whole matter of security for contracts”.  A non-usurious contract for profit is secured by property which actually exists, and only that specifed property.  A usurious contract for profit is secured by (sometimes in addition to some actual property) the mere idea of property: by a personal IOU.

A pledge to give an investor a cow next year is not — the pledge is not — an actual cow.  It is not usurious to pledge to give an investor a cow next year as part of a contract for profit; but only so long as that pledge is secured by some property which actually does exist, which fully discharges the obligation.  The pledge is not to hand over a cow next year simpliciter, but to hand over either the actually existent security or a cow, thereby fully discharging the borrower’s obligation.  A well structured contract will incentivise but not guarantee the latter.

The term ‘right’ is (like many terms) multivocal, kind of like the term ‘cow’. A right which actually has teeth is a particular right: a specific exercise of discriminating authority which trumps all other claims in a particular instance, treating one specific claim as superior to all other claims. Bob is the owner and Fred is the trespasser, so Fred must depart Bob’s property or be dragged off to jail.

Other uses of the term ‘right’ include talking about abstract categories of rights as opposed to actual rights. Again, kind of like cows. The idea that everyone has an equal right to (e.g) property is like (indeed is a superset of) the idea that everyone has an equal right to cows.

If this right is actual as opposed to abstract then it pertains to a particular cow or cows; and no particular cow is equal to any other particular cow. If Fred slaughters and eats Bob’s beef, he goes to jail.  

Furthermore, many people don’t have a cow (other than metaphorically, when all of this is pointed out). The mere idea of beef is not a meal equivalent to actual beef.

There is nothing more authoritative and discriminatory than an actual right; nothing more empty and unreal than an abstract right with no instantiation.  Owning a hypothetical cow is categorically distinct from owning an actual cow.  Reality is categorically distinct from fiction.

It is sometimes suggested that my understanding of liberalism is flawed because it relies on a concept of rights which is “absolute”.  But what critics see as “absolute” in my criticism of liberalism is simply recognition that the difference between reality and fiction is a categorical distinction, not a matter of gradiation. The difference between the idea of a cow and an actual cow is not a matter of moving along some continuum of compromise with a possible happy medium. Being and non-being are absolutely distinct.

The liberal war on authoritative particularity arises from its commitment to political liberty framed in terms of rights: arises from the fact that nothing discriminates (contra equality) and constrains (contra liberty) like actual, real, existent particular things.  And conservative liberalism, as the more sane and commonsensical sphere of liberal societies, makes the mistake of believing that a happy medium is possible between reality and the void.

Countdown to launch

At the suggestion of reader MMPeregrine, in preparation for the print version/3rd Edition of the Usury FAQ, I added a couple of questions and answers:

57) This all sounds so complicated, and use of the terms “loan” and “interest” to mean so many different things is confusing. Is there a straightforward way to tell if a simple loan for interest is usury?

58) Is there something that the government can do about usury without creating a whole bunch of complicated regulations?

UPDATE:  The Typesetter has made the current revision available in PDF here.  If you are interested in proofreading the manuscript feel free to post any errors you find in the combox here, or send email to usurybook@gmail.com.

Political freedom and the banality singularity

Folks who live in liberal societies tend to see having a large number of options as a good thing. The basic idea is that government should mind its own business and allow subjects to live and let live: should do as little as possible to ensure that the rights of free and equal individuals are enforced, and beyond that should “permit” individuals to evaluate for themselves which options they think are substantively good.

This is of course an incoherent mess prone to producing mass slaughter and other degeneracy when it crashes into reality: a doctrinal mashup of contradictory nonsense defended by the modern political monoparty with motte-and-bailey equivocation.  A liberal sovereign delegitimizes his own authority, and the authority of his peoples’ traditions to protect and enforce what is substantively good, and adopts a philosophy of quantitatively maximizing choice independent of whether those choices are or are not substantively good.  In practice this takes all of the things people really care about off the table, since the things people care about most tend to be controversial and often controverted.   What remains is the pervasive presence of disgusting and dehumanizing options.

Liberalism has to abolish politics, has to produce a vast homogeneous bureaucratized managed cafeteria of degenerate, trivial, dehumanizing troughs of slop into which atomized autonomous free and equal human animals can put their snouts.

Liberalism is just politics; AIDS is just a virus

Liberalism is first and foremost a political doctrine: an (incoherent) view about legitimate exercise of authority. It is true that once empowered liberalism cannot be contained and ‘leaks’ into everything else. But characterizing liberalism as a grand overall religious or anti-religious worldview, rather than as a specifically political doctrine, is a mistake: a mistake easily rejected by liberals as a caricature which creates a motte and bailey social structure from which escape becomes impossible.

In order to resist our enemy you have to understand him; and if liberalism is not understood as primarily a political doctrine – a political doctrine which by its nature cannot be contained or kept as subordinate by any amount of virtue, moderation, or good intentions – it cannot be adequately resisted.

Almost every conservative or reactionary travels down the same old path, which invariably seduces him into right liberalism.  The infinitesimal number of exceptions merely prove the rule: we are all liberals, and the all encompassing gravity well of liberalism will comprehensively dominate human existence until enough people reject it unequivocally.

Liberalism is ‘more than political’ only in a similar sense to which AIDS is more than a virus. By defining liberal commitments as more grandiose and religious than they are in fact, as something greater or more transcendent than specifically political commitments, we can avoid unequivocally rejecting freedom and equality as political principles (principles of authority in action). This gives liberalism a ‘motte’ into which to retreat whenever its own excesses would otherwise lead to self destruction.

Liberalism always starts as specifically political commitments, just as AIDS always starts out as a tiny invisible virus. We can rage against the snot running down the nose of the AIDS patient all we want; but if we hope to actually prevent AIDS we have to adequately grasp what causes it in the first place.  Only then can we begin to know what to do about it.

A victorious antibiotic infusion against the ku klux klamydia

Donald Trump won the presidency because tolerant, hard working, middle American white people got tired of having their American Dream deliberately destroyed for the enrichment of corrupt self righteous urban coastal elites – elites who at the same time were constantly accusing them of bigotry.  The most tolerant, live and let live race of people on the planet finally got sick of being branded as the officially hated group, simultaneously exploited and despised by the hipster hegemony pretending to be two different political parties.

Trump won by explicitly rejecting the demonization of Middle American whites as illiberal, un-American bigots: the worst thing they could possibly be.  He won by affirming that middle American whites actually really are good liberals despite what all of the lesbians and pedophiles and transwhatever freaks say: that the persecutors of middle American whites among the elite of both parties are wrong to demonize them as the subhuman Low Man.  That he ‘lost the popular vote’ is irrelevant for all sorts of reasons, first of which is that of course all of the urban hipster SJW self-hating white liberals are against him, as expected.  One might as well counterfactually assert that if the game he actually did win had been checkers instead of chess, he would have lost.

Trump’s victory may well hold back the influx of less liberal races of people into middle America for a while, thus preserving liberalism from its own worst self-destructive tendencies; though that remains to be seen.  What Trump will actually do is anyone’s guess really, though I think that whatever it is will clearly not damage the interests of Donald Trump, Inc.

This past election day represented a victory for tolerant live-and-let-live liberalism and for white supremacy, which are the same thing.

Unboxing a fiat dollar, or, the financial nihilism of a ‘balanced budget’

I don’t watch many YouTube videos, because in general I find video to be a waste of time for anything other than entertainment.  I can absorb vastly more information in a much shorter time via text and pictures.  But two exceptions are occasional ‘how to’ videos which instruct in real time while fixing or assembling something (even there text and pictures are often better if available), and ‘unboxing’ videos for products when considering a purchase.  Unboxing a product can tell you quite a bit about it, even after you’ve read high level descriptions and reviews.

This is a blog post not a video, but in it we are going to unbox a fiat dollar. I’ve explained the nature of fiat dollars at a high level before; and I’ve given descriptions of what securities are more generally and how that relates to fiat dollars specifically.  So we know that the sovereign ‘owns’ (regulates, taxes, and defends) the marketplaces over which he is sovereign, and we know that fiat dollars are a security issued by the sovereign granting rights in his marketplaces: a kind of coupon which authorizes a transaction in those marketplaces[1].  For each taxable transaction, the parties transacting must surrender a certain number of fiat dollars to the government.

When the sovereign takes in fiat dollars, from a financial perspective he is simply retiring them he is not storing them away somewhere.  When the sovereign spends dollars, from a financial perspective he is simply issuing new ones.  Financially, securities held on the balance sheet of the very same institution which issues those securities cancel themselves out. Substantively there is no ‘treasury’ of Google stock at Google which represent claims against anything other than Google itself.

So the very idea of the sovereign who issues dollars ‘balancing the budget’ in dollars is malformed: it is like calling it a ‘balanced budget’ when Google issues and retires the same number of shares of capital stock in a given year. This is financially meaningless, and focusing on ‘balancing the budget’ in this way is if anything fiscally irresponsible, the prioritization of the meaningless: financial nihilism.

What I hadn’t given yet though, before prompting by commenter Alex in a previous thread, is a concrete picture of the relationship between tax law and the real value of a dollar.  This unboxing of a fiat dollar is worth elevation into an easily referenceable post, so here it is.

Part of the problem is that tax law is so complicated. But consider a simple fixed-percentage sales tax on just one particular product. A 5% sales tax on widgets doesn’t care how many dollars you charge for your widget. It just requires you to take 5% of the sale of the widget, convert it into fiat dollars, and surrender that number of fiat dollars to the government. So if a 5% tax on widgets were the only tax, fiat dollars would represent a government claim on 5% of the value of every transaction in widgets in sovereign marketplaces.

The percentage-of-widget paid to the sovereign for each (new or used) widget transaction is the sovereign’s economic claim. The sovereign ‘owns’ 5% of every widget transaction under this example tax law. When the sovereign ‘spends’ fiat dollars (say by paying employees), he is selling ‘5% of widget transaction’ vouchers.

Of course in reality tax law is horrendously complicated and pervasive. But conceptually you can think of the tax percentages levied against transactions (including payment of wages) and property as the price paid to the sovereign for transacting in sovereign marketplaces.

Now, I haven’t developed a system of accounting to track this specific area, let alone to track government finance more generally taking into consideration its undefined balance sheet (or equivalent) in a way that accurately reflects the structure of its wide variety of fiduciary duties. But a metaphysically realist partial accounting for the security we call ‘fiat dollars’ or ‘sovereign currency’ in particular does seem possible in principle.

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[1] Property taxes are of a different character.  A property tax is not a tax on a particular transaction within sovereign markets: it is a tax on the mere existence of property, or its ‘ownership’ by an ostensible owner, within sovereign markets.  ‘Property’ which is subject to property tax is not really owned by its ostensible owners: it is owned by, and leased from, the sovereign.