Lyly's Campaspe

Since every rouged & rutting Phyllis

& our rude waking to what her bill is

 By Homonoia is accorded an Appelles

Suet her tits, sausage rings her bellies

Nathless, that whore so rides Aristotle

Only to prove no wine is its bottle.

Why Hohfeld rules, Kelsen drools.

 

Henry Cohen summarises Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law thus- 

Kelsen was a legal positivist.

i.e. law is a command 

The "positivity" of law, in his words, lies in the fact that it is created and annulled by acts of human beings,

sovereigns or those acting for sovereigns 

thus being independent of morality and similar norm systems.

This does not follow. A command may be defeated by the higher claim of morality, religion or some other normative system. Moreover, one defeated command may lead to loss of sovereignty or the power to command. Thus commands aren't independent of anything which might lead to their defeat or disregard.  

This constitutes the difference between positive law and natural law,

Positive law may say it is natural and natural law might say that it is obvious that the Sovereign has commanded it or was just about to do so before deciding to invade Poland instead. Kelsen was a stupid man who couldn't tell the difference between shite which is only different by ipse dixit stipulation.   

which, like morality, is deduced from a presumably self-evident basic norm which is considered to be the expression of the "will of nature" or of "pure reason."' Kelsen labelled his theory of positive law "the pure theory of law."

rather than the 'shit theory of law'. I wonder why? 

He explained the nature of its purity: [I]t seeks to preclude from the cognition of positive law all elements foreign thereto.

This can't be done. Cognition is bound up with the entire web of predication. You can't even separate law from econ or biology.  

The limits of this subject and its cognition must be clearly fixed in two directions:

No limits can be placed on any thing which is epistemic. German pedants were donkeys. 

the specific science of law, the discipline usually called jurisprudence, must be distinguished from the philosophy of justice, on the one hand, and from sociology, or cognition of social reality, on the other.

Distinguishing things doesn't mean they have discoverable 'limits'.  

The pure theory of law should be distinguished from the philosophy of justice.

Both are useless. Moreover, they may presuppose each other in various useless ways.  

While the pure theory of law is a science

only in the sense that the sexy theory of astrology is a science 

justice is an "irrational ideal" 

it may be arbitrary. It isn't irrational.  

and "a judgment of value, determined by emotional factors and therefore subjective in character."

Emotions are either Darwinian algorithms of the mind or we live in an occasionalist universe. There can be 'naturality' in that which is 'subjective' (i.e. has no observable metric) just as naturality may be lacking in an 'objective' configuration space- e.g. Arrow Debreu.  

" The pure theory of law must also be distinguished from sociological jurisprudence.

Only in the sense that we must distinguish my attempt to donate sperm to the moon from ordinary cases of public exposure & indecent behaviour during the course of a School excursion to the Zoo. 

Still, if you are too stupid to practice law & are stuck teaching it to people who are too stupid to practice law, then make such distinctions by all means. 

The pure theory of law studies norms-"propositions that state how men should behave" -

There are no such norms. There are merely certain actions which are forbidden- that too in specific circumstances (e.g having a wank on the Tube or taking a dump on the steps of No.10 Downing Street).  

whereas sociological jurisprudence studies what "is"-how people actually behave.

It is shit. Turds are incapable of studying anything except how to get smellier or squishier.  

Thus, Kelsen agreed with neither the natural law theorists,

who thought laws could have 'naturality' (i.e. be 'non-arbitrary') or canonicity such that all jurisdictions would converge to the same rule. Since this hasn't happened even between Scots & English law, we can safely say the thing is a pipe dream.  

who viewed law and morality as sharing the same basis,

Everything to do with human beings shares the same basis- e.g. wanking on the Tube & teaching this shite in a University.  

nor the legal realists, who believed that law consists solely of "the actual decisions of courts that litigants must live with."

This is clearly false. Many things which are clearly justiciable are nevertheless res non lege decisae

Law as a Coercive Order 

The coercive order is independent of law. I have the legal right to tell Mike Tyson he is totes gay & desperately wants to suck me off. Sadly, the coercive order which obtains has him punching off my fucking head if I try to exercise my right. 

Kelsen viewed law as a coercive order of human behavior. 

Did it stop the 'Night of the Long Knives'? No. Kelsen was clearly wrong. No wonder he couldn't get an Academic appointment when he first moved to the US. 

Laws "command a certain human behavior by attaching a coercive act to the opposite behavior."

No. Those with the means of coercion command. My infant son used to beat the fuck out of me till I surrendered the TV remote to him so he could watch Tellytubbies. The odd thing was, he got me to clean up after myself and even do some cooking and cleaning. He didn't like his Mum having to act like my unpaid servant. 

He disagreed, however, with the belief of John Austin, who

lived in a nice country where the 'Crown in Parliament' saw Justice as a service industry whose aim was utility- nothing more, save in egregious cases of repugnancy. 

 posited laws to be "a species of commands,"" since a command "is essentially a willing and its expression," 

or baby beating me or  biting my nose till I changed the channel to 'Tellytubbies'. But, at a later point, even the neighbour's cat could get me to watch 'Aristocats' for the umpteenth time instead of 'Fist of Fury'. I'm lying. It is 'Pyaasa' that I watch continually. 

and because it is doubtful whether some laws embody the true will of anyone."

There can be no doubt that, if everybody wants 'representative government', they go along with whatever legislative compromise proves 'incentive compatible'. 

 Many legislators enact laws without understanding them, let alone willing them.

They 'meta-will' them- i.e. will to will whatever results from some legislative process. But 'meta-will' is just 'will'. 

 Kelsen preferred to describe laws as norms or rules "stating that an individual ought to behave in a certain way, but not asserting that such behavior is the actual will of anyone."

In Civil Law, this may seem to be the case- e.g the conduct of a bonus paterfamilias with respect to culpa levis in abstracto. But, Hohfeld shows us the proper way to understand tort actions of this type. Essentially, you have an immunity if you show that your conduct was such as a person of the highest diligence would have exhibited in defending his own interest albeit it was a third party who was affected. 

Hohfeld was the only jurist of the previous century who wasn't pants. Add in Coase's theorem & Myerson type incentive compatibility & ...what? We are back where we started- which is a good way to be if the alternative is being stuck up our own assholes. 

முருகன் அழகு

When the Shraman pauses peregrination for Ind's four months of rain

& the Brahman praises Shiva for taking on Vishnu's Katechon's strain

Then, because Nappinnai repaired Venkateshwara's tresses

Not even Shunyata's mundan Bali, in Sutala, distresses.

Envoi- 

Prince! Krishna is the cowlick of whose skulls are bare

& why even the blackest black hole yet has hair

What Sheep say about parables

Though our shepherd's flesh furnishes, to gourmets, galavati kebab

& His blood burnishes, for the bibulous, Burgundian sharab

Nathless, it is to traffic in, but, the mohair of His beard

That, for England's Woolsack, we, yet, are reared

Envoi-

Prince! That Berenice's votive tresses, Belinda's ravished lock

Heaven's pasture now possesses, famished thy flock!

Wang Wei's Sarnath divyadhvani

Wingless the lonely mountain affords not a soul to sight

Just human voices homing through gloaming light

Slanting sun-beams, as green moss, are remade

& of Hou Yi's loss- Dreams' deer palisade. 

Did Karl Marx know the difference between dot Indians & feather Indians?

Yes. He had been to University. But he often got them confused because his IQ was low. 

The following is from Das Kapital

When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it.

Why compete with a machine? Suppose my wife had tried, even in the most luckluster manner, to compete with my Dyson, do you really think I'd have voided the warranty on it? 

Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and felt by great masses.

The benefit is gained by everyone. However, there can be transitional 'structural unemployment' for some. 

History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers,

Fuck off! The harrowing of the North was the worst thing in English history. 100,000 died.   In Yorkshire, 75 percent of the population perished.  

an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally sealed in 1838.

the spinning jenny enabled the wages of handloom weavers to rise very substantially. Then weaving itself was mechanised.  

Many of them died of starvation,

why not enter the Work House instead?  

many with families vegetated for a long time on 2 1/2 d. a day. 

But cloth got cheaper for everybody.  

On the other hand, the English cotton machinery produced an acute effect in India.

It made cloth a little cheaper- a good thing.  

The Governor General reported 1834-35: “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cottonweavers are bleaching the plains of India.”

Why the fuck would Lord Bentinck tell such a stupid lie? The answer is that he said no such thing. Karl Marx is thinking of the 'trail of tears' in the US. The path taken by the forcibly relocated Native Americans was marked by the bleached bones of those who succumbed to hunger, disease, exposure or exhaustion. 

If cloth gets cheaper, everybody benefits though some may suffer in the short run as they are forced to change their occupation. When technology improves, the quantum of muscular labour required tends to fall. This created the possibility that the industrial proletariat might, at some point in the future, shrink as a percentage of the population. This meant that the window for a Communist Revolution only existed while this percentage was still rising. Even in that case, there was the danger that an employer might share productivity gains with the workers. Without class conflict, Marx's theory of history collapses. 

Kyenes's 'means to prosperity'

In 1933, Keynes published a pamphlet titled 'the means to prosperity' which proposed that

1) the problem facing the world was one of not distribution but coordination. Yet when relative prices change, there are distributional effects if enough of income goes to or arises from a particular market (e.g. wages for workers, real interest rate for thos eliving off savings, oil for those who own oil wells etc.). Consumers who spend a big proportion of their income on a particular item- e.g. potatoes or rice for subsistence farmers)- sufffer a loss in 'real income' when the price of that staple rises. 

Changing the price vector is contentious. Moreover it may have perverse effects. Fix the price of bread too low and there is no bread in the market. The rich eat meat instead. The poor starve. 

What isn't contentious is improving coordination. People do that all the time. They don't need some stupid Professor to tell them how to do mutually beneficial deals.

2) No 'concurrency problem' arose- i.e. there was some 'natural' way of deciding in what order things should be done even if this had distributional consequences. Sadly, what is contentious is the order in which things are done. Everyone thinks they should get priority or else they expect some reward for delaying their gratification. 

3) Keynes was also saying that Structural unemployment associated with falling or stagnant productivity didn't really matter. Something could be done for workers in 'Sunset industries' without harming 'Sunrise industries' by taxing them too the hilt. 

THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

If our poverty were due to famine or earthquake or war

some poverty around the world- e.g. in China where Civil Wars raged- was attributable to such things. Britain wasn't poor because it had won the war, avoided a prolonged General Strike, and could import as much food as it liked from its huge Empire.

—if we lacked material things and the resources to produce them, we could not expect to find the Means to Prosperity except in hard work, abstinence, and invention.

People did lack material things. The 'resources to produce them' were too expensive for them to be profitably produced. One reason for this was that rents needed to fall in real terms. But a lot of the capital stock needed to be sold for scrap. There had to be a shake out in many different industries.  

In fact, our predicament is notoriously of another kind. It comes from some failure in the immaterial devices of the mind,

people had different views about what was right and what was expedient. It is difficult to coordinate the actions of people who want different things and who hold radically different beliefs about how the world works.  

in the working of the motives which should lead to the decisions and acts of will, necessary to put in movement the resources and technical means we already have.

Suppose there were a 'revelation principle' such that everybody would truthfully reveal to a central planner exactly on what terms they would be willing to buy and sell commodities and consume and pay-for public goods, then there might be an incentive compatible 'mechanism' to optimally coordinate actions. Sadly, there is a problem of impredicativity- our preference depends on the preferences of others. More sadly, we don't know the truth about ourselves for a very good reason- viz. to baffle a predator or parasite our 'source code' is hidden even from ourselves. Moreover, there are concurrency, complexity, computability and categoricity problems which make the problem intractable. 

It is as though two motor-drivers, meeting in the middle of a highway, were unable to pass one another because neither knows the rule of the road.

Easily solved if one is willing to give way.  

Their own muscles are no use; a motor engineer cannot help them; a better road would not serve. Nothing is required and nothing will avail, except a little, a very little, clear thinking.

No. Clear thinking won't help. One has to give way to the other. A sacrifice has to be made.  

So, too, our problem is not a human problem of muscles and endurance.

Nor, for Old Etonians like Keynes & Strachey, was their problem sutpidity and ignorance. This is because if you are an Economist, talking bollocks is what gets you paid, son.  

It is not an engineering problem or an agricultural problem. It is not even a business problem, if we mean by business those calculations and dispositions and organising acts by which individual entrepreneurs can better themselves. Nor is it a banking problem, if we mean by banking those principles and methods of shrewd judgement by which lasting connections are fostered and unfortunate commitments avoided. On the contrary, it is, in the strictest sense, an economic problem, or, to express it better,[Pg 6] as suggesting a blend of economic theory with the art of statesmanship, a problem of Political Economy.

It was a coordination problem of a type familiar to oligopolists, bankers, etc. If everybody raises price or expands output at the same time, chances are they will all do okay. If one expands and the others don't, it may go bankrupt.  

I call attention to the nature of the problem, because it points us to the nature of the remedy.

If we all point our arses in a particular direction and fart simultaneously, we will be able to reverse the direction of rotation of the earth. As the first Superman film showed, this will cause time to go backward. In this way we can defeat Lex Luthor and save Lois Lane.  

It is appropriate to the case that the remedy should be found in something which can fairly be called a device.

For Keynes, money was a 'subtle device' for linking the present to the future.  

Yet there are many who are suspicious of devices,

gimmicks? 

and instinctively doubt their efficacy. There are still people who believe that the way out can only be found by hard work, endurance, frugality, improved business methods, more cautious banking, and, above all, the avoidance of devices.

These things would still be required. But one thing more was needful. A collective determination to talk the right, rather than the wrong sort, of bollocks. 

But the lorries of these people will never, I fear, get by.

Because lorry-drivers didn't go to Eton. Thus they don't understand that one or other must give way. Either, the thing is covered in the Highway Code or they toss a coin or have a pissing contest. 

They may stay up all night, engage more sober chauffeurs, install new engines, and widen the road; yet they will never get by, unless they stop to think and work out with the driver opposite a small device by which each moves simultaneously a little to his left.

What Keynes says about 'lorries' is also true of people. If you go to the City of London, you will find Bankers standing motionless on the street. This is because they don't understand that if they both move a little to their left, they will be able to pass each other by.  

It is the existing situation which we should find paradoxical.

If we were mad.  

There is nothing paradoxical in the suggestion that some immaterial adjustment—some change, so to speak, “on paper”—should be capable of working wonders.

It is magical thinking.  

The paradox is to be found in 250,000 building operatives out of work, when more houses are our greatest material need.

Why did Keynes want yet more houses? His material needs were easily met by waiters and tailors and rent-boys.  

It is the man who tells us that there is no means, consistent with sound finance and political wisdom, of getting the one to work at the other, whose judgement we should instinctively doubt.

More particularly if he shows us his dick. Otherwise, the fact is, we don't meet a lot of blokes who talk to us about 'sound finance'. We do meet guys who say they will lower our taxes or raise our benefits if we vote for them. The problem is that there's some stupid shit they feel it is very important for them to do before they get round to keeping their promises.  

The calculations which we ought to suspect are those of the statesman, who, being already burdened with the support of the unemployed, tells us that it would involve him in heavy liabilities, present and to come, which the country cannot afford, if he were to set the men to build the houses; and the sanity to be questioned is his, who thinks it more economical and better calculated to increase the national wealth to maintain unemployed shipbuilders, than to spend a fraction of what their maintenance is costing him, in setting them to build one of the greatest works of man.

Keynes didn't know that the cost of a ship or a house includes raw materials and expensive equipment. He probably thought builders shit out bricks.  

When, on the contrary, I show, a little elaborately, as in the ensuing chapter, that to create wealth

by getting builders to shit out bricks & then use those bricks to build houses which can float on air (to save on having to pay for building plots) 

will increase the national income and that a large proportion of any increase in the national income will accrue to an Exchequer, amongst whose largest outgoings is the payment of incomes to those who are unemployed and whose receipts are a proportion of the incomes of those who are occupied, I hope the reader will feel, whether or not he thinks himself competent to criticise the argument in detail,

Did you know that if you buy a Time share, not only will you get free holidays, you will also receive rent for all the weeks when you aren't on holiday? This basically means that you double your income! What's more, if you take a Time share on your Time share, you can quadruple your money! No wonder the Government wants to ban what they call 'fraudulent' Timeshare sales. Don't they understand that if everybody's Income quadruples, so will the Government's tax revenue! 

that the answer is just what he would expect,—that it agrees with the instinctive promptings of his commonsense.

You'd have to be an idiot to pass up this amazing opportunity! Also I have some magic beans you will want to exchange your cow for. 

Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object,

because of the disincentive effect? 

and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the Budget. For to take the opposite view to-day is to resemble a manufacturer who, running at a loss, decides to raise his price, and when his declining sales increase the loss, wrapping himself in the rectitude of plain arithmetic, decides that prudence requires him to raise the price still more;—and who, when at last his account is balanced

by the forced sale of his inventory 

with nought on both sides,

No. There is likely to be a loss. 

is still found righteously declaring that it would have been the act of a gambler to reduce the price when you were already making a loss.

The manufacturer knows his business well enough. If the current price doesn't cover your marginal cost you may as well see if demand is inelastic. If it isn't, you go bankrupt a bit more quickly- which may be a blessing in disguise.  

Economists pretend that there was a 'device' to fix the Depression which would have no distributional or other socially divisive or politically problematic consequences. But, it was obvious, there was no such magical remedy. 

It is a different matter that Accountancy practices in the Treasury & Reserve Bank needed to change just as they needed to change in the private sector. Better book-keeping is a 'means to prosperity'. Writing books can make you a bit of money but won't have any magical effect on the economy.