My Actifit Report Card: April 13 2022

Didn’t get a whole ton of writing done today, but some of that is that I’m really hitting my limits with regards to productively writing without recharging. Tomorrow I hope to get a finished-ish version of the work for this client done (we have progress blockers from other people, but it’s just slotting in images and other content that will be other peoples’ problem and my part of that is basically putting in a placeholder and waiting to right-click a couple times).

Listened to Bastiat’s The Law and started C. S. Lewis’s God in the Dock today.

The Law never gets old. It was written in response to the French Revolution and Proudhon, and is perhaps one of the greatest classical liberal texts ever written and a cornerstone of the Austro-libertarian tradition I belong to.

One of its key points is that the moment you deviate from deontological moral law (which is essentially negative and exists to provide justice for victims through restitution from aggressors) and into positive law created because of human reasoning and desires, you wind up moving toward an ‌immoral conclusion.

In short, the problem is that once you start interfering in any activity that is not a direct violation of someone’s negative rights–that is, their rights to person and property and the use of these within their own property–you wind up starting to take from people, either in the true sense of the word through taxation and seizure or in a more expansive form that considers the restriction of action as a limitation on ownership.

This expansive form may sound like word-play at first, but it’s worth noting that what really happens here is a little different than merely redefining a term. After all, if you don’t own yourself or the things regarded as your property, you wouldn’t be able to use them as you see fit.

True ownership, then, includes as a part of its essential qualities the ability to alter, manipulate, resell, and otherwise dispose of property. Self-ownership is a little weird here–Hoppe argues that one has a constantly renewed right to one’s body as if one is constantly re-appropriating it, which is a little too complicated for me to explain well but makes a compelling argument against things like slavery or indenture.

As Bastiat sees it, what happens is that the law eventually normalizes plunder, and plunder is the antithesis of productive economic activity. Once again, Hoppe has expanded on this by arguing that people begin to use political skill instead of economic skill when choosing courses of action, since the market is suppressed and the property of others is fair game for the taking.

The old adage that war is politics by another means is especially true in this light, since the “law” that results from legislation and arbitrary use of coercive government force is really little more than banditry on a nation-wide scale.

God in the Dock is very interesting. There are parts of it which seem to be basically lectures that Lewis gave or questions that he answered in speaking, which is very interesting. I don’t think he’s right on everything (though he’s certainly not far off in most cases), but there’s something admirable in being able to just go and speak about often quite expansive and complicated topics without a lot of hemming and hawing about.

Carrion Birds is coming along nicely. I’ve created a tool to help the people running a game keep track of minor (or even, really, major) characters by setting up a one-stop-shop for all the rules and other stuff they need.

My goal is to release the game, include a character sheet, GM NPC record sheet, and GM screen as one digital package and have it be a $5 thing that draws a certain amount of market interest. I’m not sure how feasible that is when all is said and done, but that’s part of the joy of the process.

Right now it’s about 50% done, and probably even more than that. I’m working on the GM section, some of the fuzzy rules, and character advancement.

As far as projects goes, it’s very low hanging fruit as far as effort goes but I think it’ll be the sort of thing that actually has some value as part of a catalog.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io

Walking