[muliolis]

Since the filibuster is used to stall the passage of new legislation, I’m all for it.

[muliolis]

Porphyrogenitus: You might think that approach would work. But I have tried it. Most recently, the liberal I was talking to simply brushed it aside and told me that I don’t understand the Great Depression. He still hasn’t explained it to me.

But it is the truth, so it might convince other people, so we have to keep using it.

[muliolis]

Power corrupts. Enough said.

[muliolis]

Thinking more about it, I’m wondering if Rockefeller and Vanderbilt were blamed for the Long Depression, which was called The Great Depression at the time.

Obviously Venderbilt couldn’t be blamed for the 1930’s Great Depression. This would be absurd.

However, my understanding is that the Panic of 1873 and the following depression were caused by monetary expansion that was used to finance the Civil War.

Just to be clear, I haven’t seen the History Channel special, and only got that accusation from these friends of mine.

[muliolis]

I have my own blog at http://thefreemarketsalibi.blogspot.com/

I call it The Free Market’s Alibi because of how often the consequences of government regulation are blamed on the free market. The free market could not be guilty, because it wasn’t there. There was no free market!

[muliolis]

Some close friends of mine said they watched this series, and came away with the impression that Rockefeller and Vanderbilt caused the Great Depression. Exactly what the %#$@ are they talking about?

I may be giving them a subscription here for Christmas.

[muliolis]

Hello. New member here. As an Objectivist, I think that Ayn Rand gave a better answer than JohnD’s Objective/Subjective dichotomy, and that is the Objective/Subjective/Intrinsic TRIchotomy.

What JohnD calls Objective, something being good or bad in and of itself, independednt of human perception, Ayn Rand calls Intrinsic. Her definition of Objective in the context of ethics means that something is good because of its actual identity, its real world qualities that are independent of our perception, in relation to how we percieve those qualities serve human needs and goals, in particular promoting human life.

I think it was Professor David Kelley who used the metaphor of a collision between two cars, say a Ford representing the object’s real qualities, and a Chevy representing our perception of how it serves human purposes. So ask yourself, is the collision within the Ford or the Chevy? Without one or the other, the collision would not have happened. Both are needed.

In a real-world example, lets take the value of an antibiotic like penecillin. Penicillin is of great value to us (lets omit factors like antibiotic resistence, please) because something about it’s chemical structure makes it a poison to many kinds of bacteria, but harmless to humans, so it is an excellent cure for bacterial infections. We most definitely percieve a cure for disease as a great value. But penecillin would definitely not have that value if it didn’t in fact have that chemical structure that makes it a poison to bacteria.

And to further make the point, before even the germ theory of disease and the discovery of penicillin as a cure, it was simply an unpleasant mold found on certain kinds of fruit. Theoretically, it was of great potential value, but since we didn’t even know the theory, it was of no value.

[Author]

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