The Rational Argumentator

A Journal for Western Man

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The Rational Argumentator’s Sixth Anniversary Manifesto

G. Stolyarov II

Issue CLXXII - August 31, 2008

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Throughout the first five years of The Rational Argumentator’s existence, a strong empirical tendency has held with regard to TRA visitation. Every subsequent year’s visitation has been slightly greater than the cumulative visitation prior to that year. This year, however, has seen a departure from that tendency. Instead of rougly equaling prior cumulative visitation, TRA visitation since the publication of the Fifth Anniversary Manifesto has exceeded it by over 87%! Indeed, during the sixth year of its existence, The Rational Argumentator has been visited over a half-million times – 531,475 times to be more precise. This is approximately 1.8744 times the prior cumulative visitation of 283,544.

Numerous massive improvements to the magazine can account for such a phenomenal increase. The infrastructure of TRA has undergone a massive makeover, incorporating the latest in Web 2.0 templates and shifting to an open-source program – Kompozer – for creating and uploading pages via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Publishing an article or an index page has largely been reduced to the editing work required. The technical details of formatting and uploading each page have largely been reduced to an insubstantial portion of my effort.

The new website format is considerably more attractive, professional, and easy to navigate than any of its predecessors, and – as always – it will continue to evolve and improve.

Moreover, numerous features have been added to enhance The Rational Argumentator and more firmly integrate it with numerous popular hubs of Internet traffic. My YouTube videos, Free Tools for Rational Education, and free e-book, The Best Self-Help is Free are all externally hosted by websites that attract major traffic . All of these link back to The Rational Argumentator, drawing visitors to its pages and, from them, back to sites like YouTube and Associated Content, where significant amounts of my work can be found. Just like a store in an oft-frequented location tends to attract a lot of business from passers-by, so does a website that is closesly integrated with major online content hubs tend to draw a lot of its visitation from them.

TRA has also broadened its provision of free educational services, especially to actuarial students (via my  free study guides for exams 3F/MFE and 3L) and students of Austrian Economics (via the TRA Audio section).  Moreover, all of my musical compositions are at long last publicly available, and we are seeing just the beginnings of a massive experiment in open-source rational estethics and implicit activism against the ultimate enemy, death itself. As a creative, productive, satisfying leisure activity, you, too, can explore and contribute to Antideath.  Speaking of leisure, TRA’s Rational Leisure section provides an extensive offering of engaging, mind-developing, intellectual flash games. My ambition of bringing rational principles to bear on all facets of human endeavor is steadily being realized.

An extremely significant development – and quite a recent one, dating from early June 2008 onward – has been the establishment of The Progress of Liberty, a companion blog to TRA, containing regular posts integrating political, philosophical, and economic theory with creative ideas for free-market activism. Already, this blog has won a $150 award from Today.com. You might have already noticed a steady integration of TRA with The Progress of Liberty. It is my intention to turn these two venues into a single integrated entity, with essential features embedded into both sites and seamlessly easy navigation between them. The Progress of Liberty enables me to earn small amounts of advertising revenue, which I hope will eventually grow to cover the costs of hosting The Rational Argumentator’s domain. TRA still does not turn a monetary profit from visitation, but my hope is to eventually make it a self-supporting enterprise.

In addition to all the upgrades and added features, TRA has published 51 excellent issues, combining more than 510 essays, videos, works of art, musical compositions, and other intellectually enriching content. In the publication of regular issues, no year has seen more productivity than TRA’s sixth.

I am delighted that the principles of Reason, Rights, and Progress continue to attract an extensive audience of people with varied interests, worldviews, and ideas for the future. The Rational Argumentator will continue to serve as the hub for an increasing, broadening, and intensifying number of endeavors. My aim is nothing less than the gradual but wholesale transformation of contemporary political, economic, cultural, and even biological norms. I have no illusions about how much continued and determined effort this will take, but I do know – to paraphrase Ray Kurzweil – that, while most people greatly overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term, they also greatly underestimate what can be gained in the long term. Over the prior six years, The Rational Argumentator has grown beyond my most optimistic projections. I am even more enthusiastic about what the future will bring.

­­___________

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov’s works have been published on GrasstopsUSA.com. He also posts his articles on Helium.com and Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. His most recent play is Implied Consent. You can also view his YouTube Videos.  Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

Recommend this page.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Click here to return to TRA’s Issue CLXXII Index.

I do not have a dog in the fight between Russia and Georgia. I despise the neo-socialist, authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin and his likely political puppet, Dmitry Medvedev. I certainly do not condone said regime’s persistent violations of the liberties of its own citizens and its rather obvious attempts to restore the “Greater Russia” that existed during the Romanov dynasty and much of the USSR. I emigrated to the United States in part to be free of the machinations of the Russian government and its even more oppressive sibling regime in Belarus.

However, I am not going to enlist my support in favor of the Georgian side in the current South Ossetia War, either. My foremost intellectual position on this matter is more of an entreaty to the United States government that goes something like this. “Please, please, please do not get involved in this horrid mess!” I do not want a regional conflict to escalate into World War III, and I hope to convince you in subsequent posts why my position is the sanest and most reasonable possible.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

Writer, Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46796/g_stolyarov_ii.html

Author, Implied Consent, A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life: http://rationalargumentator.com/impliedconsent.html

Author, A Rational Cosmology: http://rationalargumentator.com/rc.html

Author, The Best Self-Help is Free: http://rationalargumentator.com/selfhelpfree.html                     

Author, The Progress of Liberty Blog: http://progressofliberty.today.com/

Recently, on his excellent blog, Waxing Poetically, Mike LaPenna wrote regarding the “Power of the Internet This Campaign Season.” I enjoyed Mr. LaPenna’s post in particular because he compared two snapshots in time – eight years apart – in the year 2000 and today. Many of us living our everyday lives notice only tiny incremental changes as they happen day by day, and we shift our living patterns accordingly. But over larger spans of time, such as eight years, the sum of the incremental changes results in a massive difference in terms of the opportunities available to us. While, certainly, the 2000s have not been without both major and minor crises, the general direction of our times is onward and upward, especially if we consider a longer-term picture.

There is no better time for the Internet than today. It has become so influential that even the notoriously sluggish and technologically backward politicians of major parties are beginning to recognize the need to adjust to the realities it has created.  Ron Paul’s run for the Presidency in 2007-2008 and the continuation of his impact via his Campaign for Liberty are two more great examples of how the Internet shapes today’s political landscape and brings about increasing receptiveness to free-market ideas.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

Writer, Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46796/g_stolyarov_ii.html

Author, Implied Consent, A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life: http://rationalargumentator.com/impliedconsent.html

Author, A Rational Cosmology: http://rationalargumentator.com/rc.html

Author, The Best Self-Help is Free: http://rationalargumentator.com/selfhelpfree.html                     

Author, The Progress of Liberty Blog: http://progressofliberty.today.com/

The Internet is perhaps the greatest means of individual liberation that has ever existed. It has dramatically lowered barriers to entry into the field of serious discussion and promotion of ideas. Indeed, if you do not have a blog, website, or at least some kind of online presence, you are seriously underutilizing your intellectual potential. You might feel alone or marginalized because few people in your immediate vicinity are sympathetic to your ideas or are even willing to discuss anything in an intellectual manner. This feeling immediately disappears once the entire world becomes your potential audience, and many people with similar interests find your ideas, comment on them, and benefit from them.  If anything, I find that I am often behind in my electronic correspondence because so many people write to me and comment on my work!

Today.com offers a great opportunity for you to both publish your writings and earn a small but useful and gratifying amount of money from them. Especially if you are a free-market-oriented thinker, I would highly encourage you to begin a Today.com blog and register by following this link. You pay nothing, you get exposure for your ideas, and you even get paid to do it! And there will be beneficial network effects from joining a community that already has a few free-market-oriented blogs in it. Maybe, with your help, Today.com will become known as a hub for vibrant, growing discussion and promotion of liberty.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

Writer, Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46796/g_stolyarov_ii.html

Author, Implied Consent, A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life: http://rationalargumentator.com/impliedconsent.html

Author, A Rational Cosmology: http://rationalargumentator.com/rc.html

Author, The Best Self-Help is Free: http://rationalargumentator.com/selfhelpfree.html                     

Author, The Progress of Liberty Blog: http://progressofliberty.today.com/

I have rendered publicly available a new and unusual effort that any willing individuals are welcome to join. It is called Antideath: City of the Future and consists of numerous models of skyscrapers and other buildings that I designed in Google Sketchup. All of the models can be downloaded for free for your own use in creating model cities or derivative works. I hope that these skyscrapers will provide readers of The Progress of Liberty with esthetic enjoyment while at the same time getting them to contemplate the importance of prolonging human life through any means possible – and devising new means to prolong life. I want the fight against death to be at the forefront of as many minds as possible, and putting an anti-death message into a fun project such as this one might help accomplish this purpose. I encourage you to create your own model buildings and submit them for inclusion to Antideath, using the instructions on the Antideath page linked above.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

Writer, Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46796/g_stolyarov_ii.html

Author, Implied Consent, A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life: http://rationalargumentator.com/impliedconsent.html

Author, A Rational Cosmology: http://rationalargumentator.com/rc.html

Author, The Best Self-Help is Free: http://rationalargumentator.com/selfhelpfree.html

Author, The Progress of Liberty Blog: http://progressofliberty.today.com/

The Rational Argumentator

A Journal for Western Man

Principal Index *** Contributors *** Yahoo! Group

Bob Barr versus Chuck Baldwin on Immigration

Part 2 of 2 – Video

G. Stolyarov II

Issue CLXXI - August 26, 2008

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Mr. Stolyarov delves further into his critique of Chuck Baldwin’s position on immigration, which will, if implemented, result in a massive expansion of government and a centralization of power in the United States. Dr. Baldwin claims, sincerely, to be an advocate of the United States Constitution. But many of the measures he proposes to limit immigration have no constitutional authorization whatsoever. Furthermore, they will undermine the sovereignty of private enterprise and the ability of local and state governments to check the power of the federal government. While Baldwin’s understanding of liberty in many other realms is good, Mr. Stolyarov believes that such an understanding is lacking in Baldwin’s proposals regarding immigration.

Please help promote this video by going to this page and giving it a rating of five stars, as well as embedding it on your websites and sharing it with others.

­­___________

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov’s works have been published on GrasstopsUSA.com. He also posts his articles on Helium.com and Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. His most recent play is Implied Consent. You can also view his YouTube Videos. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

Recommend this page.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Click here to return to TRA’s Issue CLXXI Index.

The Rational Argumentator

A Journal for Western Man

Principal Index *** Contributors *** Yahoo! Group

Bob Barr versus Chuck Baldwin on Immigration

Part 1 of 2 – Video

G. Stolyarov II

Issue CLXXI - August 25, 2008

Recommend this page.

In the first part of a two-part video series, Mr. Stolyarov explains why he will be voting for Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate, in the 2008 Presidential Election. He compares Barr’s views on the immigration issue to those of Dr. Chuck Baldwin, the candidate for the Constitution Party. Barr’s view is more reasonable and less simplistically anti-immigration than Baldwin’s, which is a mark in his favor. Barr recognizes some of the problems that arise from illegal immigrants using government services like Social Security, and public education, but he does not wish to reduce legal immigration – whereas Baldwin does. Here, Mr. Stolyarov outlines the positive aspects of Barr’s views and begins a critique of Baldwin’s proposals.

Please help promote this video by going to this page and giving it a rating of five stars, as well as embedding it on your websites and sharing it with others.

­­___________

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov’s works have been published on GrasstopsUSA.com. He also posts his articles on Helium.com and Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. His most recent play is Implied Consent. You can also view his YouTube Videos. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

Recommend this page.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Click here to return to TRA’s Issue CLXXI Index.

The Rational Argumentator

A Journal for Western Man

Principal Index *** Contributors *** Yahoo! Group

Life as the Origin and Basis of Morality – Part 2 of 2 – Video

G. Stolyarov II

Issue CLXXI - August 24, 2008

Recommend this page.

In the second half of this two-part video series, Mr. Stolyarov discusses the fundamental alternative of life versus death that every human being faces and the impossibility of consistently choosing death without dropping dead on the spot. Implicitly, every one of us chooses life, so every one of us needs a system of ethics that answers the question of how one ought to live. Mr. Stolyarov outlines a three-tiered system of basic morality which follows from embracing life. The first tier of morality is doing no harm to others. The second tier of morality is inflicting no harm upon oneself. The third tier of morality consists of civility and integrity. These views of morality can be embraced by anybody who values individual human life – irrespective of other religious beliefs or lack thereof.

Please help promote this video by going to this page and giving it a rating of five stars, as well as embedding it on your websites and sharing it with others.

­­___________

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov’s works have been published on GrasstopsUSA.com. He also posts his articles on Helium.com and Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. His most recent play is Implied Consent. You can also view his YouTube Videos. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

Recommend this page.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Click here to return to TRA’s Issue CLXXI Index.

The Rational Argumentator

A Journal for Western Man

Principal Index *** Contributors *** Yahoo! Group

Booms, Busts, and Krugpot Economics

William L. Anderson

Issue CLXXI - August 23, 2008

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In a recent column, Paul Krugman tries to explain the “Bush bust.” Instead of clear, cogent economic theory, we are fed a mass of contradictory ideas, a bit of political partisanship, and explanations that simply make no sense.

When one attempts to apply economic theory in order to explain certain events, one is reminded of Carl Menger’s dictum: “All things are subject to the law of cause and effect. This great principle knows no exception, and we would search in vain in the realm of experience for an example to the contrary.”

Austrian economists hold that there are certain principles which can be understood and which are based upon immutable laws of human action. Unfortunately, in Krugman’s world, events happen with no real explanation.

For example, he writes,

One of the underemphasized keys to the Clinton boom, I’d argue, was the way the cost disease of health care went into remission between 1993 and 2000. For a while, the spread of managed care put a lid on premiums, encouraging companies to expand their work forces.

But premiums surged again after 2000, imposing huge new burdens on business. It’s a good bet that this played an important role in weak job creation.

Why did they surge, and how would lower health-care costs help create a boom? Those are questions that demand answers. First, and most important, the boom of the Clinton years was centered in the stock market, yet health insurance premiums operate across the board. Furthermore, while the increase might have been slower during that time, nonetheless those costs did rise. Second, a slower rise in health-insurance premiums automatically leading to a boom in the stock market is a non sequitur — or at least Krugman does not connect the dots.

Another cause of the present downturn, Krugman notes, has been soaring prices. He writes,

What about raw materials prices? During the Clinton years basic commodities stayed cheap by historical standards. Since then, however, food and energy prices have exploded, directly lopping about 5 percent off the typical American family’s real income, and raising business costs throughout the economy.

Why has this happened? According to Krugman, it is because Congress did not give President Bill Clinton enough power:

Much of this pain could have been avoided.

If Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform health care had succeeded, the U.S. economy would be in much better shape today. But the attempt failed — and let’s remember why. Yes, the Clinton administration botched the politics. But it was Republicans in Congress who blocked reform, as Newt Gingrich pursued a strategy of “coagulation” designed to “clot everyone away” from Mr. Clinton.

As for high food and fuel prices, they’re mainly the result of growing demand from China and other emerging economies. But oil prices wouldn’t be as high as they are, and the United States would have been much less vulnerable to the current price spike, if we had taken steps in the past to limit our oil consumption.

Again, we are given the non sequitur. How do we know that Clinton’s “reform” would have lowered medical costs? The imposition of Medicare more than 40 years ago was the turning point in driving up medical-care costs. How would this “reform” have resulted in lower real costs to the economy? Krugman does not say how, other than to tell us that those Big Bad Republicans want medical care to cost a lot of money.

In dealing with food prices, one has to wonder if food imports to China and elsewhere have skyrocketed or if caloric intake in Asia is growing. In other words, we are supposed to believe that because the Chinese economy has been growing, the rank-and-file Chinese have been pigging out.

What kind of “steps” would have limited oil consumption? Mandatory rationing? Forcing everyone to purchase high-mileage vehicles? Assume that the government had done these things. It is unclear what opportunity costs would have been imposed by measures that would have made transportation of goods and people more difficult to attain, but one can surmise that such heavy-handed regulations would have made us poorer — and much less free.

Furthermore, I do not know how further restrictions on the oil industry — which I am sure Krugman has in mind — would have lowered oil prices and made Americans less vulnerable to price spikes in petroleum. Again, we are dealing with claims that do not pass Menger’s standards of cause and effect.

Oil is bought and sold in markets that span the world. The only way to separate the effects of world prices and US prices is to set up trade barriers and trade the US-produced commodity in separate markets. That is already done with sugar, where US growers are “protected” from lower-priced sugar grown elsewhere; the price of US sugar is, on average, about three times the world price. So, if Krugman believes that a similar program would lower oil prices, perhaps he needs to review the price-theory class he took at MIT.

If there is a cause-and-effect pattern in this article, it is based solely upon who occupies the White House, according to Krugman. Now, one might expect such talk from the heads of the two main political parties, but a Princeton economist is supposed to operate by higher standards than what prevail in pure, partisan politics.

Can we blame Bush for what is happening and still be intellectually honest? Yes, but one must understand cause-and-effect in economic analysis if one wishes to affix blame that has more explanatory power than “Bush is a Republican and Clinton is a Democrat.”

To understand the current about-to-bust, however, we must look back eight years at the end of the Clinton term. Despite Krugman’s partisan rants, it was clear that the Federal Reserve System had actively pumped up stock values, leading to a dangerous bubble that finally broke toward the end of 2000. By the time Bush took office in January 2001, the NASDAQ was on its way to losing half of its value, and the Dow Jones and S&P 500 indices were in freefall as well.

No doubt, the Bush administration would have loved to try to pump up the markets, but by then it was clear that stock prices had been way out of kilter in relation to fundamentals, and the markets were not going to heed the word of a president or anyone else. Thus, the administration turned toward the moribund housing market.

Following the 9/11 attacks, the Fed lowered interest rates to near one percent and began to push housing. Accompanying the Fed’s push was the “ownership society” mantra that came from the White House and the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, which put a “free enterprise” cover over what was essentially financial socialism.

Not only did we have the Fed forcing down interest rates to below their “natural” levels, but the government and its quasi-government corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, aggressively hawked their mortgage securities, with the implicit agreement that the government (read that, “taxpayers”) would “guarantee” those securities in case they lost value. They lost value anyway.

While Krugman has recognized the bubble and, indeed, recognized it before most other commentators (except the Austrians, of course), his explanation for it is steeped in partisan politics and just plain faulty analysis. The bubble occurred, he claims, because Ronald Reagan mesmerized the country into “believing in free markets,” which led to less regulation, which ultimately led to the financial bubbles. The solution? Re-regulate everything.

One hates to break it to this perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, but the problem is not “unregulated free markets.” For one, financial markets are heavily regulated by government. Second, the real problem has been the belief that government can act as the backstop for every financial failure. In fact, the various guarantees, bailouts, loans, and the other measures taken by the government to prop up failing markets have served not only to lengthen the coming recession, but also to block the recovery. One cannot simultaneously have free and wide-open financial markets and government guarantees to back failures, which economists recognize as a moral hazard.

The government’s idea (and too many people are buying into this nonsense) is that if it can prop up the failing markets (like housing) and every brokerage house and fund that was fueled by mortgage securities, then, somehow, the crisis will pass and the economy will recover. Those holding to Austrian theory, however, know better.

First, and most important, there is a reason the housing market has tanked; the boom was not sustainable. People with middle-income jobs could not reach into their pockets and continue to make payments for houses that had sold at multimillionaire prices. The malinvestments (a distinctive Austrian term) were too massive and the economic fundamentals (there is that word again) simply did not match the go-go housing market.

Second, to prop up the unhealthy, malinvested markets, governments must cannibalize the healthy markets in order to find the needed cash to transfer the wealth. Thus, over time, not only do sick markets fail to recover, but formerly healthy ones also fall into trouble, which is exactly what happened from 1930–1933.

Thus, we move into that territory where Krugman fails to tread: inflation. The Fed has attempted to perform its so-called “bailout magic” by monetary creation, known to the ancients as inflation, which is defined not by rising commodity prices per se, but rather by the unwarranted creation of new money.

Ultimately, why are oil prices rising madly? Certainly, there are supply fundamentals that play a role, but the quick decline of the dollar is mostly to blame. The tipoff has been the subsequent rise of all other commodities, which generally tends to happen in the last stages of inflation. (The earlier stages tend to be concentrated in specific financial markets before moving to commodities and consumer goods, as we are seeing now.)

Krugman, to his credit, has opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, but he also believes that it has been a boon to the economy. (All true Keynesians believe war is good for the economy, although they believe that “massive public works” are even better.) Austrians, however, recognize that the huge federal budget deficits are largely caused by the war and are financed with government paper that will surely lose large amounts of its value soon enough.

(At least the Clinton administration was able to target the stock market, so the wave of sales also meant a spike in capital-gains-tax revenues, which played a major role in balancing the federal budget. Housing sales, however, do not provide the same high-tax returns, which meant that while there was a huge amount of financial activity, the tax proceeds from this bubble were not as high as they were during the Clinton bubble.)

All of these things place huge pressure on the dollar, and the poor currency has crumbled. Again, Bush has not made a single public statement that has corresponded with the reality of the markets. Instead, he has offered bailouts and other schemes that will only prolong the financial agony.

So, can we blame Bush for what is currently happening and what will surely happen in the next year? Absolutely, and we can do it with great relish and authority.

Nonetheless, if we are going to criticize this president, one hopes that we do not fall to the Big Lie that George W. Bush believed in those free markets that utterly failed him and the country. Krugman seems to have done so, and judging from what we hear from Congress and the media, it seems that the loudest voices in this crisis are also the voices that are just plain wrong.

­­___________

William Anderson, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, teaches economics at Frostburg State University. Send him mail. See his articles.

Recommend this page.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Click here to return to TRA’s Issue CLXXI Index.

The Rational Argumentator

A Journal for Western Man

Principal Index *** Contributors *** Yahoo! Group

Life as the Origin and Basis of Morality – Part 1 of 2 – Video

G. Stolyarov II

Issue CLXXI - August 23, 2008

Recommend this page.

In this first installment in a two-part video series, Mr. Stolyarov discusses how one might rationally arrive at an ethical system. He shows why a system of ethics based on divine (or human) command is arbitrary and inadequate. Then he goes on to demonstrate that there are necessary prerequisites to an ethical system – namely, the life, volitional faculty, and rationality of those who espouse it. Just as no system can be used to disprove or deny the axioms on which it is founded, neither can an ethical system be used to deny or subvert the values of life, volition, and rationality. Rather, it ought to take the furtherance of these values as its starting point.

Please help promote this video by going to this page and giving it a rating of five stars, as well as embedding it on your websites and sharing it with others.

­­___________

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov’s works have been published on GrasstopsUSA.com. He also posts his articles on Helium.com and Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. His most recent play is Implied Consent. You can also view his YouTube Videos. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

Recommend this page.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Click here to return to TRA’s Issue CLXXI Index.