Ron Hera
financialsense.com
Value Subjectivism and Monetary Instability
Subjectivism is the philosophy that reality is what we perceive to be real and that no underlying, true reality exists independent of human perception. In other words, the nature of reality for an individual person is dependent on that individual’s own consciousness. It follows that each person experiences their own reality that is not shared with others. What is true and what seems moral to one person may not be true or moral for another person, i.e., truth and morality are relative. In contrast, objectivism is the philosophy that reality exists independent of human consciousness; that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception; and that objective knowledge of reality can be obtained through perception, evidence and logic, e.g., through scientific methods.
A subjectivist might view the stock market as a perpetual bubble floating on the hopes and dreams of entrepreneurs and investors who invest in stocks in the same way that gamblers place chips on a craps table in a casino, without any concept of an objective economic reality outside of the game. A subjectivist might view technical analysis, which is based purely on trading activity in the stock market, as the ideal tool to understand financial markets, despite the fact that is has no direct connection to the objective economic realities of the companies that stocks represent. In contrast, an objectivist might view the stock market as a venue for participation in business ownership where stocks have value as a function of the particular businesses that they represent and because of the goods and services that the businesses provide in the objective world. A subjectivist might say that “everything is relative” (although the statement is self contradictory), while an objectivist might say that they “…believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification” (Thomas H. Huxley 1825-1895). Although they may not know it, Keynesian economists, bankers and day traders are often philosophical subjectivists while Austrian economists, advocates of the gold standard and value investors are often philosophical objectivists.
