Flickr Photo Download: Alan Greenspan
The writing is a little hypey, but Susan Madrak has a very good point in her piece about Alan Greenspan over at HuffPo.
According to the Randian wet dream, all regulation is a gun held to the head of Noble Businessmen by jackbooted thugs.
(snip)
One episode in the book as described by the Post is telling: When he first heard and read details of the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters, Greenspan writes, “I was incredulous. ‘There is no way these stories could be correct,’ I told my friends. ‘No way.’ ” Later, when it was verified, Greenspan says, “I wondered how the president could take such a risk. It seemed so alien to the Bill Clinton I knew, and made me feel disappointed and sad.”
And see, this is the problem with True Believers. They fall in love with an ideal, much the same way a 15-year-old fantasizes about the perfect life she could have with her favorite rock star. They are extraordinarily naive about the complexities of human nature.
I mean, who would ever believe that thievery would run rampart in a deregulated atmosphere? Who knew? Who could imagine that terrorists would fly planes into buildings, or that invading Iraq to steal their oil wouldn’t be a cakewalk?
Who could know? Not me! It’s not my fault!
Susan Madrak: Greenspan Shrugged – Politics on The Huffington Post
As for Greenspan, he was officially associated with Ayn Rand in 1960s and 70s, but he still had some connections later than that. I saw him at an Objectvist event in the early 1980s – it was either Ayn Rand’s funeral or the first Ford Hall Forum speech that Leonard Peikoff gave after Ayn Rand’s death. I am pretty sure it was the Ford Hall Forum speech, though.
That True Believer part is spot on. I think it’s part of what I find so
personally compelling about the biography of Malcolm X – he went from
criminal to prisoner to celebrity and True Believer but at the end of
his life he’d turned a corner and started to be aware of the
complexities of life, without becoming cynical. That’s a story that you
don’t see very often; human growth and change.
