I guess I thought of her as important in my development, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she’d had an impact on so many others. In those salad days of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s [my high school and college years] there were a couple of threads running. There were the classic 1950’s memes – the birth of Rock and Roll, "ivy league" clothes, teevee. But there was another scene – the beatniks, progressive jazz, intellectuals and "pseudo-intellectuals" sitting around talking about deep things in coffee houses – Zen Buddhism, Nuclear Disarmament, Jack Kerouac, modern art, and even Objectivist Epistemology. Ayn Rand was a romantic figure in that scene – cigarette holder, artsy friends, sexual liberation, outspoken ideas. Back then, the word "cool" was "cool," and Ayn Rand fit the bill. I don’t recall thinking of her as "right wing." That was reserved for the lunatics in the John Birch society. In my life, Rand was, however, a force that turned me "left." Once I woke up to the narcissism of her thesis, I started moving the other way and by the next year had found a more personally comfortable place in the growing Civil Rights Movement. But Rand had remained in my mind as a romantic rebel from a formative age.
I’ve kind of enjoyed my former conceptualization of Alan Greenspan. A Jewish kid from New York, kind of ugly in the Woody Allen or Dave Brubeck tradition, who was a hipster playing jazz Clarinet and Sax. I guess I thought of his Ayn Rand days like my own – a fifties thing and then he moved on. I wondered if he became one of her young lovers. I thought it was cute that he cavorted with Barbara Walters and Andrea Mitchell. An irregular "cool" guy from the days of yore. I had absolutely no clue that he was the prophet and promoter of deregulation that he seems to have been. I had no idea that he never "got over" Ayn Rand like I thought everyone had. Even after I learned about his continued ideological attachments to those ideas, I had no clue that they had driven his actions as Chairman of the Fed. I didn’t attach the proper valence to his opposition to Brooksley Born. And I guessed that he just made a bad call on the housing bubble. Like most others, I saw him as a goofy looking braniac who deeply understood our economy and made it work. That’s how he seemed. That’s how he talked in public. That’s how he was portrayed on television – The Maestro, as Bob Woodward labeled him. Frankly, I never understood a word of what he said when I saw him on the news, but I mistook his ramblings for brilliance instead of bullshit.
Now that I’ve spent some time looking into his tenure, I’m appalled. It reminds me of how I felt during the Viet Nam protest days. I supported the student uprisings against the war, but was aghast when the Weathermen started blowing up things. Scream and shake fists, but don’t put your fantasies into action – not like that. So after a couple of days of reading Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan, I’m still agog. He actually got to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve and ran it operating with the heroic fantasies of a disaffected immigrant author! It just boggles my mind. It’s one thing to write in 1963::
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"It is precisely the ‘greed’ of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit seeking which is the unexpected protector of the consumer. It is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for integrity and a quality product. A company cannot afford to risk its years of investment by letting down its standards of quality for one moment or one inferior product; nor would it be tempted by any potential ‘quick killing,’"
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But it’s quite another to say in 2008 that he still thought that after getting a PhD in Economics and spending 45 years in the real world of Wall Street. Didn’t he see the movie?:
| Greenspan: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief." |
It’s the same feeling I had when I realized that Bush and Cheney had actually drummed up a bogus excuse to invade Iraq. I was incredulous that grown people would put an adolescent fantasy of that magnitude into action in the real world at a cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. I’m still incredulous. I feel the same way about Bin Laden’s attack on New York.
There is a group crew there blog is http://www.citizensforethics.org which tries and many times succeeds in spotting corruption and fights it through the courts. The group doesn’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat because they try to keep politicians and politics clean.