Minor Thoughts from me to you

Alan Greenspan's memoir is due for release tomorrow, and the news stories teasing its contents, they be a-poppin'.

Not that this is actually going to help Mr. Greenspan's book's sales as much as it might, since hilariously, both of the articles I've read on the subject today failed to mention the book's title. How much good does free publicity do when the journalists all forget to type in the name of your book?

But then, maybe "America's elder statesman of finance" should've expected as much; after all, while the leaking of his new book's anti-Bush comments are like manna from Heaven to the anti-Bush crowd, most of the rest of the tome is probably nothing people want to hear. While Mr. Greenspan is no longer a believer in Objectivist principles, as Ayn Rand's disciples have furiously noted, the time he spent as a member of her inner circle in the 1950's did ingrain in him at least some modicum of true respect for capitalism - so much so that Mr. Greenspan still advocates a U.S. return to the gold standard. That sort of talk is anathema to the majority of Democrats and Republicans today.

Mr. Greenspan was such a great chairman for the Federal Reserve, though, precisely because of this prevalent mindset in America that one should have faith in free markets just as most people have faith in Jesus Christ: sure, it's important to believe in them, but completely counting on them is just folly. Unlike his belligerent brothers and sisters in the Libertarian and Objectivist movements, Mr. Greenspan decided he was willing to play ball with this delusion. Once nominated to office he gladly went about saving America's government from its own policies, treating every symptom he could find while being careful not to directly attack the disease. As Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's disappointment of an intellectual heir, has fumed: "When he was on the Social Security commission, he helped them to save the rotten institution, rather than to phase it out."

Ironically, such behavior is exactly the target of his mentor Ms. Rand's best-known book. In her final novel, Atlas Shrugged, Ms. Rand's characters learn that capitalists cannot survive by simply doing their best within a framework established by the collectivist mentality of their fellow brothers and sisters.

Of course, Atlas Shrugged ends with its featured capitalists hiding in the mountains and the whole world around them going to Hell in a hand basket, and therein lies the rub. Many feel that abiding by principles to which you confess belief extremely limits one's ability to accomplish anything in this world. Thus Mr. Greenspan chose, much like President Bush himself has, to simply guide the U.S. economy according to whatever plan he thought (a) would help at all and (b) he could get away with. The man who wrote articles like this in 1966 lowered the dollar in the 1990's. Judge the results for yourself.

The name of his autobiography, by the way, is The Age of Turbulence.

You're welcome, Alan.