I, like many here, have seen Alan Greenspan as a wicked man, under whose leadership the Fed led us to the ledge the world now scrambles pathetically to keep a hold of. However, a thought just occured to me that may shed light on Greenspan’s motives and reasoning.
Alan Greenspan was a disciple of Ayn Rand, and was part of her inner circle during the writing of Atlas Shrugged. He has since said he was wrong in his views, and his actions would appear to confirm his denials, but it is possible that they never changed, and that his actions were deliberately in line with bringing a true free market about.
Greenspan inherited, when he became President of the Federal Reserve, a financial system which had already long been broken, one rife with injustice and inefficiency. Fascism Lite, if you will. So, let’s return to the previous background: what was Atlas Shrugged about? Was it about the preservation of an unjust system? No, it was about its DELIBERATE destruction.
Now, the world is less vulnerable to the refusal of great men to contribute than it is made out to be in that book, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. One could hardly have planned a better way to make possible the destruction of world financial and political systems than deliberately building up the largest and most leveraged bubbles in history. As any student of history could tell you, such bubbles ALWAYS burst, and the bigger they are, the more devastating is their detonation.
Maybe my cynicism muscle just needs more of a workout. Maybe Greenspan is every bit the moronic scuzzbucket he appears to be. But some of the heroes of Rand’s work appeared to be traitors to their own principles, too, before the fullness of their plans were revealed. We may never know. But it’s an interesting possibility.
I highly doubt if Greenspan’s intentions were such, that he would speak about it before and/or during his ‘plan’'s execution. Although, how would one stop such a plan from being executed, sans “taking the hard medicine” & experiencing it, instead of making it worse?
I personally view it as an interesting possibility, but I’m not foolish enough to immediately buy into it.
However, yet again, I have to second the line “it’s scary how much that makes sense”.
I think its at best interesting fiction, & thinking otherwise would probably serve to foist undeserved worship or positive views upon one of the very schills for said financial mafia.
Also, I haven’t read anything of Greenspan in the past, including his moonlighting with Objecticvism, that would indicate or even imply that a said scenario would be remotely true.
The other reason it is unbelievable is that, if it were true, Greenspan could have in fact done much more as Fed chairman to cause damage than he did. Granted, he did a lot of damage, but he could have done even more if he so chose.
He sold his soul to the establishment. What is more to know? Block points out if you were to work within the system, if he was elected Fed Chairman he would use it as a bully pulpit to end the system he is in charge of. Speak out against, promote a gold standard etc.
Greenspan didn’t do any of that, because it was not his intention. He knows the effect, he knows he created the bubble, the bust is his fault. He sold out.. its as simple as.
Also, he doesn’t deserve all the credit(silly pun?) for the current mess…the rest of the government contributed to the coming ojectivist revolution, too =]
Well, now, if he went too over the top, if he didn’t just open the door to let the greedy and shortsighted destroy their own system, he might have made his position too obvious, and it’s not like I’m the only person who knows these things about his past; it’s public knowledge. Further, the consequences for him would be devastating, and perhaps even moreso for his true philosophy, if he were to reveal that he deliberately sabotaged the financial system.
This nation (the US) is about to suffer terribly. The suffering was inevitable, but it might have been delayed, and been stretched out much longer, but for the actions of Greenspan and his loose-credit and other policies. As it stands, the breakdown has already been remarkably swift, and will become devastating to the point that Biblical references to wailing and gnashing of teeth will not seem inappropriate.
I am not saying this idle speculation reflects the truth, but I don’t see why it’s less likely than the alternative. Sure, it seems more outlandish; folly is always easier to believe than cunning. But are we truly to believe that an educated and intelligent man, a man who studied with one of the icons of Capitalist thought, who herself wrote of destroying the parasitic economies of man from within while in his company, would then go on to authentically blindly accept and promote ideals so contrary to those he had previously held as true? That a man, dubbed “the Undertaker” by his fellows, would be part of and possibly contribute to a book about men deliberately destroying the economic systems of the world, then go off and contribute mightily to the destruction of the economic systems of the world, would act without connection between that past and his later actions? That a man, already aged by the time he was part of Rand’s circle, could so change his views late in life to become such an ignorant schill for the Fascism Lite of our age?
Note that I am no Rand worshipper. Frankly, I find much of her philosophy repellent in its complete disregard for one’s obligations to dependents and her unwillingness to follow her philosophy through to its logical conclusions.