 | Friday, November 7, 2008 at 22:43:58 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: KPO'M
E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net
Alan Greenspan = John Galt? More like Robert Stadler, I'd say. At best, I'd say he's like Gail Wynand, but, unlike Wynand, Greenspan seems to think his errors were in not being enough of a second-hander, rather than being too much of one. |
| Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 18:19:27 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Chris Cathcart
E-mail: cathcacr(at)gmail.com
URL: http://chriscathcart.blogspot.com
I think I have Greenspan figured out: he's been a pragmatist all along. I just wrote about this in an h.p.o. posting:
"We have economists right now saying every which thing about the
bailout. Just now, we have economists saying that maybe it was better
to let AIG go bankrupt rather than throw $143 billion of taxpayer
dollars at it and still watch it flounder. Of course we need
"pragmatism" and practicality, but at the same time, we don't need to
be throwing darts at a board in the hopes that one of them "works" but
then turns out later not to have really been working. That's a very
bad, very anti-causality, post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc, bound-to-fail
kind of pragmatism. It's the kind of pragmatism that guided Alan
Greenspan probably since the very days of his youth, was never really
fixed in his Rand days, and now has him totally bewildered how his
supposed principles could fail on him.
What kind of principled advocate of laissez-faire capitalism writes
one year that the Fed should be replaced by a gold standard, then
another year goes to the Fed to "try and do good and make things work"
as his buddy Babs Branden rationalized to everyone several years
back? The culmination of Greenspan's association with Rand is that he
was personally impressed, inspired and "fascinated" (his word) by Rand
and her championing of the individual. The notion that he ever
integrated the philosophy strikes me as silly. You'd probably have
better luck getting David Friedman to integrate it if he were even so
inclined as to try. Has the Undertaker really even figured out if he
exists yet? It took Peikoff 15+ years to go from rationalism to an
integrated understanding; you think AG really managed anything like
going from empiricistic positivism to an integrated understanding of
Objectivism, after what we've since seen from him? Highly, highly
doubtful." |
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