Tuesday's startling testimony by Alan Greenspan was more than just another opportunity to divine the direction of nominal interest rates. Coming from a onetime acolyte of Ayn Rand and an architect of the Reagan "revolution," the Fed chairman’s denunciation of "infectious greed" was the epitaph of libertarianism. (NPR’s Marketplace had the wit to ask actor Ed Asner, a lifelong leftwing Democrat, to read Greenspan’s dryly delivered remarks in the dramatic tones they deserved.) His words were evidence that even aging libertarians have to grow up someday.
Rand’s ideas long outlived her. According to the absolutist philosophy enunciated by the late author of "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," greed is almost always good, and the more "infectious" the better. In her parody of Marxism, she insisted that unfettered avarice would advance the greatest benefit of the greatest number. (If you have noticed a similarity between these infantile ideas and what currently passes for "conservatism," then you’re catching on.) While Greenspan has moderated his views over the decades since he sat at the feet of Rand in her New York apartment, he remains the most prominent libertarian fellow-traveler ever to hold high office in this country.
The Fed chairman seems to have finally shaken off the remaining vestiges of this creed, which still guides the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the House Republican leadership and innumerable lonely college students. After expressing his dismay over the vastly increased "avenues to express greed," he went on to make another startling admission for a man of such inclinations. Until recently, he explained, he had believed that market forces alone would provide sufficient discipline to the accounting profession, and that "regulation by government was utterly unnecessary and, indeed, most inappropriate." Then he said, "I was wrong."
And with that, Greenspan blew taps for the Republican right. So much for two decades of ideologically-driven dismantling of government protection for investors, consumers and citizens. Goodbye to all that, and good riddance. Maybe someday we’ll see a revival of the kind of conservatism that once valued social solidarity along with enterprise, and demanded responsibility as the price of privilege.
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Carl
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