Alan Greenspan – Hypocrite

There was good response to yesterday’s quiz, both on-line and off-line. The following quotes were presented:

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

… the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.

The correct answer was Alan Greenspan. About 75% of the response were correct. The quotes all were from Gold and Economic Freedom which Greenspan wrote in 1966 and was included in Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” Back in the day, apparently Greenspan was a Randian and these quotes would certainly support such a contention.

Milton Friedman was the second-highest choice, while other votes went to Mises, Reagan, Sowell and Thatcher.

One of the responders stated that Ayn Rand considered Alan Greenspan an “opportunist.” Given what Greenspan professed to believe and then what he did to the country, the term is entirely too mild. Greenspan was nothing more than a political animal, willing to do whatever was necessary to stay in the good graces of the ruling elite. The phrase “opportunistic, unprincipled charlatan” seems appropriate as a description.

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