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ALAN SHRUGGED

There was a time when the economic world would stop, and in hushed reverence, listen attentively while a personage from Mount Olympus dictated the terms of its future survival. In guru-like pronouncements, Alan Greenspan would raise or lower interest rates by a quarter of a per cent, and everyone would go, “Ooooh,” and then return to their hum-drum, mortal lives, buoyed by the
Knowledge that all was well in the summit of the gods.

A young nephew, who is a banker, questioned the suggestion in one of my postings, a few weeks back, that laissez faire had outlived its usefulness. Yesterday’s specter of a chastened Greenspan admitting to Congress that he had dropped the ball (he didn’t even see it coming!), seemed to make my case by agreeing that, in the future, regulatory reins would have to be applied in order to check the impulse of runaway capitalism.

Although it may seem to be ancient history to some, that same Alan Greenspan used to be an avid attendee at those famous salons hosted by (always for me the suspect) Ayn Rand, in her Manhattan apartment. She was a middle-class emigrant who escaped the excesses and pogroms of the nascent Soviet Union. Arriving here in 1925, a hopeful novelist and film buff, she was captivated by Hollywood and eventually conquered it and the Eastern elites with her nebulous “Objectivism,” an economics philosophy combining her distaste for the new Russian collectivism and an idealized notion of American “freedom.”

I always have been suspicious of Rand’s philosophy, especially as exemplified in her novels, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” The latter, for fifty years, has been the capitalist bible for Greenspan and his clones. “Atlas Shrugged,” is as outmoded as the evils of the Soviet Union, whose nefarious practices prompted its creation. Ironically, in the novel Rand attributes the collapse of a fictional United States economy to a government that sought to repress a freewheeling capitalism. This, of course is contrary to our present, real-life situation, where our government, controlled by Ayn Rand devotees, has allowed the moneyed class to take us to wrack and ruin.

By the way, have you noticed how the Republicans now have become “victims;” how a Democratic White House, Congress and control of the Supreme Court is going to gang up on them and their prerogatives? My response: “It’s about damned time!”