Alan "Frisco" Greenspan – traitor?
Alan Greenspan was a friend of Ayn Rand, a fact I didn’t know until after I started listening to Atlas Shrugged several years ago. I learned the fact a few chapters in, and after contemplating his actions as chairman of the Federal Reserve (specifically his bubble-blowing inflationary policies) I couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t taken on the role of Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia, one of the characters from Atlas Shrugged. With that in mind, I was amused when I saw Alan Greenspan “Betrayed” Ayn Rand and Ruined the Economy, Says Rand Institute President. Really, Dr. Yaron Brook should reexamine his premises to make sure he didn’t miss something.
For those who haven’t read the book, d’Anconia is the heir to a copper mining empire, and also a classmate and friend of John Galt. He adopts the persona of a playboy who fritters away his family fortune, apparently to no end. What he is really doing is dismantling it piece by piece so that the looters don’t get it. So what does that have to do with Greenspan?
If he’s playing the part of d’Anconia, he purposely devalued the dollar to remove it as a tool of the looters against the producers. Put another way, he is accelerating the dollar’s natural demise as a fiat currency in order to make it completely useless to the looters as a weapon, exactly like d’Anconia destroyed his own empire so that others couldn’t use it against him or other producers.
If this is true, he is either absolutely brilliant (it couldn’t work better if Rand herself had come up with the scheme) or he is too clever by half for underestimating the ability of the looters to manipulate the market and the ability of objectivists and libertarians to reject him as a traitor.
Either way, I get the feeling we’ll know soon enough which flag he flies.