|
How Alan Greenspan Learned
To Stop Worrying and Love the State
Roderick T. Long
Lew Rockwell.com
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Alan Greenspan started off his political career,
under Ayn Rand’s influence, as a fairly consistent Austro-libertarian,
penning articles defending the gold standard and condemning antitrust
law. Nowadays, of course, while he still calls himself a libertarian,
few would accuse him of excessive purity in that regard. There’s
been much speculation as to the when and why of his transition.
For what it’s worth, in Greenspan’s recent memoir
The Age of Turbulence (which I’ve looked through so you
don’t have to – though I haven’t read the whole
thing), we hear the story in his own words.
There’s not much libertarian meat in the book; the only
libertarian or libertarian-ish figures to appear in the index
(apart from a brief – and mistaken – reference to
Herbert Spencer (pp. 278–79) as “a follower of Charles
Darwin”) are Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. (Well, we also
learn that (p. 323) former Putin advisor Andrei Illarionov is
an Ayn Rand fan.) Greenspan’s favourite economist is clearly
Friedman, on whom he lavishes praise throughout; his favourite
political figures, likewise adulated, are Reagan and Thatcher.
Despite his early Austrianism, there’s no reference in the
index to Mises, Hayek, or any other Austrian economist. (Okay,
Benjamin Anderson shows up in a footnote; and Fritz Machlup is
mentioned on p. 497 although he’s not in the index.) Greenspan
refers (pp. 97–98) to his own early libertarian essay on
antitrust, written for The Objectivist – but only in connection
with his using it as material for winning Andrea Mitchell’s
affections. (I am not making this up!)
(Article continues below)
Greenspan’s libertarian odyssey begins with his conversion
to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. When he first encountered Rand,
he was an adherent of logical positivism, which he describes this
way:
Pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is a school of thought
whose main tenet is that knowledge can only be gained from facts
and numbers – it heavily emphasizes rigorous proof. There
are no moral absolutes: values and ethics and the way people
behave are reflections of culture and are not subject to logic.
(p. 39)
The reference to Wittgenstein is an error; the positivists were
inspired by a certain interpretation of Wittgenstein’s writings,
but it was a deeply mistaken interpretation that Wittgenstein
himself never endorsed. (And who doesn’t think that “knowledge
can only be gained from facts”?) But never mind. In any
case, his introduction to Rand and her salon soon chipped away
at his enthusiasm for positivism. The following story is a familiar
one in Randian circles, but this is (I believe) the first time
we’ve heard it from Greenspan’s own perspective:
After listening for a few evenings, I showed my logical-positivist
colors. I don’t recall the topic being discussed, but
something prompted me to postulate that there are no moral absolutes.
Ayn Rand pounced. “How can that be?”
“Because to be truly rational, you can’t hold a
conviction without significant empirical evidence,”
“How can that be?” she asked again. “Don’t
you exist?”
“I ... can’t be sure,” I admitted.
“Would you be willing to say you don’t exist?”
“I might....”
“And by the way, who is making that argument?”
Maybe you had to be there – or, more to the point, maybe
you had to be a twenty-six-year-old math junkie – but
this exchange really shook me. I saw she was quite effectively
demonstrating the self-contradictory nature of my position.
... It dawned on me that a lot of what I’d decided was
true was probably just plain wrong. Of course, I was too stubborn
and embarrassed to concede immediately; instead, I clammed up.
This exchange suggests that the young Greenspan was not especially
well-versed in the logical positivism he espoused, since the positivists
themselves did cover this sort of objection in their writings
and could have provided, if not unassailable answers, at least
better than no answer.
Rand came away from that evening with a nickname for me. She
dubbed me “the Undertaker,” partly because my manner
was so serious and partly because I always wore a dark suit
and tie. Over the next few weeks, I later learned, she would
ask people, “Well, has the Undertaker decided he exists
yet?” (p. 41)
Full
article here.
|
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
|
|
