ATLAS TUGGED (via Brother Murphy):

Alan Shrugged: ...And Washington fell to its knees: a review of The Age of Turbulence : Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan (Andrew Ferguson, 10/08/2007, Weekly Standard)

I recalled an odd moment from a biography of Ayn Rand, the radical libertarian philosopher to whom Greenspan was devoted earlier in his career.

"Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?" Rand once asked a mutual acquaintance.

It wasn't a rhetorical question, apparently. This was in the late 1950s. By then, Rand had published her two thick, preposterous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and stood poised on the brink of international stardom. Her creepy philosophy of Objectivism, placing the self at the center of the moral universe, was being enthusiastically embraced, as it still is, by tens of thousands of pimply teenage boys in the dreamy moments between fits of social insecurity and furious bouts of masturbation. As her cultish fame spread, Rand wanted to keep tabs on her most intimate acolytes. Of these Greenspan was the most promising and, by all appearances, the most normal. Which worried her. [...]

He is an expert in having it both ways, ducking in and out of controversies, kibitzing about matters on which he had no responsibility (taxes and spending, for example, which are controlled by elected officials) and then taking offense when elected officials dared to kibitz about the interest rates he and his colleagues controlled. The habit of evasion has continued with the release of this book. Greenspan gave an advance peek at its contents to Bob Woodward, who wrote a front-page curtain-raiser story in the Washington Post. The news in the book, Woodward wrote--undoubtedly with Greenspan's acquiescence--was Greenspan's criticism of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress.

"My biggest frustration," Greenspan writes of George W. Bush, "remained the president's unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending." As for Republican congressional leaders, they were "readily inclined to loosen the federal purse strings any time it might help add a few more seats to the Republican majority." Their insistence on cutting taxes showed the same heedlessness. The result, Green-span says, was not only unconscionable federal deficits but also his own disillusionment with his party. As a lifelong Republican, he's ashamed.

It should go without saying that Greenspan is not the first Republican to criticize the overspending of the last several Republican Congresses. Lots of Republicans have done it--really, you could look it up. But even they acknowledge, as Greenspan does not, that more than irresponsible spending and tax cuts have contributed to the deficit. We've seen, among other things, two wars; a very, very big hurricane; and a massive deployment of resources against terrorism. Bush officials responded to the Woodward story by noting that Greenspan, as Fed chairman, had testified in favor of the tax cuts. And Bush himself pointed out that today's budget deficit, at 1.5 percent of GDP, is quite low relative to the 30-year average.

Confronted with this fact-based analysis, Greenspan switched the terms of debate. "The president's numbers are correct," he told Fox News. "The issue is really not the short term .  .  . but what the potential is for the budget deficit when the Baby Boomers retire." That's not true: The complaints that Woodward splashed on the front page of the Post, and which launched Greenspan's book into bestsellerdom, were precisely about the "short term." Yet Greenspan slides in and out, bobs and weaves, keeping his reputation for integrity intact.

In the Washington that Greenspan inhabits, some kinds of evasiveness are preferable to others; it helps if you're criticizing out-of-favor Republican greasebags and an unpopular Republican president.

The press is to him as he was to her.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 8, 2007 10:44 PM