Make Boston Red Again

Well said. One addition. Greenspan was the Robert Stadler of our age: the brilliant man who knew the right principles and betrayed them, certain his own genius could control the evil he agreed to serve. He was a member of Rand's inner circle. His essay "Gold and Economic Freedom" appeared in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. He argued, correctly, that the gold standard protected savers from confiscation, that statists hated gold because it blocked their deficits, and that abandoning it turned deficit spending into a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. He even understood that Social Security was a Ponzi fraud that would help bankrupt the nation. He knew all of it. Then he took command of the Federal Reserve and did the opposite of everything he had written. The Greenspan put, rates held at one percent, the housing bubble, the very confiscation he had warned of, engineered by his own hand. Here is the irony. Greenspan knew Atlas Shrugged intimately. He watched Rand create Stadler, the genius who lent his mind to the looters' Institute believing he could outwit them, and who lived to see his knowledge weaponized as Project X. Greenspan studied that warning at the source, from the author herself. He understood the character completely. Then he walked the identical road and became the man the novel was written to expose. When the wreckage came in 2008, he told Congress he had found "a flaw" in his model. There was no flaw in the model. The flaw was in the choice to abandon what he knew. Some men meet the virus and are consumed by it. Greenspan had the answer at forty and spent the next fifty years pretending he had forgotten. The savers he once vowed to protect paid for the performance.