Can you explain what exactly Rand predicted would happen 50 years ago?
- A turn towards the left in economics? That can't count her as very prescient, because most of the last 50 years have been turning the other way.
- An economic collapse? Did she predict that it would happen in exactly 50 years? If not, how is it impressive? I predict that another economic collapse will happen, too. Sometime in the next century, will people be hailing me as a genius?
- This crisis was
not caused by 'government redistributionists' in Rand's book. The most responsible government official was a disciple of Rand-- Alan Greenspan.
And here it the problem I have with all the complaints now that Greenspan is 'unfairly' associated with Rand: I never heard these complaints from the Randians when Greenspan was being hailed as the 'Maestro' and Phil Gramm was praising him as the 'greatest Fed chairman in history.' In
Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, a book of essays promoted by the Rand Institute, Greenspan is author of 3 chapters, alongside only Rand herself and her closest discipline, Nathaniel Branden. But since last October, articles have appeared on AynRand.org denouncing Greenspan and distancing him from objectivism. Unfortunately, his refusal to respond to the explosive growth of derivatives and the obvious rise of two gigantic asset bubbles during his tenure is a
direct consequence of his libertarian philosophy, which held that the market would keep all fraud in check and prevent bubbles.
The greatest irony seems to be that in Atlas Shrugged, there are a small group of indispensable individuals without whom society would collapse: exactly what many thought of Greenspan himself.
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