Greenspan: My View On The Way The World Works Is Flawed



(image via Reuters)

This has been a bad month for Ayn Randians. True, Rand's cartoonish philosophy and purple prose is vaguely romantic and, we cannot fail to note, in confluence with the pick-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps theme of American business. It also does well among Hollywood's New Agey set. But "Objectivism" also greatly underestimates the complex psychology of human beings. Worse: the demonization of "altruism" -- or, as we like to call it compassion -- is thoroughly reptile and unbecoming of civilized women and men.

One needs only look at the shithead financier-banker types and their undisciplined thumotic excesses, their "I'm-gonna-get-mine" attitude, to see the fatal flaw in the Randian ontology.

Now the methueslan Alan Greenspan, the most prominent Randian ever, essentially is disavowing "Objectivism." Greenspan, speaking before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform this morning, said, with maximum pomposity, "I found a flaw in the model of the critical fundamental structure of the way the world works."

Even in the face of massive philosophical defeat, the puffed-up Randian finds a way to make himself the center-of-the-cosmos. Greenspan added, "I've been going for 40 years or more with the conception that things were going well."

Oops.