Objectivist Round-up, Mid-August

1. Someone posted what Leonard Peikoff said years ago on his podcast concerning Alan Greenspan (the context was the apparent admission by Greenspan that free enterprise and de-regulation were in part responsible for the 2008 economic crash):

This is a question on which I have deliberately been silent for decades, and I'm not going to go into a torrent of denunciation here, but I will say something briefly.

All I can do is give you some observed facts through the years. In the 1950s, which is when I knew Alan, he was a totally different person from what he obviously is today. He's just not the same person now. I'll give you a personal biographical touch that I guess would be relevant here. In the early days, when both Alan and I were getting to know Ayn Rand, she observed that there was a difference between us, that we both committed a certain error in opposite directions. I gave too much emphasis to the moral and not enough to the practical, and Alan gave too much emphasis to the practical and not enough to the moral. She told us we each had to work to correct this error and not separate mind and body.

I did work, if I say so myself, and ultimately did integrate the two. But Alan never did. He favored that axis and minimized morality, an attitude that became much worse when he went to Washington and was confronted by compromisers, and he justified giving in on the grounds that "It's better to get something done than nothing," which in some cases was better. Increasingly, though, the longer he was in Washington, the more he had a desire to rise and be accepted and be one of them, and the less, therefore, ideas and abstractions mattered. He still proclaimed his overall philosophy. He told people he was a follower of Ayn Rand, but ideas stopped having meaning for him in the face of approval and concrete-bound deals. I think ideas actually atrophied in his mind and became insignificant, a liturgy that didn't really tie to reality.

Then the major crisis came. He no longer had any ideas to explain it, and this once-brilliant—and, believe me, he was once tremendously brilliant; you'd have been stunned by his intelligence—this one-time pro-capitalist has turned himself into an unintelligent, anti-intellectual evader, and he's now doing so in the guise of being honest, "admitting" his ideas were wrong and 'fessing up to it

I think there's another motive here too. If he were to face what the actual cause was, he would discover that a very big part of it is the behavior of the Federal Reserve in the final years under his jurisdiction. It's perhaps easier for him, if ideas aren't that important, to blame the philosophy, rather than saying, "I'm the cause of the disaster, or at least part of the cause."

Anyway, that's all I'm going to say about Alan Greenspan. I have refrained from any comment for many, many years, but this one is just too much to refrain from.

Aside from the obvious – Peikoff must remind us of Rand’s high estimation of him – if he saw Greenspan’s gradual dissent from Objectivism, then why didn’t Rand see it? My guess is that, like most people, she liked friends in high places.

2. Ayn Rand Institute author Ben Bayer said recently that “Protestantism is un-American.” Actually, one could argue that the United States is founded upon Protestantism. Most all of the United State Founders were members of Protestant denominations, and most states had established or semi-established Protestant churches at the founding. Bayer says he can’t find biblical justification for a protestant work ethic; however, Protestants were fond of citing II Thes. 3:10, “for even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat." (Incidentally, Johnathan Edwards’ sermon, Sinners in the Hands of Angry God – although a favorite of high school teachers --isn’t representative of Edwards’ sermons.)

--Neil Parille