Fortunately I was too lazy yesterday to do right by Alan Greenspan, the latest rat to blacken the hawsers of Bush’s sinking ship.
Fortunately, because Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerrilla has posted almost everything I planned to say about the veteran free-market regulator of the free market. Almost, because Susie missed a particularly inane specimen of Greenspaniana from an old essay by him in Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Newsletter:
Regulation, in an unregulated economy, is thus a major competitive tool…Drug manufacturers and food processors vie with one another to make their brand names synonymous with fine quality. Physicians have to be just as scrupulous in judging the quality of the drugs they prescribe…
A company cannot afford to risk its years of investment by letting down its standards of quality for one moment or one inferior product; nor would it be tempted by any potential “quick killing.”
Poor Alan, you must be thinking by this point. Little did the young economic consultant know that the thalidomide tsunami was about to smash his naïveté to bits.
Hold your pity. Greenspan’s youthful brain dropping appeared in August of 1963, well after Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz broke the story of how a brave federal regulator named Dr. Frances Kelsey had singlehandedly protected the United States from the worst horrors of thalidomide.
To be ignorant of this Greenspan would have had to be living on Mars. Evidently he was not. On the very next page of the same fatuous essay he writes:
The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something. He gets no credit if a new miraculous drug is discovered by drug company scientists; he does if he bans thalidomide.
Perceptive and to the point -- my only objection, as someone who spent years working with hawks and eagles and reluctantly having to kill rats to feed them, is the easy slander of rats so endemic and ubiquitous that it's hardly ever noticed. Rats are smarter, more clever in terms of achieving objectives, more loyal, and more public (rat public) - spirited than anyone in the Bush - Cheney - Administration, even though Alan Greenspan is not in that category anymore. Their behavior more resembles that of scorpions, every one for itself although collaborating for personal gain while things are going well. Other than that, as I said, I think you have a quite perceptive and relevant commentary.
Posted by: Saintperle on September 16, 2007 10:03 PM