{"id":2583,"date":"2007-09-19T23:45:51","date_gmt":"2007-09-20T06:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/09\/19\/alan-greenspan-and-those-parasites\/"},"modified":"2007-09-19T23:45:51","modified_gmt":"2007-09-20T06:45:51","slug":"alan-greenspan-and-those-parasites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/09\/19\/alan-greenspan-and-those-parasites\/","title":{"rendered":"Alan Greenspan and those parasites"},"content":{"rendered":"

This<\/a> caught my eye, from the This Modern World weblog (which apparently became a group blog since I stopped regularly reading it a few years’ ago.)<\/p>\n

Well then.\u00c2\u00a0 This should be easy to find.\u00c2\u00a0 Here is Alan Greenspan’s letter to the New York Times, in its entirety, regarding Atlas Shrugged:<\/p>\n

To The Editor:<\/p>\n

“Atlas Shrugged” is a celebration of life and happiness.\u00c2\u00a0 Justice is unrelenting.\u00c2\u00a0 Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment.\u00c2\u00a0 Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.\u00c2\u00a0 Mr. Hicks suspiciously wonders “about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,100 pages and some fourteen years of work.”\u00c2\u00a0 This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing.<\/p>\n

— Alan Greenspan<\/p>\n

A case study in the quotation I’ve settled into regarding Ayn Rand — \u00e2\u20ac\u0153(Ayn Rand) requires the fervent elitism of late adolescence to truly be taken in. One either needs to acquire a taste for Ayn Rand then, or not at all.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/span><\/p>\n

But you can also draw a direct line between that letter, and its parasites, and his Fed Chairman era quotation about how “maintain a level of worker anxiety” was his main purpose in tending to the economy. \u00c2\u00a0 Libertarianism, and “Objectivism”, ceases to make sense — as a practical service, Greenspan was never drawing down the government, but pulling levers in the government, and its relations with business.\u00c2\u00a0 But I hear that Ayn Rand devotees of a certain stripe compare Greenspan to some character or other in one of those books (Atlas Shrugged?\u00c2\u00a0 That other one whose name escapes me at this moment?) — a sell-out, you cannot function into the government system like that.\u00c2\u00a0 And thus, a cult apparatus springs up<\/a>: get away from that evil, please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This caught my eye, from the This Modern World weblog (which apparently became a group blog since I stopped regularly reading it a few years’ ago.) Well then.\u00c2\u00a0 This should be easy to find.\u00c2\u00a0 Here is Alan Greenspan’s letter to the New York Times, in its entirety, regarding Atlas Shrugged: To The Editor: “Atlas Shrugged” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}