And for all you anti-Semites out there who like to see Jews as society wreckers, yes, Alan Greenspan is a Jew. Sort of a Murray Rothbard (Jew), Frederick Hayek (Jew), Ludwig Von Mises (Jew), Ayn Rand (Jew), Milton Freedman (Jew), Jeffrey Sacks (Jew) type, but a Jew nonetheless. What that has to do with anything, I have no idea, but I know that Libertarianism, like Neoconservatism, is a largely Jewish philosophy or at least a movement that was birthed by Jews, like a number of other 20th Century movements. Now what Libertarianism has to do with the Jews or how it benefits the Jews, I have no idea.
I do know that Jews are radicals. They are always trying to upset the apple cart or redraw the circle no matter where they are on Earth. They’re sort of “born revolutionaries” people with “fanaticism in their hearts” as both Cicero and Voltaire noted.
Kevin MacDonald also noted that Jews tended to be attracted to extreme, radical, or revolutionary movements and that Jewish politics tended to be characterized by a sort of fanaticism. This was noted over a century ago in the ghettos of Galicia. Those Jews were dirt poor, but they were still susceptible to fanatical politics usually cooked up by rabbis and then driven to greater and greater extremes by people fanning the flames. There was also a tremendous amount of “totalitarian” peer pressure applied (calling people self-haters) such that most Jews, even those leery of the Fanaticism Du Jour, eventually were brought into line.
Jews are also sort of born rebels, which may be the same thing as born revolutionaries.
As a Jewish girlfriend told me when I suggested that,
Yes, we are always rebelling. We rebel, the rebellion gets crushed, lots of us get killed, we don’t learn our lesson and then later we do it again, and the cycle repeats.
Jews were staging revolutions as far back as 2,000 years ago with the wild and fanatical Maccabee Revolt and the even more fanatical, suicidal vicious and brutal Bar Khokba Revolt.
From the Net:
“The Warning” – Alan Greenspan’s deployment of Ayn Rand’s version of Austrian School objectivism, libertarianism, and its catastrophic moving aside of regulation.
Very few people wanted to take him on because he knew so much more than they did and if he didn’t he certainly appeared to. Alan Greenspan was looked-upon as the great Wizard – nobody understood what he said, but he said it in such a way that everybody bought it.
It started back in the Ford Administration.
Alan Greenspan was a financial consultant who was hired by Gerald Ford, first to be head of his council on economic advisors in the 1970’s
…he had made himself rich on Wall Street and embraced an unusual guru…Any Rand.
Greenspan is a disciple. She is the great champion of government as a destructive force that just gets in the way.
Rand, “I am opposed to all forms of control, I am for laissez-faire, I am for a completely free unregulated economy…let me put it briefly, I am for the separation of state and economics.”
He had a very clear ideology. His philosophy was in the form of what would be called “libertarianism”
Those who do well prosper, those who do not fail and the market clears the transactions.
It was a philosophy made to order for Ronald Reagan.
“Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” – Reagan
in 1987, Reagan made Greenspan the most powerful banker in the world.
Greenspan was a believer in Ayn Rand, a believer in free market, a little bit curious for a central banker because what is central banking? It’s a massive intervention in the market, setting interest rates.
Greenspan worried about the contradiction, he knew that he was sworn to abide many laws of the land which he believed to be wrong…“I had long since made up my mind to engage in reforms of capitalism as an insider, rather than as a critical pamphleteer.”
He intended to do as little as he could in terms of regulation and he proceeded to do just that.
…The Chairman of The Federal Reserve (a regulatory body that now had at its head a Chairman opening its gates)
When Clinton was elected, he asked Alan Greenspan to stay-on.
Clinton also announced that he would “ask Robert Rubin to serve as the assistant to the President for economic policy.”
The Glass-Steagall Act was repealed under Clinton’s administration: The act did away with the separation of commercial and private banking – allowing investment bankers to use private money, to gamble with the money of private citizens.
Rubin was the best known financier at that point because he had run the legendary Goldman-Sachs.
Bob Rubin was Clinton’s emissary to Wall street and Clinton placed a great deal of trust in Bob Rubin’s knowledge of financial markets and financial regulation.
He had an enormous amount of credibility because he was a business success; and Democratic administrations always seemed to worship people who could excel in business.
And at the White House and as Treasury Secretary, Rubin found an “unlikely” ally.
Bob Rubin and Alan Greenspan had very similar views on Wall Street: it boiled-down to ‘the less regulation the better’
Rubin populated the White House with a network of free market true believers; including Timothy Geitner and Larry Summers.
“The market will take care of everything and regulation will be counter productive.”
Brooksley Born, regulatory interventionist:
Clinton was presented with the opportunity to hire market interventionist Brooksley Born as Attorney General of The US but hired Janet Reno instead. He is said not to have hired Born because he found her “boring.”
Born was given a role of running the obscure CFTC (Commodities and Futures Trading Commission) …. from there she remained a representative of regulation and was invited by Greenspan to lunch.
It didn’t take long for Born to realize that she and Chairman Greenspan were not going to see eye to eye.
He said something to the effect of, “Brooksley, we are never going to agree on fraud.”
She said, “well what do you mean?”
He said, “You probably think there should be rules against it.”
She said, “Well, yes, I do.”
He said, “You know, I think the market will figure it out, and take care of the fraudsters.”
Brooksely Born, as a derivatives expert, saw the catastrophe ahead and tried to challenge this and Rubin told her that she “didn’t understand the law”
SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt had been personally lobbied to shut Born down in her challenge to this.
And then it was Alan Greenspan’s turn:
He was adamant that this was a serious mistake, that it would cause significant damage to the financial services market and that she should stop.
Rubin, Greenspan, Levitt attack..
They were believed by Congress, 90% of whom did not know what a derivative is, they only knew that these (((guys))) seem very smart and they say that if we do this it will be a disaster.
Born responds, “we’re trying to protect the money of the American public, which is at risk in these markets.”
She had no support anywhere.
They banish her powers.
In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis it would be hoped that people would see what went wrong and say, “let’s fix it”…but…it may well be that we’ve passed that critical moment and the necessary reforms will be much more difficult to come by.
Born concludes, “I think we will have continuing dangers from these markets and we will have repeats of the financial crisis of 2008 ..they may differ in details but there will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap, over and over until we learn from experience.