Larry Beinhart’s Body Politic: Alan Shrugged

by Larry Beinhart, November 24, 2008

The most interesting, and perhaps the most important, moment in philosophy in the last decade occurred on October 28, 2008, in a hearing of the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-California), during an exchange with Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006.
Ah, Alan Greenspan….

As Justin Martin writes in his meticulous biography Greenspan: The Man Behind Money (2001, Basic Books), “By the dawn of the new millennium, it was nearly impossible to find anyone in America who wasn’t ga-ga over Greenspan. Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Main Street, dogs and cats—all were high on the Fed chairman.”

Along came 2008. Now it’s “The Reckoning: Taking a Hard New Look at the Greenspan Legacy" (New York Times, October 8, 2008) and Alan’s in the “Bubble Hall of Shame.”

Alan Greenspan was an Objectivist. What, you may ask, is an Objectivist? A follower of Ayn Rand, most famous for Atlas Shrugged, a novel in which the capitalist entrepreneurs go on strike against the collectivist shlubs in government (who dare to tax and regulate) and the working class (who dare to form unions), but they’re really just leeches, and when the great men abandon the shlubs, the world collapses.

The true capitalists go off to the wilderness, form their own little utopia, build railroads that run on time and airplanes that never crash, and have fiery, gorgeous, young, college-educated heiresses desperate to bed them. It was an expression of her philosophy, which she took very seriously, and called Objectivism. She established a group, and was surrounded by devotees and acolytes. They believed that man was rational and that real morality came from strict devotion to one’s own self-interest. They wore gold dollar-sign tiepins or brooches, depending on their gender, hated collectivism, and worshipped capitalism.

When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Ayn Rand’s real name was Alissa Rosenbaum. She was a Russian Jew.

When I discovered that, I suddenly had a whole new understanding. There’s this thing about Jews. Pardon me, as I plunge into ethnic stereotyping here. But as a Jew, via Latvia and Belarus, I claim a certain latitude.
Jews like to think. Nudge one, and a philosopher begins to spout. They have a theory—about the world, God, food, love, human relations, politics. It’s happy, it’s sad. It is, especially, utopian.

They’re good at it. They make up great theories. Partly because theories are just theories, and partly because Jews are normally the underdog, so there’s almost always a humanistic heart beating beneath the ideologies they invent.