Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chairman from 1987-2006

By Wayne Hankins

History is written from the lives of good leaders with vision and principle, or bad leaders who led their people and countries to ruin and suffering because of their peculiar values, beliefs or ideas they felt were right and true. However, in following their ideal, something far different than they could have ever imagined or wanted came to be. When simply bad or false beliefs are carried to their logical ending, bad things follow. I will discuss the relationship between the ideology of Objectivism as defined by its creator, Ayn Rand, and the economic crash of 2008. I look closely at the steward of America’s monetary and regulatory policies, the Federal Reserve (the “Fed”). To correctly comprehend the workings of the Fed during the last two decades in large measure is to understand the beliefs of its past chairman (1987-2006), Alan Greenspan.

At 18, Greenspan first read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and was immediately hooked on her views of individual rights and their broader expression economically within laissez-faire capitalism. He saw this also as a moral argument against totalitarian communism.

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