It is up to the public to adopt libertarian principles. Rather than blame public figures like Greenspan who need to be worshipped, ultimately we should fault the people who do the worshipping.
Recall that I put Mallaby’s Greenspan biography at the top of my list of books of the year.
Mallaby is right. Too many people –in Greenspan’s case, too many financial experts– have been worshipping him. Why? I assume that it’s for the same reason that a Chinese economist “worshipped” the government’s GDP forecasts in the 1990s: he liked to acknowledge his ignorance (although he had a Ph.D. from MIT and worked for a top investment bank) by saying that he didn’t have any reasonable argument against government’s forecasts.
‘If the Treasury was out to gut his power base, Greenspan would counter-attack. ”
Stuff like that is just depressing.