[R-G] Klein: 'Thanks a million, Ayn Rand, for setting the greedy free'

[Anthony Fenton]

Copyright 2007 Guardian Newspapers Limited
All Rights Reserved
The Guardian (London)

September 29, 2007 Saturday

SECTION: GUARDIAN COMMENT AND DEBATE PAGES ; Pg. 34

LENGTH: 996 words

HEADLINE: Thanks a million, Ayn Rand, for setting the greedy free:  
The trickle-down theory beloved of Greenspan and his ilk is less a  
philosophy than a handy excuse for avarice

BYLINE: Naomi Klein

BODY:


The tall graduate student, visiting the US from Sweden, would not be  
satisfied with a quip. He wanted answers. "They cannot only be driven  
by greed and power. They must be driven by something higher. What?"  
Don't knock power and greed, I tried to suggest - they have built  
empires. But he wanted more. "What about a belief that they are  
building a better world?"

Since I began touring with my book The Shock Doctrine, I have had a  
number of exchanges like this, revolving around the same basic  
question: when hard-right political leaders and their advisers apply  
brutal economic shock therapy, do they honestly believe the trickle- 
down effects will build equitable societies - or are they just  
deliberately creating the conditions for yet another corporate  
feeding frenzy? Put bluntly: has the world been transformed over the  
past three decades by lofty ideology or by lowly greed?

A definitive answer would require reading the minds of men such as  
Dick Cheney and Paul Bremer, so I tend to dodge. The ideology in  
question holds that self-interest is the engine that drives society  
to its greatest heights. Isn't pursuing their own self-interest (and  
that of their campaign donors) compatible with that philosophy?  
That's the beauty: they don't have to choose. Unfortunately, this  
rarely satisfies graduate students looking for deeper meaning.  
Thankfully, I now have a new escape hatch: quoting Alan Greenspan.

His autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, has been marketed as a  
mystery solved. The man who bit his tongue for 18 years as head of  
the Federal Reserve was finally going to tell the world what he  
believed. And Greenspan has delivered, using his book and the  
surrounding publicity as a platform for his "libertarian Republican"  
ideology, chiding George Bush for abandoning the crusade for small  
government and revealing that he became a policy-maker because he  
thought he could advance his radical ideology more effectively "as an  
insider, rather than as a critical pamphleteer" on the margins. Yet  
the most interesting aspect of Greenspan's story is what it reveals  
about the ambiguous role of ideas in the free-market crusade. Given  
that Greenspan is perhaps the world's most powerful living free- 
market ideologue, it is significant that his commitment to ideology  
seems rather thin and perfunctory - less zealous belief, more  
convenient cover story.

Much of the debate around Greenspan's legacy has revolved around the  
matter of hypocrisy, of a man preaching laissez faire who repeatedly  
intervened in the market to save the wealthiest players. The economy  
that is Greenspan's legacy hardly fits the definition of a  
libertarian market, but looks very much like another phenomenon  
described in his book: "When a government's leaders routinely seek  
out private-sector individuals or businesses and, in exchange for  
political support, bestow favours on them, the society is said to be  
in the grip of 'crony capitalism'."

He was talking about Indonesia under Suharto, but my mind went  
straight to Iraq under Halliburton. Greenspan is currently warning  
the world about a dangerous looming backlash against capitalism.  
Apparently, this has nothing at all to do with the policies of  
negligent deregulation that were his trademark. Nothing to do with  
stagnant wages due to free trade and weakened unions, nor with  
pensions lost to Enron or the dotcom crash, nor homes seized in the  
subprime mortgage crisis. According to Greenspan, rampant inequality  
is caused by lousy high schools (which also have nothing to do with  
his ideology's war on the public sphere). I debated with Greenspan on  
the US radio show Democracy Now! recently and was stunned that this  
man who preaches the doctrine of personal responsibility refuses to  
take any at all.

Yet ideological contradictions are only relevant if Greenspan really  
is a true believer. I'm not convinced. Greenspan writes that as a  
student he had no interest in big ideas. Unlike his classmates in  
thrall to Keynesianism, with its promise of building a better world,  
Greenspan was simply good at maths. He started doing research for  
powerful corporations; it was profitable, but Greenspan made no  
claims to a higher social contribution. Then he discovered Ayn Rand.  
"What she did . . . was to make me think why capitalism is not only  
efficient and practical, but also moral," he said in 1974.

Rand's ideas about the "utopia of greed" allowed Greenspan to keep  
doing what he was doing but infused his corporate service with a  
powerful new sense of mission: making money wasn't just good for him,  
it was good for society as a whole. Of course, the flip side of this  
is the cruel disregard for those left behind. "Undeviating purpose  
and rationality achieve joy and fulfilment," Greenspan wrote as a  
zealous new convert. "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose  
or reason perish as they should." Was it this mindset that served him  
well as he supported shock therapy in Russia (72 million  
impoverished) and east Asia after the 1997 economic crisis (24  
million pushed into unemployment)?

Rand has played this role of greed-enabler for countless disciples.  
According to the New York Times, Atlas Shrugged - Rand's novel that  
ends with the hero tracing a dollar sign in the air like a  
benediction - stands as "one of the most influential business books  
ever written". Since Rand is simply pulped-up Adam Smith, her  
influence on men such as Greenspan suggests an interesting  
possibility. Perhaps the true purpose of the entire literature of  
trickle-down theory is to liberate entrepreneurs to pursue their  
narrowest advantage while claiming global altruistic motives - not so  
much an economic philosophy as an elaborate, retroactive rationale.

What Greenspan teaches us is that trickle-down isn't really an  
ideology after all. It's more like the friend we call after some  
embarrassing excess who will tell us, "Don't beat yourself up: You  
deserve it."

A version of this article appears in the Nation (www.thenation.com)  
www.naomiklein.org