The only thing Greenspan refuses to control is the money press and keep it from running rampant...just look at the dollar value decline under his reign.
If you believe that "the money press" is the only (or even the main) cause of the drop in the value of the dollar, you're mistaken. Again.
There are so called "pro-war Liberitarian"...So, I don't think PJ is doing a smear on RP connection with the Libertarians
The whole central banking system is a scam...FDIC etc... Subprime, These blood suckers know the Fed and Federal Government would step in and bail them out and pass the cost to the taxpayers. Let live and die just like the rest of small business. NO ONE but RP challenges the FED on capital hill.
No, mudsling, that's not it either. The "blood suckers" knew that they, personally, would be fine no matter what happened to their banks... *and* I'm pretty sure most of them genuinely believed the "there is no bubble" Jedi mind trick pulled by Greenspan and others. People are really good at believing what they want to believe. You yourself have managed to demonstrate this marvelously with most of your postings.
The day Greenspan stepped on to become the FED chair...he already betrayed whatever he believed in and became a growing part of statism. Can you believe he was a gold advocate and against Statism/inflation.
http://www.usagold.com/gildedopinion/greenspan.html
@PJ, I hope you see this contradition, on the one hand wants a more elastic currency to accomemdate rapid economic growth, on the other favors high taxes. Just more paper money. Anyone know that we as the tax payers have to pay interest to the FED for every single dollar that is printed?
You know, mudsling... I used to know, and still know, a quite a few deeply committed Marxist-Leninists. You sound exactly like them, with the trivial difference that your party line is a bit different.
@CD, I don't think you are so naive as to believe that government grows in a vacuum. Money is power, and power is money when the Fed Government is deeply involved in every facet of our daily living. DC is virtually under control of lobbyists. Reducing the current Government size is actually would reduce corporatism control...I hope you would at the least see that as a possiblity. Bill Gates donates billions to charity not because he was forced by IRS agents with guns. Market is a sort of living organism... Feedback is a force to reckon with when Corporatism mask is peeled off.
Do you know what's the central problem with the libertarian screed that "market forces will solve everything?" Other than that it fails empirically, that is.
I'll give you a hint: a guy called Karl Marx pointed it out a quite a while ago.
You still don't know?
OK, it's this: left to itself, the free market will tend to concentrate wealth.
Concentrated wealth equals concentrated power, which will then use this power to entrench itself in social/political structures.
Any system based on pure free-market capitalism will lead to a seizure of the political apparatus by concentrated, corporate wealth.
Marx's proposed cure (socializing the means of production by means of a revolution by the proletariat) was arguably worse than the disease. (I say "arguably," because I have some idea of the living hell that was the lot of the factory laborer in 19th century laissez-faire capitalism; as bad as life was in Stalin's Russia in the 1930's, you can make the case that for most people on average it wasn't quite as bad.)
However, his diagnosis of the disease was perceptive, and still stands. The interesting thing is that since Marx, we have discovered ways of counteracting this effect of the market. Namely, democracy, which empowers citizens equally regardless of their wealth, yielding a political system that redistributes wealth down the ladder, through taxation and social services.
America pioneered this with the New Deal -- which led to an unprecedented explosion of productivity, wealth, prosperity, and power, that lasted until the late 1960's at least. America was also the first to start dismantling it somewhere around the 1970's -- and sure enough, we're again seeing corporate control of government, robber barons, predatory lending, concentration of wealth, shrinking of the middle class, and a general drying-up of the American dream of having your children do better than yourself. Just like in the Roaring Twenties, that is.
Anyone who believes that the solution to problems caused by dismantling the New Deal is further dismantling of the New Deal is either a hopeless fool, someone completely blinded by ideology, or a sheep following a charismatic snake-oil salesman who may or may not be buying his own snake-oil. And if you believe that America's ills are best solved by dissolving the IRS, the Fed, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and most of the other Departments, you're throwing out the baby with the bath water, in a big way.
IOW, if Ron Paul does get elected, and if his policies won't run into a brick wall in Congress (both of which are pretty big ifs), times will get really, *really* interesting. For Americans, I mean -- his foreign policy would make him relatively harmless as a global player.
(As a matter of fact, the reason I'm only speaking out against Ron Paul now is that his foreign policy is exactly what I'd like to see, and being a foreigner, my self-interest is mostly about it. However, I didn't have the strength of character to stick to it: I have a really hard time letting complete bullshit go unchallenged.)