The Visible, Benevolent Hand of the Fed

Via Brad Spangler I discovered this awesome, short Daily Show interview with Alan Greenspan recently.

Stewart asks many of the questions whose answers so shocked me when I read the Greider book on the Fed. Greenspan predictably tip-toes around the most penetrating queries, but I'm impressed with Stewart's curiosity and fearlessness. The fact that Greenspan and his fellow faux-free-marketers don't have more practice defending the way central banking favors financial interests over the common good is an outrage. It does bear mentioning that Greenspan is a lot less defensive and more honest about the regulatory meddling that constitutes Fed activity than most of his colleagues.

At a time when people aren't generally interested in substantive economic trends - like the fact that we're cutting taxes while funding a massively expensive war, this kind of economic thought from Stewart is quite refreshing. Hopefully it gets people thinking about the artificial mutual exclusivity of economic and personal freedom represented by the mainstream left and right. If Stewart can redeem the purpose of the market in the minds of future leftists, it will go a long way to re-establishing the original privilege-busting modus operandi of the original socialist, anarchist, and libertarian movements. And we who are in the movement should be taking advantage of this somehow.

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Written on Thursday, September 20, 2007