Bill Moyer's Interview

[phareign]

I was just wondering what people thought of this. Prior to the interview, Bill Moyers makes a lot of comments a lot about Ayn Rand.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10242008/watch2.html

The man he is interviewing teaches at Texas State and he is scheduled to give a speech, and that's how I know about this. I can't believe someone wrote a book titled, "THE PREDATOR STATE: HOW CONSERVATIVES ABANDONED THE FREE MARKET AND WHY LIBERALS SHOULD TOO." And they threw Ayn Rand in there as well.

This is part of the transcript that refers to Ayn Rand if you are unable to watch it:

October 24, 2008

BILL MOYERS: Watching Alan Greenspan testify before Congress this week, I tried, I tried very hard not to keep thinking of Ayn Rand. I failed.

The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand was Alan Greenspan's ideological guru, his intellectual mentor. She was also one of the most amazing fantasists of the last century, the author of two of the most influential books of my generation THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED, both timeless best-sellers.

Rand was a hedonist, an exponent of radical self-interest, who so believed in unfettered, unbridled capitalism that she advocated the abolition of all state regulations except those dealing with crime. In the gospel according to Rand, the business community was constantly beleaguered by evil forces practicing, are you ready for this? Altruism! Yes, the unselfish regard for the welfare of others was a menace to greed, and Rand would have none of it.

Alan Greenspan met her as a much younger man in New York and, like so many blossoming capitalists, was smitten. He has since downplayed her influence on him, but as Chairman of the Fed for nearly 19 years he seemed quite Rand-like as he watched Wall Street run wild. Yesterday, like an old warrior still in a fog after his armies have been routed from the field of battle, he expressed shock at how his ideology has failed him. He didn't see it coming, he told the House Oversight Committee. The extent of the meltdown is, "Much broader than anything that I could have imagined," a "Once-in-a-century credit tsunami." The wondrous glories of a free market with no need of pesky oversight had somehow gone wrong. Now you tell us.

ALAN GREENSPAN: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms…

CHAIRMAN WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Absolutely, precisely. You know, that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

BILL MOYERS: With his ideological blinders stripped away by reality, Alan Greenspan might well do penance by curling up this weekend not with THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED but with James K. Galbraith's new book THE PREDATOR STATE: HOW CONSERVATIVES ABANDONED THE FREE MARKET AND WHY LIBERALS SHOULD TOO. In it, the author asks: "Why not build a new economic policy based on what is really happening?" A fundamental question that surely has Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman spinning in their graves.

James K. Galbraith is with me now. Professor Galbraith once served as Executive Director of Congress' Joint Economic Committee. He teaches economics at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas, where he also directs the University's Inequality Project, analyzing wages and earnings and patterns of industrial change around the world.

[brian0918]

Bill Moyers is a staunch advocate of altruism, so this shouldn't be a surprise. Nor should it be surprising that he would misrepresent the Alan Greenspan of the last few decades as an advocate of Rand's philosophy, and pretend that the financial sector has ever had anything close to a free market.

I'm ashamed to admit that I thought Moyer's show was great back in my liberal days. Trying to watch it now, I feel like I'm in a sermon.

Edited February 14, 2011 by brian0918