Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, an acolyte of Ayn Rand, and a devout proponent of free markets appeared before Congress to talk about the roots of the economic crisis. This runs 10 minutes but is worth watching and listening. If you have little time scroll forward to the 3:38 mark and then again to the 8:00 mark.
For those unfamiliar with Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, know this. Because literally billions of dollars move based on their statements, they tend to be extremely conservative in their pronouncements. Perhaps no other group of people besides the (trained) clergy consider their words with more care. For him to say that the free market ideology he supported was basically wrong, would be akin to the Pope saying that he was wrong about Jesus being simultaneously the only begotten Son of God and man.
Now of course the problem here is that those of us on the outside looking in have always known that free market ideology doesn’t work. But the thing is that we weren’t considered part of the rational world.
When what we think of as “social scientists” first began to employ statistics in order to control, manage, and study human populations, there was a moment in America where white supremacists used statistics in order to prove that slavery as a social system worked well for blacks. Using cooked census data they found that the percentage of blacks who were insane increased the further north one went. Whereas only one out of a thousand or so blacks were deemed insane in the deep south, in the northeastern corridor there were places where one out of every eighty or so were deemed insane.
The way that white supremacists explained this was extremely logical–though still racist. Blacks didn’t have the mental capacity to live with all of the choices that freedom offered. “Do I work? Do i stay home? Do I go to the store? Do I take a walk? Do I read?” And each of those choices themselves led to other choices, which led to other choices, which…you get the picture. Much better for blacks to live in a system where all of their major choices were decided for them.
Riiiighht.
(Congress questioned this finding…and when they looked into it found that in many cases there were more insane blacks in some of the towns, then there were people in the town!)
But it is this type of logic either applied to non-white spaces (‘inner cities’, ‘barrios’) domestically, or to the “third-world” in general, that caused people to ignore the flaws of the free market. To their (and our) detriment apparently.
