Bizzaro Greenspan

I generally think Donald Boudreaux, chairman of the George Mason University Economics Department and former president of the Foundation for Economic Education, is one of the good guys, so I was shocked to see him praise Greenspan for keeping the money supply stable! Only in the bizzaro world of DC is Alan “bubble” Greenspan a champion of stable money and a foe of inflation.

Left-wing economist Robert Kuttner attempts to embarrass Milton Friedman by pointing out just how interventionist Greenspan’s Fed actually was. Kuttner’s point is that Friedman, and Greenspan’s other libertarian defenders, are abandoning their alleged free-market principles by defending Greenspan. Kuttner is correct that Greenspan was never the champion of free-markets portrayed by the official libertarian-conservative movement. However, Kuttner never bothers to consider if the economic problems he gives Greenspan credit for solving are a creation of prior Fed polices or if Greenspan’s solutions merely set the stage for even more problems in the future.

Stephen Karlsson has some good comments on Greenspan’s apologists at the Mises blog.

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8:50 pm on February 7, 2006