More on Greenspan

Skimming through the comments to a blog post about Greenspan at the NY Times - mostly the usual rabidly anti-Capitalist emotionalism from people who are completely clueless about economics - I came across the following:

Missing from the analysis is that the government with ideologues of every stripe, whether libertarian Greenspan or the most oversight-averse (for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) Democrats, would be far worse arbiters and managers of risk.

After creating a $53 trillion unfunded liability and a $10 trillion deficit that will bankrupt this nation, launching an immoral and irrational bailout (opposed by over 100 economists from Ivy League schools), starting the Iraq War, severely undermining individual and civil liberties by voting in domestic surveillance and trying to foist on us the Real ID, and not to mention, injecting toxic loans into the financial system backed and promoted by government sponsored enterprises, lets not jump to the conclusion that government regulations subject to the whims of vote-pandering or special-interest owned or even well-intentioned (and hell-bound) politicians would be better. We cannot trust that free people will not indulge in irrational exuberance. But we do have a right to hope that the government won’t be the prime initiator and major cause of the problem.

Nothing that the private sector has ever done to the people of this country (even leaving aside the fact that it has created 100% of our wealth) can compare to the horrors of centralized power and decision-making.

— Filby