Greenspan Denies His Role in Financial Crisis

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.
Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan, 1966

When I first read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in 1999 I was struck by the name of one of the contributors: Alan Greenspan. I thought for sure that the name must be a coincidence, since the person who wrote the essays contained in that ode to laissez-faire could not be the same person as the chairman of the Federal Reserve. To me, the Fed represented the exact opposite of laissez-faire. And even if it were the same person, wouldn't he have to be fighting for freedom from within the machinations of our masters? A Trojan horse on the side of Objectivists? No such luck, as Greenspan was the Greenspan, and a complete traitor to his principles. He has come out in defense of his actions as Fed chairman, claiming the current crises couldn't possibly be his fault:

The reality of bubbles cannot be escaped, Greenspan believes. A central element of his worldview is that "bubbles are built into human nature."

So the Fed, FDIC, SEC, Fannie, Freddie, etc. had no role? He denies any culpability based on what? That bubbles exist absolutely and they have no actual cause, they just exist so deal with it. This is in line with Keynes' "animal spirits" view of the business cycle. How could he believe this? He wrote about the very existence of the Fed and other economic regulations being dangerous and his cautions from the past played out in real life. How could that escape him? His new point of view:

This bubble was catastrophic because self-interest failed.

Again, market regulations played no role in his world. Even his definition of "self-interest" has decayed from his time with Rand into a typical altruist's smear of the productive as whim worshipping and short sighted. Unfortunately, Greenspan is typically characterized in this way:

For America's most famous libertarian, an Ayn Rand acolyte, that is more than troubling. It's foundation-shaking. It put him into "shocked disbelief,"

This presupposes that Greenspan of 1966 and Greenspan of 2010 are the same man (I will disregard the link between Rand and libertarians). Statements like this give legitimacy to the Fed and to regulations, as if Greenspan actually were an advocate for laissez-faire and that it failed. He is no more an advocate of laissez-faire at this point in his life than Paul Krugman. A truly free market has never existed and therefore could not have been proven to fail. The only evidence is that regulations have failed. Greenspan would do the world a great service if he would denounce Rand and everything she stands for. For he doesn't represent even a hint of his former self, that moral lover-of-life that wrote from an Objectivist point of view. Or, he could denounce all of his actions as Fed Chairman, admit neither he, nor anyone, is incapable of being a central planner, embrace his roots in Objectivism, and openly fight for freedom through his status as a public figure. As of now, his link to Rand only serves to smear her philosophy. How ironic that he wrote an essay titled "The Assault on Integrity":

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.