Alan Greenspan
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Martin Feldstein’s panegyric (Editorial Pages, June 3) on the appointment of Alan Greenspan to head the Federal Reserve Board contains the following howler: “Greenspan is a wise and experienced market-oriented professional economist who will approach his new responsibilities without ideological blinders.”
All students of economics should know that there are no economists without ideology, not excluding Feldstein, a conservative, or Greenspan, a follower of Ayn Rand.
What Feldstein is saying is that he approves of Greenspan’s market-oriented ideology; he values low inflation over low unemployment, he sees market solutions to everything, even the international debt crisis, where markets have so often failed before; and he’s biased in favor of laissez-faire banking and foreign exchange policy.
The “non-ideological” tag is just a smoke screen to further Feldstein and Greenspan’s ideology. And do we need the ideology of Herbert Hoover when the world may be facing a new Depression?
JAMES N. DEVINE
Assistant Professor Economics Department Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles
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