Ferguson on Greenspan and Rand

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Andrew Ferguson serves up a wonderfully subversive review of Alan Greenspan’s memoir in the new issue of The Weekly Standard. You don’t have to agree with Ferguson to enjoy his iconoclastic wit, which in this case is aimed at both Greenspan and Ayn Rand. My favorite passage:

This was in the late 1950s. By then, Rand had published her two thick, preposterous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and stood poised on the brink of international stardom. Her creepy philosophy of Objectivism, placing the self at the center of the moral universe, was being enthusiastically embraced, as it still is, by tens of thousands of pimply teenage boys in the dreamy moments between fits of social insecurity and furious bouts of masturbation. As her cultish fame spread, Rand wanted to keep tabs on her most intimate acolytes. Of these Greenspan was the most promising and, by all appearances, the most normal. Which worried her.

Funny stuff.