So Greenspan’s congressional testimony (breathlessly awaited by Congress and the markets and press) today said that there might need to be an alternative to Social Security as it’s currently constituted, but that private accounts had some potential downsides, but that first you’d have to take care of . . . .
WTF?
Who died and made Alan Greenspan . . . anything?
So he runs the Federal Reserve.
And? (Or, who died and made the Fed . . . anything).
Okay, okay. The Fed has a “legitimate” role in . . . printing money and regulating the money supply. To this end it has a “legitimate” role in monkeying with interest rates, which are one immediate way of loosening or tightening the money supply.
Now, you can stretch it and say that to forecast what to do with interest rates, the Fed has to make some predictions about the future.
But Alan Greenspan was elected by nobody, and is not so far as I can tell the occupant of any seat ever properly conceived as a policymaking (rather than policy implementing) role. Essentially, isn’t he a functionary who’s supposed to monkey with the money supply in the way that best supports what Congress and the other elected officials choose as policy? He may or may not have private opinions on those policies, but that’s just what they are.
When you tell the grease monkey down at the service station to fill it up with premium because you’re driving to Kalamazoo, does he tell you you really ought to use super-premium, and besides, Hohokus is a much more prudent destination?
Also, Greenspan will be long dead by the time any full-scale “privitization” (and BTW, I think Bush’s plan is an awful combination of the worst forms of market risk and statist micro-management) comes into play and has the ability to work or not work. What business is it of his to be making oracular pronouncements about far-down-the-road policy issues? If I told the Secretary of the Mint we were going on the gold standard tomorrow, and he warned me that we didn’t have enough bullion to possibly do so that quickly, that’d be an appropriate, pragmatic response from a minister. If he told me we couldn’t do it because it might discourage investment in Third World foreign aid from 2029 onward, I’d tell him to mind his own business.
Of course, it is equally the fault of Congress and the markets for making Greenspan out to be some driving force in the economy and/or a brilliant strategist and prophet. But honestly, isn’t it a little weird to have the whole country hanging on his every word (and for some people, implicitly, ceding him the role of fiscal policymaker-in-chief)?