But, alas, that effort, on which so much time and money had been lavished, failed.
So the reader may wish to consider which of two choices is worse to endure. The first is this article, with its self-supplied fanfare--but with also, at least, a few new ideas. The second is Greenspan�s 2004 exhortation, based on his philosophy of personal selfishness. He seemed to want just about everyone else in his age range to make big financial sacrifices in retirement.
And even worse than those reduced benefits would be a real breakdown in Social Security-- which would probably mean a breakdown also of the entire U.S. political system.
I suppose I should insert a break here in my stream of invective. I don't wish to demonize Alan Greenspan. In many respects, from the perspective of many who have known him, he is probably a nice person. He served in a job which wasn't easy, and there had to be someone to do that job. As I write this, he is rather elderly, and I don't want to be guilty of abuse of the elderly.
However, while he wasn't personally responsible for the all the bad things that happened to the economy in the last part of his tenure, he was partly responsible and he did personify the Federal Reserve. It might be fair to say that, any more than any one other single person, he was responsible for the collapse of 2008.
I'm not an academic and not in a position to publish a scholarly article which leaves our all personalities--even though that might sometimes be desirable. So Greenspan must personify the Fed in this article, just as he did during public service.
By looking at past mistakes, we have a basis for improvement. If Greenspan's tenure had been half as long as it actually was, it wouldn't have caused the problems that it did.
That should be a lesson for the future.
If there were rules requiring important statements and reports from the government to credit sources in the same way that academic papers are required to do, future problems might be avoided
I think there are other lessons about the excessive power of the Fed to be learned from my story. And the excessive power of the Fed wasn't really Alan Greenspan's doing; it was something invested in that institution by politicians, businessmen, the media, and the general public. It might be regarded as a kind of religious superstition--the religion in question being the religion of money.
After he left the Fed, his family tried to steal my identity, which wasn't nice. As I wrote this, in 2008, we seemed to have moved beyond that phase, however. I was hoping for peaceful relations with the Greenspan clan, even if those relations might tend to be slightly cool.
But plagiarism is a major ethical offense because it discourages scholarship and innovation. It's an offense against a basic premise of Western society. Let's look east to see the difference.Confucius said that, while a man can exalt the truth, the truth cannot exalt that man. And during the reign of Chairman Mao, all bright ideas were attributed to the Chairman.
In the West we traditionally believe otherwise. We're taught that a person, who, for example, discovers an important scientific truth, deserves to be recognized.
And in the twenty-first century the United States will be facing a major confrontation with China over the question of whether there are such things as �intellectual property rights.� Is the West�s position hypocritical?
What precisely has been the difference between Chairman Mao and Chairman Greenspan?
The fact is that Greenspan set a disgraceful example and there was no objection from others. So this isn�t just about me. The whole question of �intellectual property� is at stake as well.
In this essay a basic premise is that my work was plagiarized. Many readers may be skeptical about that, so let�s go back to 1981 for a detailed account, which includes scanned images of original documents.
About that time, the popular media was reporting a looming crisis for Social Security funding. But, while idly looking at population statistics, I�d noticed a downturn in the US birth rate that had begun after 1924 and continued into the Great Depression. Adding the then-common retirement age of 65 to 1924, I came up with 1989 as a key demographic year. That is, it seemed reasonable that demands on Social Security would begin to abate after 1989, because the number of people who would be turning 65 should start to decrease that year.
CONTINUE