America’s most powerful central banker and an apostle of freedom and free enterprise, Alan Greenspan, passed away at age 100 early this morning. May he rest in peace. He served as Federal Reserve chairman between 1987 and 2006. Nearly 20 years.
He was a great man. And a friend and mentor to myself and many other conservative economists. And during his period as Federal Reserve chairman, he prosperously piloted our economy through 3.2 percent annualized real GDP growth per year and an average of 2.5 percent inflation, even as he successfully navigated us through a number of crises.
Meanwhile, job creation boomed during his tenure, stock markets soared, real incomes rose. Greenspan was at heart an old-fashioned conservative business economist with a strong belief in limited government, lower taxes, and minimal regulation.
Now some people blame him for the mortgage meltdown that occurred after he retired, but I think that’s way too simplistic, and in many respects completely untrue.
Yet Greenspan believed in a sound dollar, even linked to a gold and commodity price rule, along with limited government and less federal spending. Greenspan served successfully under Democratic and Republican Presidents, but Democrats then were Bill Clinton Democrats, not today’s socialist Democrats.
Today’s Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders, or the D.C. mayoral nominee, Janeese Lewis George, or socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s preferred Congressional candidates, they’re about as far from Greenspan’s prosperous freedom and free enterprise creed as you can get.
They’re all supporting open borders, abolishing ICE, universal basic income, free government care for everything, childcare, schools, colleges, healthcare, including abortion, federal rent controls, federal freezes on electricity, national wealth taxes, packing the Supreme Court, no voter photo ID, and on and on.
Greenspan, all his life, fought big-government socialism, and totalitarianism of any kind.
His philosophy made America an enormous success. If given a chance to govern, though, today’s crop of Democratic socialists will once again show why totalitarianism is always a failure.
Larry Kudlow is a columnist for the New York Sun. From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.
