mad anthony

Rants, politics, and thoughts on politics, technology, life,
and stuff from a generally politically conservative Baltimoron.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

So why does it matter if there is a skeleton in Greenspan's closet?

Jeff at Protein Wisdom has been reminding the blogosphere of lefty bloggers attempt to discredit Greenspan because he's supported social security reforms and privitization.

They are looking for ...anything Greenspan has ever written, said or done that reflects poorly on him. This would include erroneous predictions, older statements which contradict things he's said recently, and anything that's just plain wrong, venal or stupid

I'm not sure what Greenspan having wrongly called something 20 or 30 years ago (assuming he did) matters. He's an economist, and economics is not a perfect science. Economists use models to predict how the market will behave, but they are just predictions and they aren't perfect. Economists frequently disagree on what models to use and what things mean. They also frequently cage their predictions - which is why Harry Truman once said that he'd love to see a one-handed economist since economists always say "on the other hand".

But even if Greenspan had a very different view in the past, so what? People aren't allowed to change their opinion as they get older, learn more, and have more time to reflect? I can think of people on both sides who have switched over - like David Brock, who went from Republican to far left, and David Horowitz, who went from Black Panther to far-right. Shit, even mad anthony was convinced that Communism was a workable system - back when I was in high school.

What the left isn't realizing is that the success of right wing bloggers in, say, Rathergate, wasn't based on them sitting down and deciding they wanted to "get" someone, but rather multiple seperate people seeing things that looked wrong, researching them, and getting those facts out. Nobody sat down and said "what skeletons can we find in Rather's closet". Instead, he did something and people responded - from the present, not from something he said years ago.

1 Comments:

At 5:22 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Corect
Rod Stanton

 

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