Former Fed Chairman, and former Ayn Rand inner circle member from the 1960s was the guest on This Week ABC News, Jake Tapper, anchoring. As Brent Baker at NewsBusters writes: Tapper took an unusual opportunity to "invoke objectivist/libertarian writer-philosopher Ayn Rand.
From ABC News (via NewsBusters):
JAKE TAPPER: You'll be testifying about the financial crisis on Wednesday before the financial crisis inquiry commission. When you testified before Congress in October, you said that you finally saw a flaw in the way that you looked at markets, that markets cannot necessarily be trusted to completely police themselves. But isn't it more than a flaw? Isn't it an indictment of Ayn Rand and the view that laissez-faire capitalism can be expected to function properly, that markets can be trusted to police themselves?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Not at all. I think that there is no alternative if you want to have economic growth and higher standards of living in a democratic society to have competitive markets. And, indeed, if you merely look at the history since the enlightenment of the 18th century when all of those ideas surfaced and became applicable in public policy, we've had an explosion of economic growth, and especially in the developing countries where hundreds of millions of people have been pulled out of poverty, of extreme poverty and starvation basically because we have competitive markets.
(Big Hat tip to our friends at Newsbusters for the transcript)
