The Great Greenspan

THE ERSTWHILE CHAIRMAN of the Federal Reserve Bank – which seems to be more national than federal – was interviewed on television recently. Alan Greenspan appears to have benefited very little from his association with Ayn Rand, the philosopher of Objectivism: he seems to think that it is a matter for concern that the rich are many times richer than the poor. Why is it so? How does it matter to me whether Bill Gates is a thousand or a million times better off than I am? That datum is not objective, it is subjective.
What might be worth discussing is, whether you, or he, or I, can rival Bill Gates. Once upon a time, the answer was plain: Henry Ford I started with nothing and ended as the richest man in the world – simply by having Better Ideas. Today, it would be difficult to emulate him.
If you start by working for someone else (as Ford did) you find that wages do not increase sharply with experience and skill, because wages are not determined afresh every day by competition; they are negotiated by labor unions. Because the unions are “democratic,” in the sense of choosing their officers by majority vote, they tend to institute wages that are too high for the many at entry level, too low for the few most competent. Government organizations have the same characteristic, but no-one expects to get rich in government service (at least, so we hope!)
If you try to succeed as a professional, you find that there are paper hoops through which you must jump, often at great expense in money and delay. If you try to make it on your own, you quickly find that you are not on your own at all: you are working for the city, county, state and union tax collectors (if your state does tax transactions, such as incomes or sales.)
In the United States, as constituted, taxes are apportioned according to property (meaning, that if Congress lays a tax on [horseless] carriages, and there is one car[riage] per person in Nevada but one per ten persons in Rhode Island, then the tax on each car[riage] will be ten times higher in Rhode Island than in Nevada.) This means that the people in the poor states would object to taxes just as much as the people in the rich states: it also means that anyone who owns a car[riage] has to see that it makes a profit, or else lose it.
Were it not for taxes on transactions, and all these arbitrary obstacles, a man, or woman, with ability and ambition would be able to storm up the social order, toppling the old fools who are resting on their laurels. If you find that you cannot do that, you need not blame yourself (still less Bill Gates,) you should blame the persons you, or your parents, or your grand-parents, allowed to hold public offices.
Greenspan, who claims to be widely read, made another pathetic blunder: he suggested that the never-sufficiently-to-be-dreaded global warming could be delayed by a “carbon tax” on combustibles. Does he spend his life entirely in his library? Any ordinary man (or, of course, woman) can see the results of today’s taxes on motor vehicle fuel: the highways are managed, and indeed designed, to waste expensive fuel. You see highways where the traffic cannot distribute itself to fill all lanes equally; you see tolls which are the same at peak and off-peak times; you see STOP signs instead of YIELD signs; you see double yellow lines painted so as to keep all vehicles out of some lanes; you see stop-on-red instead of go-on-green signals; in New York, you find that drivers who do not have EZ-pass (commuter) subscriptions are excluded at off-peak times.
And what, may we ask, is done with the money collected in fuel taxes? Seemingly, it is not expended on keeping the bridges in good repair. Or does the ineffable Greenspan not watch television?