Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[madrose1]

OT: here's our Greenspan right in the middle of Ayn Rand's collective family ...seems he was a lady killer Lee , hehe

http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/issues/articleid.16149/article_detail.asp

“Alan became much warmer, more open, more available,” recalls Barbara Branden. “I mean Alan will never be Mr. Warmth, that’s just not his personality and nature. But the dourness, the grimness, the solemnity that he had when we first met him practically disappeared, I think, because he accepted us and knew that all of us including Ayn and Frank accepted him. It was like a family, it really was. And he was part of that family.”

Not everyone shared Barbara’s opinion. One member of the Collective recalls, “It’s simply that he is a very cold person. It’s very hard to know what’s on his mind. Through those thick Coke-bottle glasses, you can’t even tell that he’s awake sometimes.”

More than one member of the Collective marveled at his ability to attract beautiful women. “It was incredible how he always had a beautiful woman at his side,” recalls Barbara Branden. “I think it was the attraction of his intellectual power and probably his reserve. You couldn’t knock him over by batting your eyelashes at him. He certainly had a profound effect on women.” Another member speculates: “Maybe he was a good kisser, from all those years as a saxophone player.” His ex-wife Joan Mitchell Blumenthal offers a different explanation. “He is very clever, he knows a lot about a million things, and he has a wonderful sense of humor. Alan is charming and always interesting.”

He remained the odd man out. Rand preferred people who were young and (as one member of the Collective remembers) “malleable.” But she cut Greenspan some slack by virtue of his maturity and occupation. “He was her special pet, because he was older, and in the business world,” recalls Edith Efron, who joined the Collective a few years later. “She didn’t know anyone else very well who was a businessman. I think this was very important to her…she allowed him more intellectual liberty than she did other people.”

One area where Greenspan was apparently permitted ideological deviation was economics. The “official” Objectivist theory of economics was the Austrian theory of Ludwig von Mises, which, among other tenets, holds that economic forecasting is impossible. The issue apparently wasn’t discussed, but Greenspan continued his successful career as an economic forecaster after becoming involved with Rand. And he never, as one Collective member archly points out, “attended Ludwig von Mises seminars at New York University, despite ample opportunity.” (Today, Greenspan describes himself as an “eclectic, free-market forecaster,” who “generally agrees with Austrian economics.”)