Alan Greenspan

Alan Greenspan was born just before the Great Depression. He came from a middle-class Jewish family, attended NYU and pursued a doctorate in economics at Columbia University. As a young man, he admired the anti-government views of author Ayn Rand. He became part of her inner-circle, also called the Collective, a group that was dedicated to the ideology of self-interest which came to be known as objectivism. The tenets of the Collective had a long-lasting effective on the policies of Greenspan, and by extension the American economy, as he moved up in the political world.

Even though Greenspan had libertarian views, he aggressively pursued a career in politics. He was considered a brilliant economist and became an economic adviser in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. In his first political appointment, he was named to Nixon's Bureau of the Budget. Greenspan actively pursued the chairmanship of the...