Naomi Klein has a piece in The Nation, Greenspan and the Myth of the True Believer, where she ruminates on the question of intent: do free-market capitalists really believe that laissez faire discipline sets the conditions for the best possible society through general uplift in wealth, or do they just say that because it’s a convenient cover for their minority cash and power grab? Her more or less tentative answer is: convenient cover.

Yet ideological contradictions are only relevant if Greenspan really is a true believer. I’m not convinced. Greenspan writes that as a student he had no interest in big ideas. Unlike his classmates who were in the thrall of Keynesianism with its promise of building a better world, Greenspan was simply good at math. He started doing research for powerful corporations; it was profitable, but Greenspan made no claims to a higher social contribution.

I figure it doesn’t much matter whether the radical capitalists believe their public rhetoric or not. The effect is inevitably the same, for better or worse. I’ve met some who really do seem to believe that they’re inducing positive transformation by cutting the string on the kite of society and letting the warm winds of market emergence carry it to better places. Others seem to think non-interference in market effects is a kind of moral imperative, and actively working to shape outcomes is a sort of flinching cowardice. Either way or any other way, real-world outcomes make it look like unfettered capitalism is dangerous and must be stopped. Apart from some recalibration of tactics, we should probably do that regardless.