Dr. Alan Greenspan is coming to Calgary on November 10, 2009. Before you rush out and purchase tickets let me save you some money (the price hasn’t been released yet, but George W. Bush was $400).

First things first, Alan Greenspan is no doctor. New York University just gave him a PhD in 1977.

Nicknamed the Maestro, Greenspan was just the front man. He was conducting nothing, but the biggest economic swindle in history. Greenspan just built up the facade to allow this to happen.

Beware of the way Alan Greenspan talks. He uses strange and cryptic language to describe simple things. For example, in 1996 he said the market was displaying ‘irrational exuberance’. What he really meant was the market was displaying the utmost greed and no one was doing anything about it.

He found nothing wrong with US manufacturing going abroad, for he consoled us that this “freed resources to engage in the output of products and services world consumers value more highly” - like sub prime mortgages and collateral debt obligations. He ignored the historical reality that world superpowers always have the world's strongest manufacturing base, otherwise they don't remain a superpower.

Greenspan believes in many things. He believes the government should keep its stickin’ paws off the market. The all powerful market should be left to itself. Pursuing one’s self interest he believes is not only good, it is great.

The most important rationale for government not to touch the break according to Greenspan (before the economic crash) was that corporations could police themselves. In fact corporations could be trusted to protect their shareholders better than could government.

The fundamental flaw in this rationale was that CEOs, hedge fund managers, and shareholders may have different interests. The reality was that CEOs and hedge fund managers took terrible risks that paid off in the short term and cashed in to the tune of billions of dollars. While the CEOs and hedge fund managers cashed in, they left shareholders and later workers and taxpayers holding the bag (also known as the invisible hand).

As the housing, stock market, and debt bubble kept growing in the last few years, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan strongly advocated that the bubble be left alone.

Greenspan though believed in something called ‘creative destruction’. Creative destruction was formulated by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. He said that economic downturns were a good thing. Capitalism’s remarkable resilience was because “a market economy will incessantly revitalize itself from within by scrapping old and failing businesses and then reallocating resources to newer, more productive ones.”

Therefore letting the housing, stock market, and debt bubble burst on its own was the right thing to do. What Schumpeter and Greenspan failed to elaborate on was that the market marches on only if government and workers pay for it.

Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, says that the total cost of the government bailout in the United States will be $23.7 trillion. While workers lose their jobs and the government debt load balloons, the corporations who caused the problem in the first place, externalize the destruction to society and continue on producing profits in new areas with the government’s money. Profits take off again, while workers get left behind reading about the jobless recovery.

This is the free market fantasy that Greenspan will spout on about when he comes to Calgary. He probably won’t mention that his economic policies saddled the government with debt, cost workers their jobs and their houses, quickened the elevation of China as the future world’s new superpower, and most importantly enriched the economic elite. 

I expect nothing less than a rock star and god-like reception from wealthy Calgarians. They want to get richer too. At our expense of course.