G'day Jim, >I expect that Alan G. will try to keep the Wall Street/Main Street bubble >economy growing as long as possible. But do you really think he cares about >Gore? He's an erstwhile follower of Ayn Rand after all, while Gore embraces >a totally technocratic ideology. Well, Rand was a bit all over the place, wasn't she? Greenspan is the fountainhead to whom all look for guidance - no more one of Rand's 'men of the mind' than a technocrat (an untenably thin distinction, anyway), reputed to be unrivalled in his manipulation of the technology of interest rates (and his ability to speak for great lengths of time without conveying meaning, but I digress). - And his 'mebbe we're in a new economy' line (as committed a claim as he has made in 12 years, I suspect) is nicely in line with the brand differentiation Al 'father-of-the-Net' Gore has chosen for himself ... - And both men obviously went to the same surgeon for their personalitectomies ... - And the new Gore has been very much the development-by-free-enterprise-even-if-that's-not-how-the-Net-actually-came- into-being-or-became-popular-in-the-first-place man these last four years or so ... - And isn't the new Greenspan the man with his all-knowing hands on the levers - and isn't that what a technocrat does? >And George Dubya may draw the all-important Greenspan vote by endorsing school vouchers, killing more >prisoners, etc. I wouldn't have thought issuing vouchers or cooking prisoners were particularly/definitively Randian manouvres. Anyway, doesn't *The Fountainhead* tell us it's okay to blow up the Fed and the IMF? After all, both are structures we originally built, only to have them rudely transformed at the hands of techno-bureau-crats. And doesn't *Atlas Shrugged* tell us that the bureaucratic manipulation of interest rates is nought but a feather aimed at the armpits of the god-like Soroses and Buffets who hold our world aloft? Isn't that sort of thing more particularly/definitively Randian? Al and Al are two of a kind, surely? Yours absolutely time-wastingly, Rob.