"Capitalism the Unknown Ideal" contains a section entitled "Are Periodic Depressions Inevitable in a System of Laissez-Faire Capitalism?"  That article refers to an analogy that was described then as "an invaluable metaphor from Alan Greenspan."  According to Greenspan, "if under laissez-faire, the banking system and the principles controlling the availability of funds act as a fuse that prevents a blowout in the economy -- then the government, through the Federal Reserve System, put a penny in the fusebox.  The result was the explosion and Crash of 1929."

If in the 1960's and before there was already a penny in the nation's financial fusebox, the early years of this decade represent the time when the electrical circuity of the financial system finally overloaded.  Today virtually the entire structure of the nation's economic house has burst into flames, and there is no fireman in sight.

While the fusebox metaphor aptly describes the underlying cause of today's turmoil, it is also useful to follow the analogy to observe that once the house has caught fire, simply removing the penny (as desirable as that may be) will not by itself extinguish the fire.  The financial press remains full of commentators who see prosperity returning "right around the corner" based on the belief that borrowing more money can restore the pre-crash state of affairs.  This, however, is akin to trying to send more electrical current down the already-burnt and shorted wiring, and only makes the problem worse.

Decades of misallocation of resources caused by the penny in the interest rate fusebox, and by multiple other govenment-mandated distortions, have created non-productive monstrosities throughout the financial system.  The craters being dug as those houses of cards fall around us will likely be larger, and occur more quickly, than most people now expect.  The establishment failed to heed the warnings when the problem was manageable, and now that the flames are rising the chance that stampeding herd will turn to a more reasonable path appear dim indeed. 

The immediate challenge facing every fan of Ayn Rand is first to preserve his or her own financial independence and safety so as to live to fight another day.  After that, the task remains to educate those who can be reached that the failure we see around us is not the failure of freedom, but the failure to heed the warnings Ayn Rand articulated so many years ago.  Today's firemen must equip themselves not with water hoses, but with the ideas of Ayn Rand.   And they should learn from the example of Alan Greespan that those ideas,once adopted, cannot be abandoned without serious consequences.