I, a citizen of this man's Kingdom, write this account so that all the unbelievers may know the economic miracles of our Chairman Alan Greenspan, even in his childhood. The beginning of it is like this:

This child Alan, when he was only five years old, went to the ford in a mountain stream where his fellows were playing. He waded in and removed the stones and branches that were obstructing the flow. "There," he said. "This stream will now run at a more perfect rate. Neither shall it run too fast and erode its banks, nor shall it be inhibited and deprive us of liquidity."

The other children were stunned and mute, for they had never heard such things.

One day in that same year Alan came again to the stream when his peers were there. He knelt in the water and with his hands dug clay from the bottom and molded from it a hundred coins. He distributed these to the other children, although not evenly. Some children received only one coin and others received more. They watched in awe as Alan spat on the coins in his hand and said, "Now on my word these are legal tender currency. Go forth and generate consumer demand and initiate capital investment."

Some of the children rejoiced. Others were jealous and said, "Why is it that I get only this one coin while my brother has gotten ten?"

"For the sake of ever-growing productivity it must be so," said the child Alan. "Excessive parity of wealth distribution could conceivably dampen perceived incentive for innovation."

The children murmured that he spoke this with a wondrous authority. "Surely he visits realms of secret knowledge to make such pronouncements."

But one girl among them was the daughter of a bank regulator. She said, "Do these actions not violate statutory law? Who are you to create new money backed by nothing but your word?" And she went home and told her father what young Alan had done at the stream. The bank regulator rushed to the ford tearing at his robes. "How do you take it on yourself to put our national currency at risk of devaluation by recklessly increasing the money supply?" He demanded this of the child. "You shall be punished harshly by the monetary authorities under their laws!"

Alan stood in the swiftly moving stream, tracing dollar signs in the water with the tip of his finger. He said calmly to the bank regulator, "Which monetary authority shall punish me? Is it the one that has already profaned this currency by inviting deflation into our homes and stifling consumption?" For such a thing was happening in those days. "If you punish me for making this crooked road straight by injecting liquidity, then so must you punish that which is much greater than any man: the Spirit of Unfettered Productivity Growth. It came before all of us and by its laws shall we all be judged. I make these wonders for you so that your heart might be softened and you might see and have faith in it and live accordingly."

This man ceased tearing at his clothes and said, "What I have heard from those lips has changed me." He went to nearest regional reserve bank and told others of the boy's deeds.

One day when Alan was walking to school a careless boy ran up against him in the street, knocking Alan to the ground. A number of legal tender bills and coins fell from Alan's pocket and dropped into the sewer and were lost forever. Alan rose up and cried, "Witness the destruction of productive capital, even as it dwelt peacefully in my pocket!"

The boy scoffed, but Alan fixed him with his eyes and the air itself shuddered. "My words will move markets!" Alan cried. "Those such as you who are a threat to investment capital will never see access to credit except at rates many times higher than prime! You will see my Kingdom of easy credit all around you, but you will never be let into it until you repent!" The boy ran away in fear, but did not have it in his heart to repent, and he lived and died with subprime credit rating.

When Alan was six, he found a man who everyone said was possessed by demons because he raved day and night, blaspheming the monetary authorities and cursing them for the plague of deflation. But the man beheld the child Alan and became wide-eyed and silent. Finally he said, "From the sternness of this child's look, I can see that he does not belong to this wretched economic realm! I foresee that he is a man who will kill deflation at its roots! What a great thing! Is he god or angel—or what I am to say? I know not!"

"Go invest and consume," said Alan. "The kingdom of ever-growing productivity is coming soon and you shall be foremost among its ranks when it arrives."

The man did have faith and became a great promoter of efficiencies of scale. His chain of discount superstores soon covered the land and creatively destroyed untold numbers of small, family-owned businesses, which were not aggressively driving productivity growth.

A follower of Keynes came to the mountain stream and took a willow branch and laid it across the swiftly flowing waters to create a pool. He did this because he believed it was right and because he wanted to go swimming. The child Alan, seeing this, was angered. "O deluded and foolish man!" he said. "What harm did this unobstructed stream do to you? And what folly that you think your actions might optimize its flow!" He cursed the Keynesian to decades of deteriorating political influence, and it has happened like this, the historians having already written it.

At harvest time this child Alan walked into a corn field where men and women were working to reap the crop and then sell it in bushels, as they had done for generations. "You must be pleased," said one man to Alan. "Behold this productivity!"

But the boy looked troubled and a shadow fell over him. "Will you not see?" he asked. "If you don't understand by now, I wonder if you ever will! Are your hearts truly this hard?"

Everyone was stunned and quiet until one woman asked him, "Can you show us?"

Alan said to her, "There is hope for you," and he touched her forehead. Then he plucked an ear of corn with each hand. "The harvest of corn in this locality is undertaken with production methods that have not developed or advanced since last year or years prior. Put simply, your productivity doesn't grow as it must in my Kingdom."

"So how can we become more productive?" asked the woman, who now had tears on her cheeks as did many others around her, for they knew in their hearts what he said was true.

With his hands Alan stripped back the leaves from the corn and showing them, he said in quiet voice, "You might press oil from a small portion of your crop, heat it, and then drop handfuls of stripped kernels into it. Could you not sell the resultant foodstuff to travelers as a snack, sprinkled lightly with salt? Would this not generate growth in our domestic product, our productivity indices, and effectuate diversification in the labor economy?"