Alan Greenspan impressed me on the Daily Show last night.

One minor thing, they ran out of time before Greenspan could fully respond to Jon Stewart’s question of “Why do we favor investment over work?”. The question was in response to the stock market jumping in response than a greater than expected prime rate cut. The question does demand a long answer, and the part Greenspan didn’t have time to get to was

“The tax code is used to incentivize investment and work (a very approximate answer, it does that whether we want it to or not). The role of the Federal Reserve is to regulate the money supply and ensure that a dollar a year from now buys about as much as a dollar today.”