Alan Greenspan is dead at one hundred years of age, according to the Washington Examiner, which reports he served as the thirteenth chairman of the Federal Reserve under four successive presidents. I did not live to see the Federal Reserve — it was chartered in 1913, nearly a century after my own departure — but I need not have witnessed its founding to recognize its shape. It is, in every essential, the thing I argued against: a central institution, insulated from electoral accountability, wielding dominion over the currency on which every farmer, every laborer, every small merchant depends for the price of his bread and the value of his savings.

I regarded the first Bank of the United States as a constitutional usurpation and a civic danger. My objection was never merely technical. It was this: when the power to expand or contract money is concentrated in one body, and that body is not answerable to the people at the ballot box, then the governed are no longer truly governing themselves in the matter that touches them most immediately — what their labor is worth. Greenspan held that chair for nearly nineteen years. Nineteen years. A republic that could not remove its monetary sovereign for nearly two decades has surrendered something real.

I mean no disrespect to the man's intellect or to his genuine devotion, as he understood it, to the public interest. The Washington Examiner's account of his death offers no full reckoning of his record, and I will not pretend to one; the particulars of modern monetary mechanism lie beyond what I could have known in my own century. What I can speak to is the structure — and the structure warns. Power that consolidates in one office, however wisely exercised by one incumbent, does not disassemble itself when that incumbent departs. It awaits the next.

Greenspan himself, if reports from later in his career are to be credited — and I mark this as inference, not recollection — came to doubt some of the doctrines he had championed: that markets, left to self-regulate, would always correct before catastrophe. That is an honorable admission. But the lesson a republic should draw is not merely that one man revised his model; it is that no single man, however gifted, should have carried so much of the weight to begin with. The dispersal of power is not an inefficiency to be tolerated — it is the mechanism by which errors are caught before they become systemic ruin.

The death of a long-serving chairman is also an occasion to ask about public debt, which is always, in my view, the hidden companion of loose monetary authority. I held that one generation has no right to bind the next with obligations it did not choose; that debt is, in the most literal sense, a form of tyranny across time. When a central bank can ease the cost of borrowing indefinitely, it makes that tyranny cheap to execute and easy to defer. The bill still arrives; only the generation paying it changes. That is precisely the bargain a free people should refuse.

Let the Republic use this moment — the passing of the man who perhaps more than any other personified centralized monetary power in the modern age — to ask with fresh seriousness: how much authority should reside in one institution, one chairmanship, one interpretation of an economic model? The answer that best preserves liberty is the one that distributes, checks, and renders accountable. It was the answer in 1791. I see no reason, in principle, why it should be different now.