The Cruelty of Kindness

I get bothered by "do gooders" who blindly apply their own logic to the world. In the last US election a lot of Democrats are motivated by worries about US jobs and see a salvation in demanding an "even playing field" which throws up barriers to third world countries by demanding industrial work and safety standards and environmental standards that effectively bar the really poor from getting onto the first rung of the ladder to a better standard of living.

Nicholas Kristof at the NY Times has written many articles to push his concern about the poor and wretched around the world. Here is his latest op-ed:

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.

Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.

“I’d love to get a job in a factory,” said Pim Srey Rath, a 19-year-old woman scavenging for plastic. “At least that work is in the shade. Here is where it’s hot.”

Another woman, Vath Sam Oeun, hopes her 10-year-old boy, scavenging beside her, grows up to get a factory job, partly because she has seen other children run over by garbage trucks. Her boy has never been to a doctor or a dentist, and last bathed when he was 2, so a sweatshop job by comparison would be far more pleasant and less dangerous.

I’m glad that many Americans are repulsed by the idea of importing products made by barely paid, barely legal workers in dangerous factories. Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty. At a time of tremendous economic distress and protectionist pressures, there’s a special danger that tighter labor standards will be used as an excuse to curb trade.

...

When I defend sweatshops, people always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop? No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom.

...

Cambodia has, in fact, pursued an interesting experiment by working with factories to establish decent labor standards and wages. It’s a worthwhile idea, but one result of paying above-market wages is that those in charge of hiring often demand bribes — sometimes a month’s salary — in exchange for a job. In addition, these standards add to production costs, so some factories have closed because of the global economic crisis and the difficulty of competing internationally.

The best way to help people in the poorest countries isn’t to campaign against sweatshops but to promote manufacturing there. One of the best things America could do for Africa would be to strengthen our program to encourage African imports, called AGOA, and nudge Europe to match it.

This is one place where the Left has an ugly legacy. Pursuit of simplistic "solutions" has created sad facts on the ground. The developed world keeps moaning about the lack of development in the under-developed parts of the world, but they don't open their markets up to accept products from third world countries. Instead "foreign aid" is slathered over the open sore of poverty to make it better when all it does is lines of the pockets of the corrupt and blocks real progress.

In the 1970s/80s I worked on projects that delivered prestige projects to under-developed countries. These high tech toys were under-utilized and sometimes left to fall apart. Canada got to chalk up its contribution to "fight" poverty, but in reality the money was simply a subsidy to buy these prestige toys from Canada that had little or no real benefit to the under-developed country.

Oh, and while I'm complaining, I should mention that Canada has horrible pockets of poverty especially on native reserves. These are places where "dependency" has become a way of life. Suicide and drugs, unemployment, alcohol, depression are rampant. Canada likes to be smug about its social policies, but there are some real horror stories in out-of-the-way places.

Educate to be Happy?

Justin Wolfers in the Freakonomics blog responds to a reader's question of whether "ignorance is truly bliss?" by offering...

My reasoning is simple: more intelligent people tend to earn higher incomes, and we know that people with higher incomes are more likely to be happy.

But then he "backs up" his argument with data that shows that people who score high on intelligence tests are happier.

That's fine, but his claims go beyond the data presented (earlier blogs point to his research that links happiness and income/wealth). In this blog he has introduced 3 variables: happiness, intelligence, and income. But produced data for only 2 variables: happiness & intelligence.

The problem is the relationship between these three factors. Is it causal? Are they merely statistically related with a hidden factor that links them causally? I'm willing to guess that higher income is a concomitant of higher intelligence that is only weakly linked because there are other factors (e.g. those who tout EQ, an emotional intelligence, or other factors in a personality that favours money-making activities). Obviously a blog is not a place to develop or espouse a full fledged theory.

Wolfers then muses...

But this doesn’t answer the harder question: What creates a relationship between (measured) intelligence and (measured) happiness? Are those who are lucky enough to be born intelligent also lucky enough to be born happier? Do happy folks elicit greater attention from their teachers? Or does the sort of intelligence that is created by education also enable us to successfully pursue happiness? If it’s the latter, then perhaps these data point to yet another reason to invest in education.

But here Wolfers misses the really critical question: what kind of education? The Classical World "solved" this through Stoicism and Epicureanism which taught a world weariness and acceptance. But I really doubt that this is the kind of "education" Wolfers intends.

Here's the Stoic road to happiness from Wikipedia:

The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective; in regards to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes." A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy," thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole".

And the Epicurean road to happiness from Wikipedia:

Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear (ataraxia) as well as absence of bodily pain (aponia) through knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of our desires. The combination of these two states is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest form.

But I really doubt these are the "educational goals" that Wolfers is promoting.

I don't doubt Wolfer's data, but my personal experience is that income and intelligence lead to idle time and that idle time sets up certain personality types for neuroticism and unhappiness. For some, intelligence and income enable them to live wonderful productive and happy lives. But I suspect the world isn't simple. For some, education helps them find happiness. Some intelligent people can find happiness, but sometimes the education they receive introduces in them expectations or desires that leave them unhappy. Some unintelligent people can be happy if they are unaware of limitations. In short, it is complex. And worse, the answer is dynamic since happiness is not simply an internal state. We interact with others and perceive ourselves in and through them which in turn alters our own perception. Any social science is a very tricky science indeed!

The Attacks on the New Deal

The right wing anti-government nuts fought regulation and have nearly destroyed the US.

Now that Obama is poised to do a very modest "new deal" for America, the knives are out and the right wingers want to stop any "handouts" to the poor, the unemployed, the under-employed. (Obviously trillion dollar handouts are meant to be reserved for the truly deserving, the Wall Street billionaires and multi-millionaires who ran rampant under Bush and have destroyed the economy.)

So... the NY Times has an article that describes the long history of attacking FDR and the New Deal and how this is the latest strategy by the right wingers to undermine Obama even before he gets his stimulus package to Congress. Here are some tidbits from an article by Adam Cohen entitled "Republican's Latest Talking Point: The New Deal Failed":

Conservatives have railed against the New Deal from the start. In 1934, H. L. Mencken was already decrying it as “a saturnalia of expropriation and waste.” When F.D.R. ran for re-election in 1936, a headline in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers insisted that “Moscow Backs Roosevelt.”

But Americans were not fooled. They knew F.D.R. was on their side in a way that Herbert Hoover and his fellow free-marketers hadn’t been. They could see first-hand the good that Roosevelt’s jobs programs were doing for the Depression’s victims and the slow but unmistakable improvements in the economy.

In the 1934 midterm elections, the voters delivered their first verdict on the New Deal, expanding the Democrats’ margins in Congress. In 1936, F.D.R. won in a bigger landslide than he had four years earlier. By 1940, the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, was supporting much of Roosevelt’s social welfare and regulatory regime.

...

Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”

Assessing the Bush Admin Performance

Here is a nice review of how the Bush administration handled the TARP money to save the financial sector:

The Terrible Lessons of TARP

from The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz

With the government now debating the release of the second half of the TARP funds, perhaps now is as good a time as any to look at how successfully spent the first $350 Billion dollars were.

The evidence is not very favorable.

What I can say without reservation is that the TARP spending prevented large brokers and banks from going to zero. Since the legislation was passed in the Fall, there has not been a major disruptive bankruptcy.

Sure, the FDIC had to take over a few institutions that were overdue for the long dirt nap anyway, but the sort of market roiling Bear Steans collapse, and the subsequent Q3 Lehman/AIG/CitiGroup disasters have at least stopped.

This is not, to be clear, any declaration that the TARP has been a success. We have avoided financial armageddon, but other than that, it has been an abject failure.

The short list of criticisms starts with the ad hoc way it was formed, and foisted on the public. There were no clear goals, no over-arching strategy, no milestones to evaluate its success.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the shortcomings and misfires the TARP has yielded:

1. No Strategic Plan: What was the original purpose of the TARP? Its hard to say, other than it was of the greatest importance it be passed with minimum debate and even less information. Without stated objectives, its difficult to evaluate whether it is achieving those goals.

2. Methods and Tactics: By what method was the TARP to be implemented? Buy distressed assets? Recapitalize the banks? Increase lending to businesses and consumers? Rescue foreclosed homeowners? Stimulate the economy? The constantly morphing objectives make it hard to take the original claims very seriously.

3. No Triage: There seemed to be no evaluative method in determining which banks should be saved and which should be put down. If the goal was to strengthen the financial sector, then the approach is to help those that can be strengthened, and have an orderly liquidation of those that cannot. Merely throwing money at weak and dying banks is no long term strategy.

4. Wasting Taxpayer Monies: Why did private investors like Warren Buffett get so much of a better deal than Uncle Sam? Its clear to me that both Treasury and the Fed lack the expertise to negotiate these investments. Instead, set up a matching investment. Let those in the private sector with the expertise to do so make substantial arms-length investments, with the the US matching ( at 10 or even 20X) on the same terms.

5. Transparency, Accountability, Responsibility: How monies have been spent by the Treasury department (and Fed) should be a textbook example of government accountability and transparency. Its not, and there is no good reason why. The Fed is even worse, refusing to release any details, which has led to lawsuits being filed by Bloomberg and Fox News to get the specific public information.

6. Evaluating Progress: All major programs should have some method of evaluating if they are achieving their goals. This is missing from the TARP, and its why so many people have no idea if it has been successful or not.

7. Moral Hazard: Why are we rewarding companies that were poorly managed, reckless money losers? All of the TARP recipients should have anyone senior management associated with the bad investments fired; bonuses suspended, shareholders wiped out. How are these firms paying dividends with government money? Where are the clawbacks of bonuses from Stan O’Neill, Angelo Mozilo, Chuck Prince? That the people responsible for the mess are even remotely profiting from it is simply unconscionable.

As bad as the $700 plus billion expnditures have been, the real damage lay in the future. When in doubt, traders will go bigger and more reckless than ever before. That is the terrible lessons of the TARP: Make sure you screw up big enough to get the taxpayer to rescue you . . .

The Harding administration was corrupt because it was in the pocket of special interests. The Bush administration has done that one better. Not only was it corrupt and in the service of the highest bidder among the lobbyists, it was incompetent.

The sad fact is that a large segment of the American public "bought" the political spin of Bush in 2000 and again in 2004 and some still buy it in 2009 as evidenced by the large numbers voting for McCain even though McCain quickly dropped the "reformer" image and brought on board all the Bush cronies and spinmeisters to run his campaign.

Liberal vs. Libertarian

I found this very concise and sound description of the liberal versus libertarian ideologies. As well, it provides a nice summary of the vagaries of libertarian political tactics over the last 40 years. This is from an announcement of a debate/discussion to be held at Stanford University. Brad Delong put the notice of the event on his web site.

That liberals and libertarians share philosophical origins is clearly implied by the common Latin root for both words, liberalis, meaning open or generous. Both philosophies advocate civil liberties, individual autonomy, limited state interference in private affairs, and a non-bellicose foreign policy. Where the two stances have diverged is with respect to fiscal and regulatory issues. Although liberals generally view markets as the best way of organizing production and distribution, they have been more sympathetic than libertarians to governmental involvement in the management of markets for the public good. Moreover, whereas both liberals and libertarians generally concur that the public sector should avoid excessive spending, the former have been more supportive of government programs to expand opportunity and provide social insurance.

During the 1960s and 1970s, when the public sector was expanding and government spending was rising sharply, libertarians leaned strongly toward a “fusionist” coalition with traditional social conservatives and generally supported the Republican realignment of the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2000, however, the Republican party has succumbed to ideologies that have shifted it steadily away from core libertarian principles by curtailing civil liberties, expanding government intrusions into private affairs, running up huge fiscal deficits, expanding federal control over local institutions such as schools, and launching costly military invasions in the absence of direct threats.

In the wake of these developments, the “fusionist” coalition between libertarians and conservative republicans has substantially frayed and perhaps the time has come to reconsider the historical estrangement between liberals and libertarians. Given shared positions with respect to civil liberties, state involvement in private affairs, fiscal responsibility, and the War in Iraq, it may be fruitful to search for common ground in other areas. Is there room for compromise on contested regulatory and fiscal issues, or are liberals and libertarians destined to be occasional tactical allies with fundamentally conflicting strategic visions? And regardless of possibilities for closer political cooperation, what libertarian insights do liberals need to do a better job of appreciating, and vice versa?

My experience is that libertarians are hard sectarians at the fringe of the political debate. As the above shows, they also "play politics" and maneuver to exploit the broader political trends for their own sectarian interests. I would compare them the the Bolsheviks swimming in the political waters of the broader Social Democratic movements of the early 20th century. In short, be distrustful of their ideological maneuvering, they tend to be fanatics and extreme partisans.

Keynes Diagnoses the 21st Century Malady

The following is extremely interesting because it shows how perceptive Keynes was in understanding the intellectual forces leading up to the "modern" situation. I've included only section one of the essay because it is truly relevant. The rest of the essay attempts to look into the future (from 1926) and unfortunately Keynes is less of a prophet than he was of a key analyst of our intellectual history). The other sections are interesting and I generally agree with his view that some social institution between individual and state need to be born to bridge the gap, but the particulars of that part of his argument is less interesting.

The arugment which comprises section one of the essay is exceptionally good and understanding the intellectual movements leading up to the modern situation. As I read it the voices of conservatives and liberal and socialists and libertarians are all there. He has show how they all thread together in leading to the modern situation. It is well worth reading the following. I am indebted to Brad DeLong for putting this piece, John Maynard Keynes: The End of Laissez Faire (1926), on his Egregious Moderation blog:

The disposition towards public affairs, which we conveniently sum up as individualism and laissez-faire, drew its sustenance from many different rivulets of thought and springs of feeling. For more than a hundred years our philosophers ruled us because, by a miracle, they nearly all agreed or seem to agree on this one thing. We do not dance even yet to a new tune. But a change is in the air. We hear but indistinctly what were once the clearest and most distinguishable voices which have ever instructed political mankind. The orchestra of diverse instruments, the chorus of articulate sound, is receding at last into the distance.

At the end of the seventeenth century the divine right of monarchs gave place to natural liberty and to the compact, and the divine right of the church to the principle of toleration, and to the view that a church is 'a voluntary society of men’, coming together, in a way which is 'absolutely free and spontaneous' (Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration). Fifty years later the divine origin and absolute voice of duty gave place to the calculations of utility. In the hands of Locke and Hume these doctrines founded Individualism. The compact presumed rights in the individual; the new ethics, being no more than a scientific study of the consequences of rational self-love, placed the individual at the centre. ‘The sole trouble Virtue demands', said Hume, 'is that of just Calculation, and a steady preference of the greater Happiness.' (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, section LX).

These ideas accorded with the practical notions of conservatives and of lawyers. They furnished a satisfactory intellectual foundation to the rights of property and to the liberty of the individual in possession to do what he liked with himself and with his own. This was one of the contributions of the eighteenth century to the air we still breathe.

The purpose of promoting the individual was to depose the monarch and the church; the effect - through the new ethical significance attributed to contract - was to buttress property and prescriptions. But it was not long before the claims of society raised themselves anew against the individual. Paley and Bentham accepted utilitarian hedonism from the hands of Hume and his predecessors, but enlarged it into social utility (‘I omit’ says Archdeacon Paley, 'much usual declamation upon the dignity and capacity of our nature, the superiority of the soul to the body, of the rational to the animal part of our constitution; upon the worthiness, refinement, and delicacy of some satisfactions, and the meanness, grossness, and sensuality of others: because I hold that pleasures differ in nothing but in continuance and intensity' - Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, Book 1, chap. 6). Rousseau took the Social Contract from Locke and drew out of it the General Will. In each case the transition was made by virtue of the new emphasis laid on equality. 'Locke applies his Social Contract to modify the natural equality of mankind, so far as that phrase implies equality of property or even of privilege, in consideration of general security. In Rousseau's version equality is not only the starting-point but the goal.' (Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, II, 192).

Paley and Bentham reached the same destination, but by different routes. Paley avoided an egoistic conclusion to his hedonism by a God from the machine. 'Virtue', he says, 'is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness' - in this way bringing I and the others to a parity. Bentham reached the same result by pure reason. There is no rational ground, he argued, for preferring the happiness of one individual, even oneself, to that of any other. Hence the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the sole rational object of conduct - taking utility from Hume, but forgetting that sage man's corollary: 'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.' 'Tis not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian, or person totally unknown to me ... Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.'

Rousseau derived equality from the state of nature, Paley from the will of God, Bentham from a mathematical law of indifference. Equality and altruism had thus entered political philosophy, and from Rousseau and Bentham sprang both democracy and utilitarian socialism.

This is the second current - sprang from long-dead controversies, and carried on its way by long-exploded sophistries - which still permeates our atmosphere of thought but it did not drive out the former current. It mixed with it. The early nineteenth century performed the miraculous union. It harmonised the conservative individualism of Locke, Hume, Johnson, and Burke with the socialism and democratic egalitarianism of Rousseau, Paley, Bentham, and Godwin. (Godwin carried laissez-faire so far that he thought all government an evil, in which Bentham almost agreed with him. The doctrine of equality becomes with him one of extreme individualism, verging on anarchy. 'The universal exercise of private judgement’ he says, 'is a doctrine so unspeakably beautiful that the true politician will certainly feel infinite reluctance in admitting the idea of interfering with it' - see Leslie Stephen, op. cit. II, 277).

Nevertheless, that age would have been hard put to it to achieve this harmony of opposites if it had not been for the economists, who sprang into prominence just at the right moment. The idea of a divine harmony between private advantage and the public good is already apparent in Paley. But it was the economists who gave the notion a good scientific basis. Suppose that by the working of natural laws individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment in condition of freedom always tend to promote the general interest at the same time! Our philosophical difficulties are resolved-at least for the practical man, who can then concentrate his efforts on securing the necessary conditions of freedom. To the philosophical doctrine that the government has no right to interfere, and the divine that it has no need to interfere, there is added a scientific proof that its interference is inexpedient. This is the third current of thought, just discoverable in Adam Smith, who was ready in the main to allow the public good to rest on 'the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition', but not fully and self-consciously developed until the nineteenth century begins. The principle of laissez-faire had arrived to harmonise individualism and socialism, and to make at one Hume's egoism with the greatest good of the greatest number. The political philosopher could retire in favour of the business man - for the latter could attain the philosopher's summum bonum by just pursuing his own private profit.

Yet some other ingredients were needed to complete the pudding. First the corruption and incompetence of eighteenth-century government, many legacies of which survived into the nineteenth. The individualism of the political philosophers pointed to laissez-faire. The divine or scientific harmony (as the case might be) between private interest and public advantage pointed to laissez-faire. But above all, the ineptitude of public administrators strongly prejudiced the practical man in favour of laissez-faire - a sentiment which has by no means disappeared. Almost everything which the State did in the eighteenth century in excess of its minimum functions was, or seemed, injurious or unsuccessful.

On the other hand, material progress between 1750 and 1850 came from individual initiative, and owed almost nothing to the directive influence of organised society as a whole. Thus practical experience reinforced a priori reasonings. The philosophers and the economists told us that for sundry deep reasons unfettered private enterprise would promote the greatest good of the whole. What could suit the business man better? And could a practical observer, looking about him, deny that the blessings of improvement which distinguished the age he lived in were traceable to the activities of individuals ‘on the make’?

Thus the ground was fertile for a doctrine that, whether on divine, natural, or scientific grounds, state action should be narrowly confined and economic life left, unregulated so far as may be, to the skill and good sense of individual citizens actuated by the admirable motive of trying to get on in the world.

By the time that the influence of Paley and his like was waning, the innovations of Darwin were shaking the foundations of belief. Nothing could seem more oppose than the old doctrine and the new - the doctrine which looked on the world as the work of the divine watchmaker and the doctrine which seemed to draw all things out of Chance, Chaos, and Old Time. But at this one point the new ideas bolstered up the old. The economists were teaching that wealth, commerce, and machinery were the children of free competition - that free competition built London. But the Darwinians could go one better than that - free competition had built man. The human eye was no longer the demonstration of design, miraculously contriving all things for the best; it was the supreme achievement of chance, operating under conditions of free competition and laissez-faire. The principle of the survival of the fittest could be regarded as a vast generalisation of the Ricardian economics. Socialist interferences became, in the light of this grander synthesis, not merely inexpedient, but impious, as calculated to retard the onward movement of the mighty process by which we ourselves had risen like Aphrodite out of the primeval slime of ocean.

Therefore I trace the peculiar unity of the everyday political philosophy of the nineteenth century to the success with which it harmonised diversified and warring schools and united all good things to a single end. Hume and Paley, Burke and Rousseau, Godwin and Malthus, Cobbett and Huskisson, Bentham and Coleridge, Darwin and the Bishop of Oxford, were all, it was discovered, preaching practically the same thing - individualism and laissez-faire. This was the Church of England and those her apostles, whilst the company of the economists were there to prove that the least deviation into impiety involved financial ruin.

These reasons and this atmosphere are the explanations, we know it or not - and most of us in these degenerate days are largely ignorant in the matter - why we feel such a strong bias in favour of laissez-faire, and why state action to regulate the value of money, or the course of investment, or the population, provokes such passionate suspicions in many upright breasts. We have not read these authors; we should consider their arguments preposterous if they were to fall into our hands. Nevertheless we should not, I fancy, think as we do, if Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Paley, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Miss Martineau had not thought and written as they did. A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

Quantifying the Unquantifiable

Here is a snippet from a comment in the New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg that talks about Obama, but buried within it is a devastating summing up of the Bush legacy:

The President-elect’s performance can’t fully explain the public’s welcoming view of him. Part of it, surely, reflects an eagerness to be rid of the incumbent. A gangly Illinois politician whom “the base” would today label a RINo—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many “some” is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given his comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration’s downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America’s influence, prestige, power, and moral standing.

The televised “legacy interviews” that Bush has granted have been notable for the interviewee’s shruggings-off of responsibility for what he has wrought, abroad and at home. He’s sorry about the inartfulness of “dead or alive” and “bring ’em on” and “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” but not about the war or its conduct. And in a discussion of the economic catastrophe he is about to bequeath to his successor, there is this exchange, with ABC’s Charles Gibson:


GIBSON: Do you feel in any way responsible for what’s happening?

BUSH: You know, I’ve been the President during this period of time. But I think when the history of this period is written people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over, you know, a decade or so before I arrived as President, during I arrived as President. I’m sorry it’s happening, of course. Obviously, I don’t like the idea of people losing jobs or being worried about their 401(k)s.

A nice epitaph for “compassionate conservatism”—feckless to the end. And the end, at long last, is nigh.