Personal Responsiblity Indeed

Ellen Goodman's article "Personal Responsibility?" from the Indianapolis Star:

For decades now the mantra of personal responsibility has kept a lock on our imaginations. And our political dialogue....

In the economy even more than the culture, personal responsibility has been a best-seller. We were told by conservatives and free-market holy rollers that markets were smart and governments were dumb, that the government was the problem not the solution. So when credit cards come through the mail, college freshmen are expected to just say no. When poor people were wooed and seduced by subprime mortgages, they are the ones dubbed irresponsible....

...The ownership society turned into the everyone-on-your-own society. Three years ago, Congress passed a law making it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. Just six months ago, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary who now wants to be czar, insisted the government actions to prevent mortgage foreclosures would "do more harm than they would do good."

But now, as Jacob Hacker, the author of "The Great Risk Shift," puts it, we are seeing that "the rhetoric of personal responsibility stops at the edge of the market."

... Consider the lame duck who reappeared on the national stage this week, sounding less like a president than as a press secretary for Paulson...

The other bookend on the Bush years is this meltdown of epic proportions. We are bailing out the institutions that operated what Warren Buffett once called the financial weapons of mass destruction. Only this time, the mushroom cloud -- the threat of an economic catastrophe -- may be real.

Personal responsibility? "I share the outrage," says Paulson. But in his original three-page fix-it manual there was a paragraph that lit up like neon. The secretary who asked for all the power to "take such actions as the secretary deems necessary" also asked for protection from any oversight or review. Personal responsibility? The titans coming to Congress with cups in their hands and the economy in the balance were not too embarrassed to fight against caps on their salaries. What exactly do we have here? Socialism for the rich?...

Read Ellen Goodman's entire article on "Personal Responsibilty?" here.