CT Blue

This morning’s Times has a post mortem on one of George Bush’s many failures: the housing crisis. The Times credits Bush with genuinely wanting to increase home ownership. I refuse to do that, since I don’t think he’s ever actually wanted to improve the lives of ordinary people. He has done what needed to be done in order to enrich the members of his class.

The article establishes anew what we already knew: that the primary reason the situation got so out of hand was Bush and his gang’s adherence to Republican anti-regulation orthodoxy. It doesn’t matter whether they actually believed that unregulated markets always work optimally, or only said so because it was in the interests of their base. The effect was the same.

Publicly, Bush blames everyone but himself. Privately? I never believe the second hand Bush quotes passed on by Bush flacks, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is true:

But in private moments, aides say, the president is looking inward. During a recent ride aboard Marine One, the presidential helicopter, Mr. Bush sounded a reflective note.

“We absolutely wanted to increase homeownership,” Tony Fratto, his deputy press secretary, recalled him saying. “But we never wanted lenders to make bad decisions.”

Here is a guy who exploited every loophole, and created a bunch from whole cloth, to expand and abuse his own power. When the law did not allow him to do something, he argued that it did. When it was clear as day that something he did was illegal, he did it anyway, because he knew one thing. He was subject to absolutely no oversight. As a result he made a lot of bad decisions. In fact, it would be the work of a day to try to come up with one good decision he made.

So we must wonder. What made him think his banker friends would act any differently, after he abolished effective oversight of them? Those bankers did not make bad decisions. Things worked out great for them. They all got spectacularly rich, and they’re still spectacularly rich. Thanks to Bush, they’re still in line for big bonuses, on our dime. Their decisions were bad only if looked at from the point of view of the general interest. But Republican dogma tells us that business people are not supposed to consider any interests but their own. That’s what regulators are for-to make sure that the pursuit of private gain does not destroy the public good. So, if Bush didn’t want lenders to make bad decisions, he himself made all the wrong decisions to prevent them from doing so. But then, what else is new?

Update. Paul Krugman, on his blog, comments on Bush’s commitment to home ownership and the root of our present problem:

I’m also with Barry Ritholtz that Bush’s emphasis on homeownership was not the problem. Bush favored homeownership; I’m sure he also favored marital fidelity; his influence on homeownership and his influence on adultery were probably comparable. It’s Bush’s opposition to financial regulation that did the evil deed.