One of conservativism’s greatest failures, and there are many, is its simultaneous insistence on personal responsibility! while at the same time it absolves some folks of all personal responsibility.

As in, the Masters of the Universe.

John Kay makes a point in his Financial Times column that we ought to repeat here every day of the week, so that maybe it’ll finally penetrate the addled brains:

Their activities underwritten by implicit and explicit government guarantee, it is increasingly business as usual for conglomerate banks. The politicians they lobby sound increasingly like their mouthpieces, espousing the revisionist view that the crisis was caused by bad regulation. It was not: the crisis was caused by greedy and inept bank executives who failed to control activities they did not understand. While regulators may be at fault in not having acted sufficiently vigorously, the claim that they caused the crisis is as ludicrous as the claim that crime is caused by the indolence of the police.

But that is the claim conservatives make.

Their line is that the financial crisis was caused entirely by government, by a failure of government. But what about the bankers themselves? How much blame do they bear?

And if you read enough conservative commetary you can’t help but come away with this sense that conservatives don’t blame the bankers at all - because they were merely taking advantage of opportunities presented to them by government. The bankers might have been greedy or reckless, but if government hadn’t provided them with perverse incentives, this wouldn’t have been a problem!

This is the same as saying that the person who stole your GPS isn’t really to blame - it’s all your fault because you forgot to lock the door to your car! You provided him a perverse incentive!

News flash: Even if/where the government provided perverse incentives, this doesn’t in and of itself absolve those who grasped at those perverse incentives.

“Personal responsibility” involves resisting temptation - doesn’t it?