One of our great misfortunes is that all of the world’s leaders seem to have a stake in proclaiming that the end of the world is near. President Barack Obama is touring the country telling audiences that unless Congress passes his new jobs bill — the word “stimulus” is considered too laden with memories of past failures to be usable by the president — we will almost certainly collapse into another recession. Republican leaders respond by saying unless the president changes his policies or, better still, the nation changes its president, we will fall ever further into debt, with living standards spiralling downward. In Europe, the powers-that-be are saying that unless Italy, Greece and others change their profligate ways, and German chancellor Angela Merkel keeps her nation’s purse open indefinitely to provide a Berlin backstop, the eurozone will collapse and with it the international banking system. And World Bank president Robert Zoellick returned from China to tell those of us here in Washington that the world has entered “a new danger zone with little running room… Unless Europe, Japan, and the United States … face up to responsibilities they will drag down not only themselves, but the global economy.”

Zoellick’s news was best of all. He was making an important point: The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Our problems stem not from any intrinsic flaw in free market capitalism, nor from some historically determined collapse of Western economies, but from terrible policies — made by man, and capable of being undone by man.