“America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people,” George W. Bush, October, 2003, “Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.” That remark prompted these thoughts from John Judis in the July/August 2004 Foreign Policy:

As many Philippine commentators remarked afterward, Bush’s rendition of Philippine-American history bore little relation to fact. True, the U.S. Navy ousted Spain from the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But instead of creating a Philippine democracy, the McKinley administration, its confidence inflated by victory in that splendid little war, annexed the country and installed a colonial administrator. The United States then waged a brutal war against the same Philippine independence movement it encouraged to fight against Spain. The war dragged on for 14 years. Before it ended, about 120,000 U.S. troops were deployed, more than 4,000 were killed, and more than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. Resentment lingered a century later during Bush’s visit.

As for the Philippines’ democracy, the United States can take little credit for what exists and some blame for what doesn’t. The electoral machinery the United States designed in 1946 provided a democratic veneer beneath which a handful of families, allied to U.S. investors-and addicted to kickbacks-controlled the Philippine land, economy, and society. The tenuous system broke down in 1973 when Philippine politician Ferdinand Marcos had himself declared president for life. Marcos was finally overthrown in 1986, but even today Philippine democracy remains more dream than reality. Three months before Bush’s visit, a group of soldiers staged a mutiny that raised fears of a military coup. With Islamic radicals and communists roaming the countryside, the Philippines is perhaps the least stable of Asian nations. If the analogy between the United States’ liberation of the Philippines and of Iraq holds true, it will not be to the credit of the Bush administration, but to the skeptics who charged that the White House undertook the invasion of Baghdad with its eyes wide shut.

Now via Daniel Larison, we see Michael O’Hanlon and Jason Campbell once again citing the Phillipines as a model of success: “The experience of successful counterinsurgency and stabilization missions in places such as the Philippines and Malaysia, by contrast, leads us to place a premium on tracking trends in the daily lives of typical citizens.” To a remarkable extent our contemporary debates are just re-hashing the controversies over imperialism of over a century ago.

Tyler Cowen’s upset with Jonathan Kozol’s warning that “If those of us who profess to value public schools and the principle of democratic access they uphold cannot find the courage or the motivation to fight in their defense, we may soon wake up to find that they have been replaced by wholly owned subsidiaries of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wal-Mart.” And, indeed, if anything the problem with privatizing the school system is likely to be the reverse of this. Businesses go where the business opportunities are.

Given the difficulty of the enterprises, there’s no reason to think that educating disadvantaged children is a market that smart businessmen are clamoring to get in on. The basic structure of the achievement gap problem in the United States is that all the evidence suggests that educating the disadvantaged is harder than educating the privileged, but the latter task attracts more resources than does the former. A privatized system could, in principle, change that; but a publicly administered one could as well. Either way, you’d need a setup so that the best people (in terms of teachers, administrators, or even vicious profit-maximizing businessmen) were drawn to doing the harder job rather than the easier one.

Louis Uchitelle profiles the voices of the new guilded age. Some, like Sanford Weill, aren’t just richer than hell, they fully intend to be jerks about it. “We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built,” he says at one point “and we shouldn’t rely on somebody else to provide all the services our society needs.” Or there’s Leo Hindrey who observes that Jerek “Deter makes an unbelievable amount of money, but you look at him and you say, ‘Wow, I cannot find another ballplayer with that same set of skills.” Others have their doubts:

A handful of critics among the new elite, or close to it, are scornful of such self-appraisal. “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy,” Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve Board chairman, said in an interview, challenging the contentions of the very rich that they are, more than others, the driving force of a robust economy.

Right. The economy grew at a perfectly rapid clip in a broad-based manner in the 1950s and 60s.