Thomas A. James

In February 2009, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote one of his many much-talkedabout Op-Ed pieces, this one about the furor being raised over the government bailout of big banks in the wake of the economic crisis—a crisis that they, of course, more or less created. Brooks's point in that piece was essentially that outraged critics of government intervention should get real: government is not, as he put it, "in the Last Judgment business." It is not government's business…