Through the looking glass

David Brooks touches, I think, on a lot of the same things I was getting at in my earlier post about personal responsibility going out the window during a depression:

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.

...

...Individual responsibility doesn’t mean much in an economy like this one. We all know people who have been laid off through no fault of their own. The responsible have been punished along with the profligate.

...It makes sense for government to try to restore some communal order. And the sad reality is that in these circumstances government has to spend money on precisely those sectors that have been swinging most wildly — housing, finance, etc. It has to help stabilize people who have been idiots.

As Krugman would say, we're "through the looking glass"--virtuous behavior on an individual level is sinking the economy, and the only way to bring it back up is to give money to those who behaved the worst.