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profits as a way to recoup taxpayer bailout money. In the bankers’ view, they had already paid back their bailout money—with interest—and therefore nothing more could legitimately be asked of them. But imagine for a moment what the banking industry profits would have been in 2009 absent the several hundred billion dollars of government funds from which they benefited both directly and indirectly. We can never know for sure, of course, because we didn’t run that experiment, but we can make some educated guesses. AIG, for one, would probably not exist and its various counterparties, including Goldman Sachs, would be short several tens of billions of dollars that were funneled to them through AIG. Citigroup might well have collapsed, and Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers might all have been dissolved rather than merged with other banks.

All told, the banking industry might have lost tens of billions of dollars in 2009—quite the opposite of the tens of billions they actually made—and many thousands of bankers who in reality received bonuses would instead have been out of work. Now imagine that in the fall of 2008 the leaders of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and the like were offered a choice between the “systemic support” world in which they were guaranteed government support and the “libertarian” world in which they would be left hung out to dry. Forget for a moment the devastation that would have been wreaked on the rest of the economy, and ask how much of their future compensation the banks would have been willing to concede in order to not be allowed to fail? Again, it’s a hypothetical question, but with their very survival in the balance it seems safe to assume that they would have agreed to commit more than the face value of their direct loans.

That the banks and their allies have instead managed to portray themselves as victims of stifling government intervention and political populism run amok is therefore disingenuous, and not only for the obvious reason that the banks benefited from considerable government largess other than direct loans.30 The real reason is philosophical consistency. When times are good, banks wish to be perceived as independent risk-taking entities, entitled to the full fruits of their hard-won labors. But during a crisis they wish to be treated as critical elements in a larger system to which their failure would pose an existential threat. Whether this latter claim is true because they are too big or too interconnected, or for any other reason, is actually not so important. The real point is that either they are libertarians, who should bear the full weight of their own failures as well as their successes, or else they are Rawlsians, paying their dues to the system that takes care of them. They should not be able to switch philosophies at their convenience.

BEARING EACH OTHER’S BURDENS

In his recent book Justice, the philosopher Michael Sandel makes a similar point, arguing that all questions of fairness and justice have to be adjudicated in light of how dependent we are on each other—most obviously, on our networks of friends, family, colleagues, and classmates, but also on our communities, on our national and ethnic identities, and even on our distant ancestors. We are proud of what “our” people have accomplished, we protect them against outsiders, and we come to their aid when necessary. We feel that we owe them our loyalty for no reason other than that we are connected to them, and we expect them to reciprocate. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that social networks play a critical role in our lives, connecting us with resources, providing information and support, and facilitating transactions on the basis of mutual trust and assumed respect. So embedded are we in networks of social relations that it would be hard to imagine ourselves outside of them.31

So far, this view seems uncontroversial. Even Margaret Thatcher, who claimed that “there is no such thing as society,” conceded that families mattered as well as individuals. But Sandel argues that the importance