Man on Fire

"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot." --George Orwell

Krugman gets cheeky with analogies of fire departments with financial reform: “…letting banks fail — as opposed to [the government] seizing and restructuring them — is a bad idea for the same reason that it’s a bad idea to stand aside while an urban office building burns.” To extend that analogy, then Krugman’s proposition is to give the arsonists the task of dousing the building they set fire to in the first place.