Jeff Madrick’s The Case for Big Government arrives when one might imagine that Wall Street has made the case quite persuasively on its own. By mid-February, the Federal Reserve’s once-gargantuan $29 billion rescue of Bear Stearns had been dwarfed not just by the government’s hotly debated $700 billion “bailout bill” last fall, or even President Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus package, but far more stunningly by the $7.6 trillion the Fed and Treasury had by the beginning of 2009 already pledged to contain the ever-widening collapse of the economy, and the additional sum of up to $2 trillion that the new administration said it would raise from public and private sources to rescue banks.