The token conservative columnist at the New York Times, David Brooks, has written a piece that encourages Obama to continue and even increase his expansion of the federal leviathan, but not to do so with openly socialistic policies. In the course of that nonsense, he gives a badly misleading account of American history in the decades prior to the Civil War, in particular the Whig approach to government. In this piece, economics professor Tom DiLorenzo sets the historical record straight, and also skewers Brooks for his advocacy of more statism.