Like most conservatives, trial lawyers are unabashed and unapologetic capitalists, exploiting the market for legal services as energetically and entrepreneurially as they can and taking great risk in the process. When consumer products or business practices start to smell fishy, trial lawyers pounce. They can spend millions to develop a case, only to lose everything when the judge or jury rules against them. But the upside can be huge, with multimillion-dollar recoveries and substantial fees.

Conservatives bash trial lawyers for this sort of swashbuckling, but why? Conservatives believe -- correctly -- that the profit motive leads to better mousetraps. Greed is good, and the greed of trial lawyers, though they wouldn't call it that, has given all of us safer products and fairer dealing.

Something else trial lawyers share with their Republican tormenters: They don't go crying to big government. Government is sluggish, inefficient, unresponsive. Government is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, operating with a third less funding than it used to as Firestone tires come apart and Ford Explorers roll off the road. Government is the Food and Drug Administration, under tremendous pressure to rush drugs to market and shocked, shocked at having to recall them months later. Government is the Securities and Exchange Commission, apparently clueless while giant companies committed serial securities fraud. Government is why conservatives argue that social needs are often better met by the private sector, and why privatizing public services is all the rage in government.

Hence trial lawyers. Courts have long used the phrase "private attorney general" to describe a citizen who brings a lawsuit that advances public goals. In this conservative era of downsized and outsourced government, trial lawyers are, for better or worse, the private attorneys general for us all.