More than one commentator has noted that there is a silver lining in the widespread belief that America urgently needs a major economic stimulus package. It is a gift to President Obama, many suggest, because it allows his administration to pursue a wide range of social policies as a package rather than one by one, and provides for a level of funding that couldn’t otherwise be imagined.

That’s probably true. But I think that there is another deeper and more valuable silver lining in this cloud of economic disaster. The need for economic stimulus provides an opportunity to demonstrate the value of good government and public service.

America’s need for a major economic stimulus package is widely felt. American markets urgently need an infusion of capital. Growing ranks of unemployed workers urgently need jobs. Both families facing foreclosures and families simply wanting to buy a new home need credit. And yes, banks and Wall Street investors and small American businesses all need that capital, that credit and those workers. So why is the economic stimulus package controversial? Why did every Republican in the House of Representatives vote against it?

Of course simple partisan politics is the first and probably the most important reason. Republicans are desperate to show they still matter, that they don’t have to go along quietly just because the President is popular, the Democrats have a big majority, and the stimulus package has wide popular support.

But many Republicans also voted, I believe, out of real conviction. They voted against the stimulus because they thought it would expand government. The Cato Institute is not running for re-election and it ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times challenging the notion that a stimulus package was really needed. A couple hundred economists signed on.

There are two reasons for this kind of negative response. One is basically an opposition to a stimulus package as such, because it represents a government intervention into the economy. It is impressive that the Cato Institute could find 200 economists who still believe markets are automatically self-correcting—and indeed self-correcting not just in the long-run (when, as Keynes said, we will all be dead) but on a time-scale fast enough that years of massive suffering can be averted. But this is an honest belief, and social scientists can debate whether it is grounded more in empirical evidence or ideology.

Others are not against a stimulus but against this particular package. Some would rather rely more on tax cuts or target the tax cuts more to those who are likely to invest their savings (i.e., the well off). Some would focus more on bailing out specific businesses, whether banks or auto companies. The common ingredients are a desire to get money into markets quickly, and a willingness to rely entirely on the same economic actors and market mechanisms that have been working in a minimally regulated fashion for the last several years.

Instead, the Obama team has chosen a very broad approach to economic stimulus. They are not just printing money, not just opening credit, not just infusing cash to the biggest corporations in America. They are building schools and repairing roads, making health care available to the uninsured, creating jobs, investing in cleaner and more renewable energy, giving tax credits to working families. This is partly a matter of equity—distributing money and opportunity fairly—and it is partly a matter of trying to reach people in personal need as quickly as possible. But it is also a matter of economic policy. Obama and his advisors are trying to promote economic growth by getting cash and capital into the economy by dozens of different routes, not just a few. They are betting that recovery will be more sustainable if it has broad roots than if it is based only on the rescue of troubled corporations and wealthy investors.

But the Obama approach is also based on a belief in public service and effective management of public affairs. It will work only if a wide variety of different government agencies do their work well. It calls for the staff of the Department of Education to do a good job using early childhood education funds to make Head Start work better. It calls for staff of the Department of Energy to do a good job using stimulus funds to promote innovation in new energy sources and in new technologies. It calls for the staff of a range of departments to use stimulus funds to make specific improvements—in housing, in roads, in health care. There is an act of faith in this.

For decades every presidential candidate has run against government. Not only conservative economists but also a range of others have told us there is almost nothing the government can do better than corporations and markets. They have pressed for private schools over public, private prisons, privatization of social security, an approach to private health care that leaves more and more Americans uninsured and doctors working as the agents of insurance companies. This didn’t happen just because markets were effective, it happened because advocates for market fundamentalism were effective in spreading an ideology that said private property should be the basis of all policy, that public values and interests were always derivative or secondary.

That many government programs have been run poorly and that too many government officials have been corrupt has given credence to the accusation. Of course, the corruption may have reached its peak under the Bush administration—which of course spoke the language of small government but actually caused the federal government to grow larger than ever before. And hasn’t there been quite a bit of corruption on Wall Street? Bernard Madoff, of course, but also every investment bank that sold instruments its executives didn’t understand, every commercial bank that hid the toxic loans on its balance sheets, every financial manager who knew the game they were playing could not be sustained but thought he would be smart enough to get out before it collapsed and had no obligation to make his gambling clear to investors?

Here’s an example of a government program being run badly: former Treasury Secretary Paulsen organized the Bush administration’s bailouts of banks so that there would be almost no restrictions on how the money was used. And many banks used the money to pay bonuses to their own high-level staff, more than $18 billion dollars worth.

The Obama administration may yet give more money to those same banks, because bank failures are a bad thing for the public interest. But if the administration is serious about the public interest, it will put conditions on the money, it will put regulations in place, and/or it will demand an ownership stake in the banks.

And this is the issue in every area where money from the stimulus package can be spent: the Obama administration needs to distribute the money in appropriate ways with appropriate conditions. It needs to establish regulations that protect the public interest. And in some cases, it needs to rely on public institutions—like public schools and hospitals.

For these public institutions to work well, they need support. In some cases they need reform. In all cases they need new recruits and new motivation for longtime staff members who have suffered in the years when no one wanted to say anything good about government.

President Obama may help to inspire improvements by calling for change. With his cabinet members he can help to insure improvements by changing the organizational structures and operating practices of government agencies. But it is not just structures and procedures that matter. It is also the ideal of public service itself, and the idea that government should be judged by how well it promotes the public interest. Candidate Obama promised a renewal of public service. In effect, routing stimulus funds through a range of government agencies is making good on this campaign promise as well as his promise to fix economic problems.

President Obama has chosen to put faith in effective government action and invited the American people to do so as well. In the long run this may be just as important as the record-setting size of the stimulus package.