New Yorkers who thought Eliot Spitzer had made a left-wing war on Wall Street from his office of attorney general may not have seen the last of it. Not even the Lord High Executioner himself did what his successor, Andrew Cuomo, has done and name deputy attorneys general for “social justice” and “economic justice.”

Such titles have no precedent in the New York State Attorney General’s office, though the law allows Mr. Cuomo to organize his office just about any way he wants. A spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo, Wendy Katz, called the new titles “basic categories and divisions” that “reflect the attorney general’s priorities.” For example, the deputy for social justice oversees social things like charities and immigration.

It remains to be seen if Mr. Cuomo’s deputies plan to treat their appointments as mandates for social activism. The deputy attorney general for “economic justice,” Eric Corngold, is a veteran federal prosecutor from the Eastern District of New York, specializing in white-collar crime.

Enforcing the law and prosecuting crime is one thing, but too often the term “economic justice” is code for punishing successful people by taking away their property and redistributing it to poorer people. These are, properly, matters for legislatures to debate as they set tax rates, not for prosecutors to dictate with the heavy hand of lawsuits and criminal charges.

We thought the sense of the situation was expressed quite well by Tom Palmer of the Cato Institute, who said to us: “If the Catholic Church wants to talk about social justice, they can do that. But you create a special deputy or a political office like that, it’s someone who can punish you.”

The expectations of New Yorkers for their state politicians at this point are pretty low. In the matter of the attorney general, we’d be happy if he represents the state government competently in court and if he pursues justice, period. New York’s laws are complicated enough that if Mr. Cuomo wants to enforce them, he will have plenty of work on his hands without superimposing vague, unlegislated, socialist notions of economic or social justice that would only reinforce the notion that there is some radical political agenda and result in injustice.