Hey Paul Gigot: Thomas Frank Is Awful

Ugh, Thomas Frank is just godawful. He's now on a streak of something like seven or eight inane columns. Last week's column prompted me to lay into the folks at the WSJ who employ him. This week's only serves to make me want to vomit. He cites a lone instance of incompetent/corrupt government contracting to indict private vs. public provision of services and smears the whole legitimate case for private sector provision of services as a conservative fraud. This is a highly complex and nuanced debate within the field of political economy, but Frank justs wipes it all away with an anecdote. It is not as if the world has never seen massive fraud and waste at the hands of "progressive" government. Furthermore, what Frank misses is that the fraud and waste evident in contracting to private companies begins with and emanates from the belief in big and expansive government. Fine, private contractors have failed to live up to promises and cheated taxpayers, but who selected the bozos and funded them? Who managed the process and provided the lax oversight that allowed the fraud and waste to blossom? Yes, the government. Not Republican government or Democratic government, but big, ambitious, interventionist government. So, the government can't even choose the correct people and oversee the process correctly, but they sure as hell must be better at the whole kit and kaboodle from planning to execution. What, like the Post Office or the IRS or the Census Bureau? How are we to believe that a government that can't manage experts can be both manager and expert? The anecdotes that Frank provides only demonstrate further the endemic incompetence and/or flawed incentive structure that doom big government approaches to failure. He has inadvertantly shown us how government more often than not will screw up - something we've known for a long time.

Surely there is a lefty columnist out there who isn't an embarassment to the left and surely the WSJ ought to be able to find and hire such a person.

N.B. - for all you readers who might think I'm just barking and that I don't have any real influence over at the WSJ, check out this June 23 editorial and then this June 11 post. Hmmmm.