In his final WSJ opinion column (“The Tilting Yard”) yesterday (how sad – moving to Harper’s), Thomas Frank rails on the fact that nothing has changed in Washington over his two years of writing the column. He is one of those progressives who believe that Barry has not done nearly enough to control and regulate business. Well, there is another thing that has not changed – his inability to understand the inevitable consequences of a large and powerful government. One of his favorite subjects is “regulatory capture”, which he references obliquely (“regulatory misbehavior”) in his final column, and had columns discussing very directly on 6/24/09 and 11/25/09. Regulatory capture was made most famous by my UofC business school professor George Stigler in a 1971 journal article. It is the process by which a small group (relative to the general population) – a “special interest” group – “captures” the regulators to get them to develop regulations or provide subsidies that will benefit the group. These groups can be business firms, labor unions, professional groups, environmental groups, minorities, and many others. They attempt to influence legislators and bureaucrats in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Unfortunately, it is clear from his columns that Frank does not understand the concept. The fundamental principle that Frank misses is that these efforts are an inevitable part of the democratic political process and personal cost/benefit decisions. There are large benefits to the groups, while the costs are widely disbursed, so there is little incentive for opponents to spend time or resources to organize. Frank seems to believe that if we only had better politicians, bureaucrats and regulations, that all would be well. This is a pipe dream. The only way to reduce the use of the coercive power of the state to benefit the few is to have a smaller, less powerful government. That is one of the main reasons that true conservatives support smaller government and less regulation.
I suppose I may miss my blood boiling each Wednesday as I read Frank’s column, and I do welcome debate, dissent and alternative views in the WSJ OpEd pages. However, I hope the WSJ can find a replacement who has some clue about economics and incentives, unlike most of the political class.
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A great "good riddance" for Thomas Frank from The Weekly Standard's
ReplyDelete"The Scrapbook" (8/23/10):
What’s the Matter With Thomas Frank
The Scrapbook was perusing the Wall Street Journal the other morning
and somewhere in the middle of the Opinion page noticed this sentence:
“This is my last weekly column for the Wall Street Journal . . .” We
were hooked.
Of course, a columnist can only write one essay with such an
arresting opener, so that may well be the last thing The Scrapbook
ever reads by its author, Thomas Frank. Recruited in 2008 as a
successor to Al Hunt, Frank was presumably hired to offer routine
contrast to the Journal’s (generally) conservative editorial pages. It
was, by any measure, a bold choice: Frank had gained some renown with
the publication of What’s the Matter With Kansas (2004), in which he
lamented the fact that the working-class voters of his native state,
by supporting Republican candidates, voted (in his view) against their
own interests. It was a provocative thesis, supported with the
apparatus of a doctorate from the University of Chicago, but tinctured
(in The Scrapbook’s opinion) with an ill-disguised contempt for the
electors of Kansas, and a full-throated hostility to conservatism, as
a guiding principle, and to conservatives as human beings. The title
of his next book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (2008),
neatly summarized his thesis.
Conservatives are often accused of intolerance, but it has been The
Scrapbook’s experience, especially recently, that the left is the real
province of incivility on the battleground of ideas. Unfortunately,
Thomas Frank, in the pages of the Journal, soon became Exhibit A. Not
content with a reflexive partisanship and pidgin Marxism, Frank
challenged conservative ideas by consistently deriding them, without
elaboration, and speaking scornfully—sometimes in surprisingly ugly
terms—of people who identify themselves as conservatives. This is the
sort of behavior that might be expected if Frank had been holding
forth at a dinner party or preaching to the choir in the pages of,
say, the Nation. Readers of the Wall Street Journal, who might be
interested in hearing what the other side thinks, or would appreciate
a trenchant critique of this or that doctrine, soon learned that there
was nothing to be learned from reading Thomas Frank.
Indeed, The Scrapbook is reminded of this trend by the recent behavior
of Paul Krugman, the Princeton economics professor and Nobel laureate
who writes a column in the New York Times. Krugman decided last week
to evaluate Republican representative Paul Ryan’s comprehensive plan
to overhaul federal spending and reduce taxes. And how did he do so?
By ignoring the details of Ryan’s proposal, misrepresenting his words
and actions, and referring to the congressman as a “flimflam man,” a
“fraud,” and a “dope.” For this an innocent Times reader should pay
two dollars?