Jonathan Chait, whose TRB column in the New Republic has been one of the best things in that magazine in recent years, has begun blogging at TNR's Web site. I wish he hadn't waited so long. His posts, like his column, are sharp, smart, and often very funny. He knows (and cares) enough about policy to embarrass those who, neither knowing nor caring, crowd the airwaves and the blogosphere with attitudes disguised as analysis. An example: Earlier today Barney Frank expressed doubt that new taxes might chase bankers away from Wall Street. "I don't know where people would go for comparable salaries," Frank said. "I guess perhaps they could star in major motion pictures." The National Review's Veronique de Rugy was not amused.
[I]f Mister Frank really believes that chasing well-paid employees to go elsewhere is a winning strategy and won't have any impact on the industry, then I suggest that next time he is sick he goes to a hospital where doctors are poorly paid and see how he feels about that. This anti-capitalist and anti-wealth mentality is scary and very anti-American.
To which Chait responded: "Hey, you know what else is anti-American? Being named 'Veronique de Rugy.'" Cheap...and funny, but even Gawker can do that. Here's what Gawker—and many left-of-center Beltway bloggers—can't do:
Of course, Frank didn't say that reduced pay would have no deleterious effect on the quality of any profession, he said it about the finance profession. It's telling that de Rugy changed the subject from finance to medicine. Exactly what horrors does she think would occur if we had less brilliant people flocking to the finance industry? We'd wind up with a bunch of hacks who, I don't know, crashed the world economy because they never considered the possibility that historically sky-high housing prices might drop? [...][Y]ou can see why de Rugy changed the subject from finance to medicine. But let's stay on medicine for a moment. What if we did pay doctors less? Would it be a disaster? Well, France pays doctors a lot less, and its quality of care is so good that even hard-core libertarians go nuts for it when they actually come into close contact with its system. It wouldn't necessarily be easy to impose that system here -- among other things, you'd need to reduce malpractice fees and the cost of medical school, as France does. But it does show that de Rugy's simple free market model doesn't work as clearly as conservatives want to believe.
This sort of thing doesn't require a whole column, but it's nice to see someone doing it: reading online commentary as if it deserved scrutiny, then showing us why, in many cases, it doesn't.
