Thomas Frank writes a regular column for the Wall Street Journal. He’s the “balance” to writers who can actually reason logically from evidence.

Today’s piece really takes the cake. Frank writes, “The free-market system blunders into recession; its victims flock to the free-market banner. Here we go again.”

You’ve got to wonder if Frank really never reads anything in the Journal but his own stuff. The Journal has run innumerable pieces by people who know what they’re talking about that conclusively refute the leftist trope that the recession was caused by “the free market.” There are many books published in the last two years that show how government interference with the market, via artifically low interest rates, political pressure on lenders to abandon safe mortgage standards, etc. caused the bubble and the subsequent financial debacle. Evidently Frank chooses to ignore such works. Is he afraid to stick his nose into, for example, Sowell’s book The Housing Boom and Bust?

Frank affects to be something of a public intellectual, but only a propagandist could write something so astoundingly ignorant or deceitful.