Thomas Frank has an almost-interesting column today. It would have been really interesting if he could have gotten past square one and not spent almost the entire column bitching and moaning about the cultural obsession with the hyper-rich. I think there’s some merit to his complaints. But they are so unbelievably familiar and trite at this point that if I knew he was never really going to get past that stuff I probably wouldn’t have read it.
His topic is Alex Kuczynski, The New York Times’ chronicler of the lifestyles of the rich and famous who also happens to be a billionaire’s wife.
The argument yearning to breathe free in his column is that renting out the wombs of middle class women for surrogate pregnancies is really icky. But unless I missed it somehow, he nowhere gets into the public policy implications of all this beyond noting that this ickiness is where market logic takes us. Okay. There’s certainly an argument there, even if I may not be entirely on his (or Ramesh’s page) on this stuff.
But what I’d like to know is, Does Frank think the practice should be banned? Or should it be subsidized? Is there any public policy whatsoever behind is self-evident disgust and rage? Or is this just the umpeenth rant in a long series of rants?