Simon Johnson’s appearance on NPR’s “Fresh Air” is very informative on the case for nationalization of failing financial institutions, and what that would entail. He makes the point based on his IMF experience that this is what the IMF—and, indeed, the U.S. government—would be recommending were this occurring in some other country.

Meanwhile, every time someone suggests that it would be nice for the Treausury Department not to be staffed by people with compromising relationships with big-time finance and a history of professional involvement in the screw-ups, you hear some kind of pusback like this from Megan McArdle: “Perhaps we should just give up entirely on the idea of putting someone who, like, knows something about the financial system, in charge of the financial system. Is Dr. Phil available?” Hardy har-har.

And yet, look, we’re only looking to fill a relatively small number of positions. Timothy Geithner needs a Deputy Secretary. And then there’s a need for an Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance, an Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions, and an Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets. There are other positions in the department, but those are the four where you might think that experience with high finance specifically was vitally necessary. It’s only three jobs. And you can’t tell me that there aren’t four people alive in the United States who have experience with finance but lack compromising relationship. Why not Simon Johnson, for example? Give him one of the jobs, and a quarter of your problem would be solved. Indeed, if you even got three non-bankers to fill four of the positions, I think that would create a lot of piece of mind. Nouriel Roubini, to give another name well-known to the blogosphere, seems perfectly well-qualified for a job at Treasury—he’s even worked in the past as a “senior adviser” to Tim Geithner.

Ezra Klein writes that Republicans are drawing the lines of opposition to the progressive health care agenda in pretty narrow terms:

Does that matter? It’s hard to say. Rhetorically, the GOP has staked out a very narrow corner of opposition. Last week, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi, Orrin Hatch, and Judd Gregg — essentially, all the Senate Republicans with jurisdiction over health reform, and McConnell — co-signed a letter to President Obama. I’ve obtained a copy, and it’s up for download here. They draw two lines in the sand. First, they warn against using the budget reconciliation process to pass heath care. Doing so would “make it difficult to gain broad bipartisan support” and “do a disservice to this important issue.” Substantively, they fear a public insurance option. “Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition,” they say. “Ultimately, we would be left with a single government-run plan controlling the market.”

When I was in Switzerland, I learned a bit about their health care system. In essence, it looked like the plan Democrats were talking about on the campaign trail but without the public option. And that, it seems to me, would be compatible with what the Republicans are saying here. And just in time, Regina Herzlinger from the Manhattan Institute chimes in at the Corner in praise of Switzerland:

Republicans, full of complaints about the Obama plan, have not coalesced around a viable alternative. Mired in fantasies about a replay of 1992, they think they can face down universal coverage and that their impossibly wonky ideas, full of tax takeaways and mysterious high-risk pools, will defeat Obama’s brilliantly clear proposals. [...] There is only one viable Republican solution: A consumer-driven system that passes the employer tax exemption and funding onto consumers, so they, and not the government, control all health-care costs. Switzerland, which enables universal coverage without any governmental insurance through this system, benefits from costs 40 percent lower than the U.S. and, unlike the single-payer systems in the U.K. or Canada, excellent results for the sick.

Obama has formally committed himself to the idea of a Medicare-like public option, but the availability of such an option is not one of the administration’s eight principles for health reform. This suggests the possibility of a compromise if the GOP wants it. My strong guess is that if leading Republicans were really willing to offer a Swiss-style system as a compromise measure, that Democrats would leap at the chance to take a clean legislative victory and start haggling over funding mechanisms rather than fight to the death over a public plan.

At the same time, for that very reason until such an offer is made I think it’s vital to fight like crazy for a public plan since it’s the risk that such a plan would be rammed through the Senate via budget reconciliation that gives conservatives their incentive to come to the table and strike a deal over something more modest.

The National Park Service has released its Preliminary Preferred Alternative for the National Mall available and opened it for comments. It’s a pretty solid plan, featuring calls for increased bicycle facilities (in theory, the Mall should be a great venue for recreational biking that also services some cross-town practical transportation needs; in practice it’s sort of neither) some smarter parking policies, and better pedestrian access between the Tidal Basin and the Washington Monument.

You can offer comments on the proposal here and read more about it here.

I’ve written previously about the Bush administration’s steep retaliatory import duty on Roquefort cheese. This is of particular interest to me, because not only does it illustrate important policy points, but Roquefort happens to be my favorite cheese. I had thought, however, that nobody was going to take up the cause of America’s suffering cheese-loving elites. But now it seems Rep. Jim Oberstar has stepped up to the plate with a letter to the President. It reads, in part:

“Freedom fries and “freedom toast” did serious damage to U.S.-French relaions. We both want to reestablish America’s moral authority in the world under your presidency; a very noble gesture toward that goal would be to remove or reduce this mean-spirited and unproductive punitive duty on Roquefort cheese.

Though I am a supporter of “buy American”, it is for unfairly subsidized foreign products when they are identical or comparable to ours. Roquefort cheese is not in this category. I know from my own experience that if such retaliatory action were taken on products produced ins mall communities in my district, as oquefort cheese is in a small French town, it would have a serious adverse local economic impact.

I’m with Oberstar. But this reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write about Protected Designation of Origin rules more broadly. For example, I only recently learned that though “extra virgin olive oil” has a precise meaning in Europe, in the U.S. you can just slap that label on pretty much anything you like. This free market gesture, it seems to me, tends to actually eliminate incentives to produce high-quality olive oil since it’s difficult to credibly signal that your product is better.