Rats

It doesn't get much more fun in the editorial writing line than the rat scandal that is engulfing the city's commissioner of mental hygiene, Dr. Thomas Frieden. The health department he heads is actually the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Some shorten his title to commissioner of health. But these columns prefer shortening it to commissioner of mental hygiene. The phrase seems to capture the Orwellian, even Marxist aspect of the mania of the good doctor (he's actually an awfully nice fellow) for trying to make decisions for New Yorkers that New Yorkers — who are highly intelligent and savvy — can make perfectly well for themselves.

The rat scandal was broken by CBS's local television news affiliate. Our friends at the New York Post interpreted the rat infestation as a sign that Dr. Frieden has been so distracted by his campaigns against smoking and transfats that he can't attend to basics. It came up with a videotape showing a city health inspector allegedly dozing off at a bar of a restaurant he was supposed to be inspecting. It also noted that there has been a long history of bribery scandals involving city health inspectors. Makes sense.

Yet we wonder whether Dr. Frieden's default on rats also offers an opportunity to step back and ask some broader questions. Is it really necessary for government employees to be patrolling the city 's restaurant kitchens? There once may have been a need for this sort of thing, back when vaccinations against rat-borne diseases were less common, when unemployment was higher and these public health jobs were a kind of employment program, and when the market for information on dining establishments was less perfect. Or before open kitchens became as common as they are now in the restaurant business.

But in the age of Zagat's, Gayot, Citysearch, Chowhound.com, and AAA, when restaurant reviews and ratings are accessible by mobile phone to customers on the sidewalk wondering where to eat, consumers are empowered like never before to monitor restaurant quality. Who needs the government to tell them where to eat when CBS and the New York Post do a better job finding rats than the government? New Yorkers are a savvy enough band that they can navigate the tradeoff between price and speed and cleanliness in a restaurant on their own, without the assistance of big government.

In our experience in New York, rats are more commonly seen in government-run spaces — the subway tracks, the sewers, the wharves, the parks — than in privately owned spaces. Mayor Bloomberg and his mental hygiene commissioner will doubtless think we are living in a libertarian fantasy-land, but our idea of progress would be reacting to the rat scandal not by hiring more — or more diligent — restaurant inspectors, but by laying off the whole band of them and returning the cost of running the whole inspection operation to New Yorkers in the form of a tax cut.