Washington ? On the left of the Democratic Party, they don’t come any smarter than Barney Frank, the 12-term congressman from Massachusetts. Republicans enjoy debating him, because if you’ve beaten him, you know the next liberal will be easier.

In a speech on March 4, Frank took what has become a commonplace political conversation, something that President Bush, Sen. Kerry and scores of lesser lights constantly discuss — namely, the frustrating job market — and probed it in a depth one rarely hears from a politician.

By doing so, he carried the jobs debate to a level where the policy choices become so basic — and challenging — that ordinary pols and pundits fear to tread.

While most of those in office or seeking office suggest that tweaking the economy with modest measures such as more job training or new tax incentives will revive the great job-growing engines of the 1990s, Frank offers a more sweeping and disturbing hypothesis.

A fundamental shift has occurred, he says. “The ability of the private sector in this country to create wealth is now outstripping its ability to create jobs. The normal rule of thumb by which a certain increase in the gross domestic product would produce a concomitant increase in jobs does not appear to apply.”

That is the basic reason, he suggests, for this jobless recovery — why month after month the economic growth figures spell boom, and month after month unemployment remains stubbornly high and more thousands become so discouraged they give up the search for work.

Frank buttresses his argument by pointing out that the boom in corporate profits and the rise in the stock market have been accompanied not just by joblessness, but a decline in real wages, a falloff in private health insurance and a rise in income inequality.

All this suggests something more is at work than just bad luck or bad timing — a shift requiring a fundamental re-examination of the available options.

Why is this boom leaving so many worse off? Frank’s catalogue of causes is a familiar one: globalization and its handmaiden, the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the weakening of unions; the tilt of the tax system in favor of the wealthy investor. And Frank endorses the regular catalogue of remedies urged by Kerry and other mainstream Democrats. They include tougher trade rules, restoration of union organizing and bargaining rights and steps to make the tax system more progressive. Like everyone else, including President Bush, he says education, innovation and skills training are the keys to a healthy long-term economic future.

But unlike others, Frank does not stop at that point. Just as he is bold in diagnosing the cause of the problem — a private economy geared to producing wealth, not jobs — he is equally daring in his remedies.

Toward the end of his speech, Frank uttered a sentence one can hardly imagine coming from the mouth of a 21st-century American politician. “Our problem today,” he said, “is too little government.”

When I asked him in an interview Thursday if he was sending a message to John Kerry, Frank said, “It’s a message for all Democrats. What I’m saying is we’re in a situation now where we need the government, and where is it? We’ve cut taxes, we’ve criticized bureaucracy, we’ve almost condemned the public sector. I’m saying it’s time to talk positively about government and use it to do what the private economy is no longer doing.”

His proposal is to tax some of the wealth the private sector is now producing so abundantly — “a fairly small percentage,” he said, without being specific — “and use it to employ people on socially useful purposes.”

Frank urges that we “take some of the wealth that is being created by this wonderful thing, this increased productivity, this new technology and the ways of using it, and all this innovation, and let us use it for our own undisputed public purposes. Let us give cities and states more money so they can have more people policing, fighting fires, cleaning up the environment, repairing facilities that need to be repaired, enhancing train transportation, building highways, helping construct affordable housing in places where that is a crisis, helping pay for higher education for students.”

As Frank acknowledged, this whole approach smacks “to some extent (of) the New Deal philosophy.” And that is why no one, including the Democratic presidential candidate, is likely to endorse it wholesale.

But if you sense, as I do, a need to challenge Bush’s belief that pumping up the private sector with more tax incentives and more deregulation is the only way to find the missing jobs, Barney Frank’s speech fills a real void in the debate.

– David Broder is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.