Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It

Where the harm is almost certain, Congress does nothing. Where the harm is at best contested, Congress races to the rescue.

“Cognitive capture is a better description of this phenomenon than crony capitalism.”53

as Raghuram Rajan puts it, “What is particularly alarming is that the risk taking may well have been in the best ex ante interests of their shareholders.”

as lobbying has become more respectable—and this is the key—it has also become more dangerous. The rent seeking that was hidden and careful before is now open and notorious. No one is embarrassed by what the profession does, because everything the profession does is out in the open for all to see.

the question that I mean these data to raise is simply this: Not: Did these contributions buy the silliness we see? Instead: Do these contributions affect your ability to believe that this policy is something other than silliness?

Derivatives serve a valuable purpose. As with any contract, their aim is to shift risk within a market to someone better able to carry it. That’s a good thing, for the market, and the economy generally. That we’ve just seen an economy detonated by derivatives gone wild shouldn’t lead us to ban (as if we could) these financial innovations. It should

As Jake Arvey, the man behind Adlai Stevenson’s political career, defined politics: “politics is the art of putting people under obligation to you.”

The public policy challenge with negative externalities is to avoid these imposed costs, by forcing the imposer to pay for them. The challenge with positive externalities is to ensure that the creator gets enough of the externalized benefits to have incentive to produce them in the first place.

in both economies, then, reciprocity is the norm. The difference is the transparency of that reciprocity. Gifts in this sense are not selfless acts to another. Gifts are moves in a game; they oblige others.