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

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

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

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.

These clear and strong rules cushion skepticism; they make trust possible because they give the public a reason to believe that the institution will act as it has signaled it would act.

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?

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.

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.

it is embarrassing to reckon the huge gap between our pro-free-market rhetoric around the world and the actual market of government regulation of food production we’ve produced here at home.

the single most salient feature of the government that we have evolved is not that it discriminates in favor of one side and against the other. The single most salient feature is that it discriminates against all sides to favor itself.