Ten percent of the recipients of farm subsidies collect 73 percent of the subsidies—between 2003 and 2005, $91,000 per farm. The average subsidy of the bottom 80 percent? Three thousand dollars per farm.28 And

to more rational souls, the charade is a signal: spend your time elsewhere, because this game is not for real. Participation thus declines, especially among the sensible middle. Policy gets driven by the extremists at both ends.

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

We need to ask whether there is a feasible or reasonable way to win back the confidence that the presence of money takes away. Are there procedures that would remove the doubt of the reasonable person?

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.

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

If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves in this way, to procure the passage of a general law with a view to the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption, and the

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.