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

According to Professor Eric Hanushek of Stanford’s Hoover Institute, if we could eliminate just the bottom 6 to 8 percent of bad teachers, we could bring our results up to the standards of Finland, perhaps the best in the world.

had just finished clerking at the Supreme Court. That experience had depressed me beyond measure. I had idolized the Court. It turns out humans work there.

the mere presence of money with a certain relationship to the results makes us less confident about those results.

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

Negative externalities impose costs on others. Positive externalities create benefits for others, even if, as with competition, they make some people worse off.

Between 1974 and 2008 “the average amount it took to run for reelection to the House went from $56,000 to more than $1.3 million.”3 In 1974 the total spent by all candidates for Congress (both House and Senate) was $77 million. By 1982 that number was $343 million—a 450 percent increase in eight years.4 By 2010 it was $1.8 billion—a 525 percent inc

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

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.

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.”