From Who's More Evil: Corn Farmers or Goldman Sachs?

Farmers have excellent political clout, and courtesy of Iowa's first-in-the-nation status, they've hijacked the entire system of electing a President. For John McCain to run in 2008, Mr. Straight Talk Express needed to reverse his position on ethanol and other ag subsidies. It's just how the game is played.

Ok, ok. But they're just farmers, right? And they didn't require a huge bailout in order to avoid collapsing the entire system, so they've got that going for them. But while the financial system flamed out spectacularly last fall, the agriculture industry has been waging a quieter war on America.

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Other areas you'd want to explore include the cost of ethanol subsidies, and the opportunity cost of having gone down the worst possible avenue towards energy stability, rather than focusing on something that could possibly work.

But here's the thing. All this stuff, as we noted above, is a silent war on America. Sure, there's outrage from time to time, but it's slow and it's not event-related. And as Nassim Taleb would tell you, our focus on events cloud our judgment.

We remember Lehman and the day that the AIG bonus story came out. We remember yesterday's Goldman Sachs earnings. We don't remember how our friends got fatter and fatter over the years, slurping soda and corn syrup-laden wheat bread.

Read it all here.