A great High Wonk conversation about the unjust distribution of good looks over at Asymmetrical Information (how did I forget to read that blog for the last year or so?).

Here’s a related point I’ve thought about a lot (and written about a little somewhere). Friendship corrupts far, far more than money does. Always has, always will. If I offered the editor of The New York Times $10,000 to let me write an op-ed on anything I wanted, he’d laugh in my face, his integrity impugned. If I happened to be an old college buddy of his, that’d change everything. If I made the mistakes Doris Kearns Goodwin has made, I’d never get on Meet the Press (not like that’s happening any time soon anyway). But because Goodwin is buddies with Russert, she’s on all the time. Meanwhile, it’s inconceivable that I could buy my way onto the show. Examples of this are endless and obvious. An incompetent employee would have hard time bribing his boss to keep him on the job. An incompetent employee who’s the boss’s poker buddy has got serious job security. Senators support colleagues not so much out of mutual enrichment but out of loyalty to the buddy system.

But we cannot regulate friendship (indeed, I’d say regulating friendship is the very definition of tyranny), so we regulate a far, far weaker “problem” in the form of money. This isn’t to say that regulating money is wrong per se. But when you hear the more utopian rhetoric about getting money out of politics or creating an egalitarian society through economic redistribution, it’s important to keep in mind that money is hardly the only “problem” when it comes to the unjust distribution of advantages in society.