FLASHBACK: “The problem is that today’s elites aren’t really the better sorts of people. As Richard Fernandez notes, today we have a principal-agent problem. Those happen when the agent (a lawyer, say, or a public official, or a journalist) cuts deals for himself instead of for the benefit of the people he’s representing. Our elites seem to be doing that now — looking after themselves, rather than after the country, with traditional limits on self-dealing having vanished.”