And Then There's the Derivative Markets…

Regulators have halted a man's effort to sell his vote on eBay.

This is, of course, entirely proper. But part of me wishes they'd let the auction proceed, just so we could finally find out how much one vote is worth.

(Or, at least, how much this one guy's vote is worth. One thing a robust, legal, transparent market in votes would quickly reveal is that not every vote is equally valuable. Anyone who's paying attention knows this already, but it might not be helpful, from the civic religion's point of view, to make it so obvious.)