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But nobody ever collects the $10,000 or the 10,000 signatures of outrage--we all just pay the fines, the junk fees, the extra sales tax, the additional income tax and the higher entrance fees and passively fume. Our stake in each game of revenue enhancement is small, so we do nothing. The special interests' stake is all-or-nothing, gigantic, as important as life itself--and so they will throw their last million at the politicos in charge of the tax revenue (and revenues from the sale of bonds) and demand their fiefdom be protected at all costs.

This is how the states, counties, cities, agencies and eventually the central government become insolvent and unable to pay their increasingly unaffordable obligations.

Asymmetric Stakes in the Game is a key concept in the Survival+ analysis because it plays out in so many fields in which wealth is collected from millions but distributed to an Elite.

The truly Kafkaesque nightmare that is the U.S. "healthcare" (actually sick-care) system is a prime example. The players who gorge themselves on the hundreds of billions of dollars in tax swag will fight to the bitter end to maintain their share of the wealth, even if it eventually causes the collapse of the entire system. That inevitability is what I term internecine conflict between protected fiefdoms.

Asymmetric Stakes in the Game impacts every industry which is either funded by the State (tax revenues and State borrowing) or regulated by the State--in other words, virtually every important industry. Those with the most to lose will fight for their share of the national wealth with extreme ferocity, while those paying the endless incrementally higher taxes will never reach the threshold of demanding fundamental transformation.

An asymmetric Stake in the Game also plays out in the stock and financial markets.

Millions of employees and self-employed people contribute to a 401K and/or IRA (individual retirement account), and millions of public employees contribute to pension funds. A relatively small number of money managers decide how to invest/play those billions.

A relative handful of players collect most of the winnings from that game. The tens of millions of players (those with 401Ks, etc.) who have lost 40% of their accumulated wealth in the two years September 2007-September 2009 are either essentially powerless (you get to move your 401K money around any of four funds, all of which lost 40%) or sheep lined up to be sheared by the players with an asymmetric stake in the game.

If you and I can collect $10 million in bonuses each, while our firm can reap $40 billion and then buy political protection for a mere $100 million of that swag, are we motivated to level the playing field? Of course not. We're interested in processing as many sheep as we can, and in keeping the game rigged in our favor.

The swag from the game is so gargantuan that we will move Heaven and Earth to persuade the political/regulatory Powers That Be to solidify/legitimate our advantages. It's literally financial life or death for us, while the "little people" who lost 40% of their stake, well, they will just sigh and passively accept their fate; maybe they'll glance at a headline in a magazine about a new mutual fund or ETF, and that's the end of their discontent.

Though their cumulative losses in the rigged game totaled some $13 trillion between 2007 and 2009, individually each passively accepts their own losses without regard to the nature of the game. Each surrenders political power to the Elites because the losses don't seem to have a political source: masking the political source of the asymmetry is the key to the power Elites' success in keeping the game rigged in their own favor.

So the mainstream media dutifully spews the propaganda that the "market is a rational mechanism for price discovery" and all the rest while behind the scenes a handful of players reap $100 million a day by gaming the trading system at its very root.

This account is replayed in every industry at some level, for the concentration of regulatory reach, tax revenues