David Brooks had an interesting column earlier this week in which he asked, “Why aren’t there more liberals in America?” According to Gallup Poll numbers, about 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, versus 36% moderate and 21% liberal. This strikes Brooks as a bit of a puzzle, since the financial crisis and the economic downturn would seem to support liberal beliefs in some ways. Brooks’s answer: “Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government. A few decades ago they did, but now they don’t. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.”

Brooks goes on to speculate about the basis for that distrust: “Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It’s more likely because they think the whole system is rigged. Or to put it in the economists’ language, they believe the government has been captured by rent-seekers.”

This all sounds very familiar. It’s essentially the basis of the current critique of copyright law: that Congress has become beholden to a few stakeholders, and as a result modern copyright law has become unmoored from any legitimate purpose and now simply apportions rents to favored dinosaur industries.

But even that description of the situation is not dark enough.