Reply #7: You want to gamble on a poker hand - fine. Just don't do it with my (tax) money and

[T Wolf]

manipulate conditions to ensure that your bet wins.

If that individual farmer wants to take out insurance, do it in a straight-forward manner. Only the farmer and the insurance company should be involved. Neither should be able to foist off their bet on another, unconnected entity. It is the second-through-hundredth-removed entity that is only in it for the gamble that fucks things up.

It is as if the hedge0fund cretin takes the bet from the farmer, packages his bet into a larger deal with a large corp somewhere else that hires a crop duster to poison the farmers fields, forcing a loss of produce. Price rises for rarer output so farmer loses out and hedge funder steals the excess. Fair, huh?

There must be limits to how far away from the original issue these manipulations can be.