Because I can. And because my friend Ben finally started blogging.

Also because it’s baseball season.

And for a few other reasons I’ll write about soon.

I’ve read so many frustrating newsbytes this week that I can’t help seeing a pattern emerge. And it’s only Wednesday. In no particular order:

• A politically appointed World Bank President is outed for dictating his girlfriend’s outsized raises, after bitterly disputing a multi-national ethics board’s recommendations
• A U.S. state governor is found to be going 91 MPH just before the crash that nearly kills him, in contradiction to U.S. law and specific guidelines for exceptions
• White House officials are discovered to be improperly using and failing to archive political email, while official email from investigation subjects goes missing, in contradiction to U.S. law and clearly posted guidelines on how to follow it
• Yet another Wall Street darling is under investigation for massive fraud and violation of SEC rules at shareholder expense
• A troubled young student with both a legal record and a campus history recognizing him as a danger to himself and others is able to purchase a gun before going on a shooting spree

It’s enough to make even a bitter old man shake his head. But the sad thread these items share is that they are all took place despite - and not only despite, but is flagrant disregard of - serious infrastructure designed to prevent them.

Publicly debated and democratically constructed laws, transparent disclosure systems, officially monitored and enforced regulations, “fail-safe” IT systems and, oh yeah, common decency and shame are, apparently, not enough to overcome political cronyism and the human ego.

Setting aside the moral repugnance of this misbehavior, the truly disturbing thing about it is that these are key systems designed to protect us. . . from exactly the kinds of corruption noted above. Suppose someone you love were killed by a U.S. state governor on his way to meet a discredited radio personality, in a speeding car driven by a state trooper?

There is a problem here.

Regular readers and friends know I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about barter and swap business models. I’ve just caught up with Redeye VC’s opinion piece on this, Thoughts on Swap 2.0, which has some great points on the challenges of driving uptake in these marketplaces, and data & analysis to support it. As the founder of Half.com, Josh commands a lot of credibility here.

My version of the analysis is very simple: The value derived from a barter transaction (net of what you’re trading away), must exceed the cost of buying the item in a simple cash transaction (net of the cash value of the item you’re potentially trading), and - importantly - must do so by a margin sufficient to substantially exceed the costs in inconvenience, uncertainty, and social awkwardness of trading orthogonally with strangers.

These costs are substantial, and in my opinion take away most of the marketplace in small-ticket items. Signing up for a new service, learning its rules, having to go through a process of selecting what I want and setting up umpteen DVD transactions, trusting strangers to mail me stuff, having to ask questions about the condition of stuff, etc., are a pain in the ass. It’s just easier to either sell stuff for cash in a known system or to dump a box of CD’s on the record store counter and take what they’ll give me.

In large-ticket marketplaces, where products are not commodity products, trust becomes a bigger driver of the uncertainty factor. You probably wouldn’t trade your car to a guy you’ve never heard of for equity in his illiquid startup. Where products are commodity, why not sell for cash?

For an online system to work, there also has to be a meaningful efficiency benefit from bringing together and normalizing a market of many fragmented participants. This takes away other sections of the market - repeating trades between known participants, local service provider economies, and farmers’ markets, to name a few examples.

There are opportunities, however, where bigger-ticket items create enough incentive, and where known-commodity items (or traders) can create enough trust. RCI and Interval International, for example, are two multi-hundred-million-dollar barter banks for timeshare inventory, and have millions of participants paying real cash in management and transaction fees in a trusted marketplace. They work because they are high-ticket enough to come out positive in the equation above, because they are known-value and trusted commodities, and because the cash market for condo rentals is inefficient (for part-time landlords at least).

Where else do conditions like this exist? Why couldn’t one create a market for swapping used cars, capitalizing on the consumer-unfavorable conditions on the dealer side and the fact that most new-car buyers pay a huge sales tax penalty when they buy new and sell at 50% of value? (For example.)