You would be surprised at the people who read the editorial pages of newspapers. I used to be. Once I saw a bus driver reading the editorial page of my newspaper, and it made me nervous. He was glancing at it at the stops, and I was afraid he might fall asleep and run the bus into a curb or worse.

When I first became a staffer on the editorial page, I assumed I would be writing for the intelligentsia. Such oligarchic notions are not uncommon for people in that end of the newspaper business. Back then I must have thought my time was not well spent writing for bus drivers. I was wrong of course. Bus drivers have the same appetite for ideas and opinions as college professors.

Time taught me that. Six years of writing editorials also taught me the deep and qualitative difference between opinions and ideas. Of opinions there are countless number; of good, solid ideas there are fewer than there are people dealing in them, which makes them a hard currency indeed.