This dispiriting conclusion might be exacerbated by an unfortunate characteristic of many government policies, including many of the best understood and most important policies on economic benefits. If the populace is distributed along some rough continuum of preferences with respect to some policy arena, then any specific policy that is adopted will be very near the positions of only a fraction of the populace. Among those who are at all aware of policies, then, most people might think that they fare relatively poorly from any given policy. Hence they might not even reach the inductive generalization that an actual government does serve their interests at all well.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 760