Trust is an asset

Trust is an asset. It must be built up. In the process of that building up it must be earned. It cannot be taken, it can only be given and received. Once it is built up it must be nurtured through stewardship rather than employed exclusively in the interests of welfare- or profit-maximization. 

Trust is a fund with a fertile core that can be harvested but which is also susceptible to being abused and exploited for short term gain. Eventually the trust would be exhausted. 

Now imagine the earning and the building up of trust not just between two people but over a larger population. Such a process shades into institution-building, where the institution is the development of a set of interlocking trusting relationships. 

We can go further and describe the establishment of standards and practices which are institutions for institutions, which is to say a set of interlocking trusting relationships among sets of interlocking trusting relationships. 

All of these must be nurtured and stewarded. They can be exploited for short term gain but at the cost, in the long term, of their exhaustion and collapse.