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Voters should be grateful for the government transparency laws that required Senator Bernie Sanders, a rival to Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, to reveal how much he made last year in speaking engagement fees. The total is $1,867.42 for three appearances, a grand sum that is chump change in presidential politicking but enough for the senator to respectably donate the money to charity.

Mr. Sanders, the Senate’s Vermont independent and self-described Democratic socialist, is a far better speaker than those numbers indicate, as his weekly talk radio conversation, “Brunch With Bernie,” has shown. He has delighted leftist political junkies for the past decade with his iconoclastic broadsides. But the senator doesn’t milk his signature New England contrariness for money, not yet anyway.

Loyalists in his fledgling campaign, of course, could not be happier for the contrast with Mrs. Clinton afforded by the disclosure. She has netted more than $11 million for 51 speeches in a recent 15-month stretch, being paid as much as $315,000 per address, with some of it going to charity, according to The Hill. Top dollar for Senator Sanders was a not so hefty $850 paid for a combative exchange with Republican sympathizers on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” the HBO show where the comedian regularly invites politicians to march to a different drummer. (“As a 73-year-old socialist Jew from Vermont, he’s everything everyone is not,” Mr. Maher happily explained on the air. “We love Bernie.”)

So far, the senator may stand out most in the race for not having a super PAC to join rivals in circumventing campaign limits on small-size donations and currying favor with rich patrons. “I do not have millionaire or billionaire friends,” Mr. Sanders declared at the outset, sounding aloof as Thoreau at the money trough. In making a virtue of his campaign hunt for small donations the senator implicitly invites further comparison with Mrs. Clinton. She is reported gearing up to personally court donors for her own super PAC, aiming to garner the 7-figure donations that Senator Sanders can only renounce.