Farm Subsidies

     With all of the talk about deficit reduction, trimming Federal spending, and the evils of socialism one would think that agricultural subsidies would be in the cross-hairs of Republicans and Democrats alike.  Economists are generally opposed to the practice because it distorts markets, inflates the price of land, overwhelmingly go towards agribusiness, and only goes towards certain crops like corn.  (I especially hate subsidies to corn because not only does it receive subsidies to grow; but there are also subsidies for ethanol AND the US government created an automatic market for ethanol by the passing of laws that mandated it's use in Federal vehicles.  All in all, very much an excellent example of a command economy.)
    As a quick aside, if you ever want to find out if someone is libertarian, talk about guns and farm subsidies, if they like the former and hate the latter they are libertarians.  100% accurate.
    Matt Yglesias has a post about Senator Roy Blunt supporting  agricultural subsidies but not food aid to the poor.  Pretty heartless right?  He's in favor of giving government money to businesses but not poor people?  I'm sure he, and any other supporter of the process, will argue that these are really just small time farmers, and the subsidies are necessary to make sure that we have food whenever we might need it.  The problem with this argument is that it's not what farm subsidies do.  Farm subsidies actually aid bigger businesses than they do smaller ones because of the increase in land prices.  There is something to be said about the history of food production and how it would go through a boom and bust cycle in the past, the solution to this is not to simply give out yearly subsidies.  It would be far better to have emergency funds on hand to purchase food on the international market than to simply give farmers money to grow a ton of crops regardless of whether or not the market is there to pay for all of them.  In addition, it makes more sense to subsidize the purchase of food rather than the production because that way people will always be able to buy said food, meaning there will always be a market for what the farmers produce. 
    Farm subsidies are one of those government programs that by and large is unpopular, but due to the nature of Congress we get stuck with them.  Congress is structured in such a way so that it tends to favor rural states more than urban ones.  In addition, Democrats and Republicans from these rural states are both largely in favor of agricultural subsidies because their constituents are.  It's a regional policy more than an ideological one.  What really bothers me about this whole affair is that we're likely to see large reductions in funding to a variety of government services that benefit the poor, the middle class, and urban populations; while seeing gratuitous amounts of money still being paid to unnecessary programs in the Department of Defense and to agribusiness.