That damn farm bill again

Here's a link to the Register's editorial on the farm bill, urging President Bush to veto it as threatened, even if it turns out to be little more than a gesture. The persistence and even the increase of farm subsidies when farm prices and farm profits are higher than in recent memory should be a surprise, but unfortunately it isn't. It's the old public choice analysis -- that when there are concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, the people getting the concentrated benefits will win out in the political game every time, and that bureaucrats act in their own interests, just like everybody else rather than being dispassionate, disinterested avatars of virtue.