Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Pimp My Farm: Lusting After Taxpayer Money

Members of Congress are less like whores than they are like pimps for persons unwillingly conscripted to perform unpleasant services.

Consider, for example, agricultural subsidies. Each year a handful of farmers and agribusinesses receive billions of taxpayer dollars. These are dollars that government forcibly takes from the pockets of taxpayers and then transfers to farmers.

The customers, in this case, are the farmers and agribusinesses. The suppliers of the services performed for these customers are taxpayers, for it's the taxpayers who possess the ultimate asset -- money -- that farmers and agribusinesses lust after. And the intermediaries who oblige the suppliers to satisfy the base lusts of the customers are politicians. Just as pimps facilitate their customers' access to prostitutes' assets, politicians facilitate their customers' access to taxpayers' assets.

~Donald Boudreaux, chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University

5 Comments:

At 1/27/2009 11:36 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Please don't call the giant agribusinesses that receive the bulk of farm subsidies "farmers".

Hydra

 
At 1/27/2009 1:55 PM, Blogger misterjosh said...

That's a really awkward metaphor. At least prostitutes get some amount of money from the exchange (sometimes). taxpayers just get screwed.

 
At 1/28/2009 1:53 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Uh, don't most hand-waving, hair-on-fire articles in "Economic" blogs usually have, like, you know, numbers, or something?

 
At 1/28/2009 11:47 AM, Blogger juandos said...

Isn't this yet another lesson of where federal governement intervention into areas they don't belong cost the taxpayers even more than necessary?

 
At 1/28/2009 2:25 PM, Blogger juandos said...

"Pimp My Farm: Lusting After Taxpayer Money"...

Well with a headline like that, this story begs to be repeated: $335,000,000 FOR STD PREVENTION IN ECONOMIC STIMULUS BILL

674 pages of tax extortion rationalization

 

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