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This is sort of an esoteric debate, but you occasionally get into conversations about the difficulty of removing wasteful or perverse subsidies in which an economist inevitably makes the obvious point: Why not stop subsidizing the thing and begin subsidizing the people? For instance, Mark Kleiman suggested an end to agricultural subsidies that would be replaced with "cash grants, of steadily decreasing amounts every year, to residents of rural areas." As a plan, that would be better for the people we're theoretically helping, and better as a question of national policy. But as Andrew Sabl replies, it would be too blatant. You get away with farm subsidies because they can be sold as "paying people for doing What Decent People Do: that is, work—and most particularly, work at growing stuff and raising sources of future barbecue. Cash payments given out regardless of the work done by their recipients involve, well, welfare. Replacing virtue-rewards with welfare would be not just widely but viscerally unpopular." The other issue is that it's deadly. The subsidies get phased out. The agribusiness giants lose their supports. Robert Frank had a similar idea in which we defuse insurance industry opposition to single payer by recognizing that they invested in health coverage in good faith, and it would be "unjust" to end their business model overnight. As such, he argues we should compensate them for losses, starting at 100 percent and then gradually phasing out as "companies shifted investments elsewhere." But these companies have no elsewhere to shift. They know how to do one thing, and one thing only. And they know how instantly unpopular welfare for insurance industry executives would prove. At the end of the day, large policies require at least superficial plausibility. We subsidize farmers because farmers are important and we like cheap food, but we subsidize farmers because Congress is a regional entity and large agriculture giants are powerful in the right places. We allow the private insurance industry because innovation is important and people are pleased with the insurance they currently have, but they really survive because running for Congress is expensive and Republicans are correctly convinced that government-run health care will prove popular. And so on. If the public were informed enough and cynical enough to buy into the compensatory scheme, they'd be angry enough about the original state of affairs to allow politicians to end the offending subsidy outright.
