Friday, February 22, 2008

Those Damnable Advisers

One of the things that happens with complex government programs is that people set up businesses acting as advisers or intermediaries between the citizen and government. (Think H&R Block, etc.) That's true with US farm programs--I remember visiting the Fresno County FSA office in 1991 and finding one cotton/rice outfit had a person whose whole job was working with the FSA and Reclamation offices (water rights, supposedly limited to 960 acres were big, as well as the cotton and rice payments).

So too overseas, as described in this blog post at the CAP Health Check ("CAP" being the EU's farm program). The lesson being--when there's money to gain, people will work to gain it.

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