Farm subsidies: This might make you wince, unless you're a corporate farmer.

The good Keich Whicker is writing a paper on the self-sustaining nature of government spending:

What was created in the name of common good is sustained in the name of the particular interest. Bureaucratic clientism becomes self-perpetuating, in the absence of some crisis or scandal, because a single interest group to which the program matters greatly is highly motivated and well-situated to ward off the criticisms of other groups that have a broad but weak interest in the policy.

Perhaps the best example of this is what can generally be described as America's farming industry. Here, we find that from 1950 to 1970, the number of farms in the country declined from about 5.6 million to less than 3 million. However, during the same time period, government payments to farmers – in the form of subsidies and other assistance – swelled from $283 million to more than $3.2 billion.

Recent years show that the trend continues. The federal government sent about $13.4 billion in farm subsidies to more than 1.4 million recipients in 2006, according to an update of the Environmental Working Group's Farm Subsidy Database. The new data bring the 12-year subsidy total tracked online by EWG to more than $177 billion. Over that period, 10 percent of the beneficiaries collected 75 percent of all subsidy payments.