Subsidies? Whatever for?

SEE HERE This little piece about farm subsidies is just an excuse to riff on the topic in general. What business is it of the government to subsidize anything? To take the money of others and give it to businesses that otherwise would fail is a recipe for making any society less competitive and less capable. It rewards inefficient producers and likely raises the cost of the goods subsidized simply because there's no incentive for the subsidized to be efficient. Taxes on corporations are also a lie. You can't tax corporations, only the people who depend on their production. Corporations don't pay taxes, people do. The people who pay are those who buy the products of the corporation and in the process the corporation is made less competitive against foreign competition. Is it any wonder that we're growing less competitive versus the rest of the world? We have the highest corporate tax burden on our corporations.

What's the remedy? Get the government out of the knickers of business by eliminating both subsidies and taxes. That being said it would be a shock to do it overnight and the last thing we need are shocks, so the subsidies and the taxes should be staged down in a smooth fashion from what they are today to nothing in five to ten years. To make sure it happens we really ought to put a Constitutional amendment in place that restricts the government from doing this kind of thing except under specific emergency conditions that are spelled out. If we can't get control of what we are screwing up then we'll only get it fixed after the train wreck that is sure to come.