It's hard to imagine that shipping alfalfa across the Pacific makes economic sense -- perhaps only to fill otherwise empty container ships? Subsidizing water f

It's hard to imagine that shipping alfalfa across the Pacific makes economic sense -- perhaps only to fill otherwise empty container ships? Subsidizing water for this is crazy, but it's also driven by the desire of China to avoid depending on the U.S. for food. So crazy, sure, but WHY do we have this kind of crazy? Yes, agri-business lobbyists are more concentrated than consumer (i.e. have lower coordination costs and higher stakes), but that's not the main reason. Democracies that geographically distribute representation are subject to hostaging, so e.g., every district has defense spending, midwestern states get ethanol mandates and California's central valley gets decades of bullet train investment, and water allocation is majorly messed up. That's essentially the picture of politics in the US today, and it has less to do with capitalism than with how we agreed to agree (though none of us actually agreed to that). The only thing moderating that tendency is when national political party discipline overrides local -- in war (before, during, and after), or in periods of ideological fervor. Not a solution. So the real question is: why can we make exponential progress in teraflop systems, but not moderately rational governance?