I could go on, but the point here is that the government is picking winners and losers all of the time, and doing that through fiscal policies that are allocating money to some individuals as a matter of law and arbitrary whim that has little or nothing at all to do with fiscal capacity or any other metric other than access to those in positions of political power and who gave the most in terms of political campaign donations in the past.
I understand this very well, RHorning. I live in Russia where we have an extremely high level of corruption and sometimes the economical laws for free market just do not work because there is no space for them. Still I believe that if there are many corrupters in, i.e. police (we call it "militia" and this is exactly our case), it does not mean the police is not needed at all and must be abolished. I believe that as a model the economical model we use right now is good enough for the time being. But the model is a model, the life is life and they differ.
Thanks for your posts, was very interesting.