If to fund such activities the government taxes the people who already would support them, then it engages in self-subsidy. Consider painter Donald Baechler, who has had 27 solo exhibitions around the world and sells several hundred thousand dollars of art each year. The federal government has decided that he is a valuable contributor to modern culture and wants to make his life and work easier by putting more dollars in his pocket. But at the same time the government makes his life and work harder by taking thousands away from him in taxes. Farm subsidies illustrate the same pattern.
Government spends billions to support farmers and bolster their standard of living.
I choose 1982 because that's when the Department of Agriculture happened to do a survey of disposable farm income. Everywhere we look, we find government using its powers of taxation to drain funds away from the same people and functions that government itself has declared worthy, subsidizable social needs. This was the view of a staff member of the Senate Budget Committee when I tried to interest her in the dilemma. If this assumption were true, then self-subsidy would indeed be no problem. But the state is not a frictionless machine.