If I want to be a baseball star, I reward myself every time I practice baseball. If we want our country to be the best at corn production, we subsidize corn so farmers are rewarded by better profit for growing it.

Subsidies are a powerful tool that allows a place to focus on a facet it wishes success in. However, with lobbying and crazy capitalism stuff, subsidization is less of an intelligent tool withwhich to customize an empire as it is being built, and more a process through which powerful vested interests funnel additional funds in to themselves. When the farmers growing corn form a lobbying group and push for greater corn subsidies, they will always want greater corn subsidies; growth becomes blind. And the more powerful they become, the more powerful they can make themselves.

Subsidization in a subpar framework also destabilizes developing economies. Farmers of many small countries get run out of business because the cost of growing their produce is more than what foreign subsidized goods sell for on the local market. This subsidized goods dumping and destroying of local farmers often is started by foreign leverage coercing local government to accept ‘Free Trade’, which sounds great because ‘Free’, but results in local producers of developing nations being unable to compete while the wealth gets siphoned out of the country.

I would do subsidies somewhat differently. I think there should be some thought and direction behind it instead of just monsters insatiably feeding themselves. If there is any group of people that should be beyond election, termlimit, sway of money or bribery, and basically stuck in a room with no outside interference for infinite time, it is the council responsible for determining subsidies. They should be smart people, not politicians, and entirely cut off from lobbyists. They can see what ratios of the population are supportive of each businesstype, but no interacting directly with lobbyists. They can hold to a long term concept instead of switch direction every reelection and, longterm, be stronger wherever they focused. Obviously, they should be aligned with an overall idea of what makes the country special. Ideally, each country would focus it’s own niche unless purposely competing to maximize quality while reducing cost of a sector.

And generally the baseline norm of countries should not include perfectly free trade and, instead, not allow import of foreign goods that have been subsidized to costs below what local producers can make. If local producers cannot compete, there won’t be local producers long. That isn’t, in all situations, bad. For example, a country may produce no clothes, but import clothing from another country cheaper than it would make clothing locally; meanwhile, subsidizing, producing and exporting back something else, like food, for a mutually beneficial exchange. Countries should not be just letting their producers get removed with no plan tho, as has happened historically to places like Haiti and thrown them in to extreme poverty as all wealth gets sucked out and none brought in. So baseline trade rules for countries should account for and protect against this and it only be allowed to happen because of purposely specializing in and exporting out another field.