Why minority interests profit so handsomely

was too optimistic.

Federal funding went to whaling museums in three states from which whalers went to sea (Massachusetts, Alaska and Hawaii) and in Mississippi, which was not a home of whalers but is the home of Republican Sen. Thad Cochran, an Appropriations Committee titan.

The whaling program, which cost about $9 million in its last year, was administered by the Department of Education. It objected to doing this, which is one reason the funding ended: Government changed because part of it was annoyed. Also, a congressman publicized the subsidy.

The $9 million was a piddling smidgen of a fraction of the federal budget, as is the $5 million wool and mohair subsidy. It was smuggled into the 1954 NationalWool Act, which was supposed to stimulate wool production, lest we run short when next we need 12 million uniforms for a twofront world war.

Mohair had nothing to do with this supposed military necessity, but mohair producers wanted a seat on the gravy train.

Their subsidy became briefly notorious and briefly died (it was resuscitated when no one was any longer paying attention) after Jonathan Rauch called attention to it in his 1994 book “Demosclerosis.” Rauch’s neologism describes government that is resistant to change because it is solicitous toward many minor but attentive factions.

These clients thrive in obscurity because of the law that governs much of government, the law of dispersed costs and concentrated benefits. Taxpayers do not notice, unless someone like Rauch tells them, the costs of subsidizing whaling museums or mohair, but the subsidies mean much to those who run the museums or produce the mohair.

Similarly, consumers do not notice the cost of sugar import quotas added to the sugar they consume, quotas that substantially enrich sugar producers. And so on and on. For a century now, the national government has been hyperactive in distributing economic advantages to attentive but inconspicuous factions. This will not stop. Why?

James Joyce said his readers should devote their entire lives to understanding his fiction (not that a lifetime is long enough to fathom “FinnegansWake”).

If Americans devoted their lives to mastering the federal budget’s minutiae, gargantuan government might behave better. But what economists call the “information costs” of such mastery would be much higher than the costs of just paying the hundreds of billions that the subsidies cost.

There is a name for what this fact produces: demosclerosis.