Ramesh suggests that some people might overstate the degree to which presidential candidates’ enthusiasm for the federal ethanol mandate, an immensely expensive and stupid piece of public policy, is driven by the Iowa caucuses. A number of other states’ politicians strongly support the mandate (the “renewable fuel standard”), too. This seems right, but at the margins it still seems like it could be beneficial not to let any one state get to impose its crony litmus tests on national politicians every four years, and farm policy is, as far as awful federal policies go, quite awful and quite big. Replacing that issue with fishmermen’s unemployment insurance or snowmaking subsidies or whatever gets the New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce going might really be a good thing. Moving to a system where the first primary/caucus is rotated or awarded competitively would also help at the margins, in the sense that no one state’s interests gets a special, permanent boost.

So it seems like the ethanol-mandate charade should indeed be a part of the debate about how to organize primaries (not that Ramesh would disagree), even though bad policies that provide big costs to narrow special interests while imposing small costs on everyone else will, of course, always be with us.