From a reader:

I don’t know quite what to say. Subsidies for who? What fisheries? What boats? What are you talking about? In America, there are no fishing subsidies that I know of. I have a small salmon troller, and the federal government put us out of business last year, no aid, no unemployment, no food stamps, and certainly no subsidies. People here are losing their homes, their families, their boats, and the only way of life they have ever known. Now who is getting these subsidies? The environmentalists, in their infinite wisdom, who predict (like in the Greenpeace Angry Kid Video) that there will be no fish left have never left the dock! What kills fish in the Northwest is human development, the Starbucks, the endless california-style developments of personalized single family homes (available in your choice of three shades of beige), the movie theatres that endlessly loop An Inconvienient Truth for 12 bucks a seat. These urban, liberal areas have destroyed most of the habitat that the magnificent King Salmon used to spawn in. Did I mention the dams built without fish ladders to power these urban areas? The farms, sucking water out of the rivers to turn desert into farmland, at reduced water prices paid for with subsidies from the taxpayers to the farmers? And where is the fisherman? His season was cut by 88 percent. No ‘sorry’, no help. And most definitely no subsidies. Name one other area of commerce that the federal government can step in and shut down without remedy – I don’t know of one. But Oceana, and Ian at Planet Gore, and perhaps our esteemed Jonah, have probably never tried to make a living on the deck of a boat on this fish filled ocean. If you hear of a subsidy in fishing, let me know. If you want to know more about the realities of fishing, let me know. By the way, the scientists that made the faulty predictions that shut us down last year, and the federal water managers who caused the disaster in the first place, well, their F$@&ing paychecks kept coming last year. I, along with the rest of the fleet, lost my ass.