From a reader:

Not to spam you, but… When I worked on the Hill I did some fisheries stuff. Your e-mailer is right — there aren’t any direct federal subsidies to fishermen. There has been a massive “tragedy of the commons” problem, though, with too many boats chasing too few fish. It caused several fisheries to collapse. The initial federal solution to this was to determine how much of each species a given fishery could give up in a year and still have enough to replenish itself — Total Allowable Catch or Maximum Sustainable Yield. Then they required commercial fishermen to record their catch, and when the TAC or MSY was hit, the fishery closed. The perverse result of this was a “race for fish” wherein boats fished as fast as they could, day and night, to catch as much of the TAC as possible before the fishery closed. It also resulted in some pretty environmentally harmful fishing practices — it’s hard to worry about by-catch (taking non-target species) when your racing against the clock. And far from solving the problem of over-capitalized fisheries, it resulted in capital stuffing, with fishermen buying more and bigger boats to try to fish faster. In the late 90′s, there was a conservative driven push to solve this — to allow fishing interests to have a designated percentage of the TAC which they could fish in their own time. These Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQ’s) would either be allocated on the basis of historic catch, or else bought and sold on the open market, so that if it’s more efficient, Fisherman X could sell or lease his ITQ to Fisherman Y, and go do something else. Also, Fisherman Y could time his catch to the market — stay home when there is a glut of product, and go fish when it is scarce. It made tons of sense. Naturally, it was opposed by Greenpeace, which felt it created a property right to some of God’s (or Gaia’s) creatures. Anyway, I’ve been out of fish politics since about 2001, so I don’t know the current state of affairs, but for what it’s worth.

Me: For the record, I never meant to say that fishing subsidies were a problem in the US or that they even exist. Mine was a larger point about these sorts of subsidies world wide. The US can’t get rid of its agriculture subsidies without other countries doing likewise. International aid, development loans, trade rules, whaling, the whole kitchen sink would have to be on the table. As much as I feel sorry for the guys on the short end of the stick in America’s fishing industry, I wouldn’t want to see us dash even faster in the global race to the bottom by subsidizing our industry. I’d rather see our industry stay free of that sort of thing while pressuring foreign governments to end their subsidies. In short, I don’t like subsidies for stuff we eat. It helps keep the third world poor, skews markets, hurts the environment and helps giant corporations who hide behind the overalls of family farmers.