[anigbrowl]

The government is not an independent entity. Farmers (by which I include agribusiness corporations) vote and donate heavily to political causes. Further, the government is not a monolithic entity; you have the governor, various other elected officials, and then all the legislators in the assembly and state senate, plus all the people that California sends to Congress Washington DC. There are a lot of people who live in inland California whose economic well-being depends directly or indirectly on agriculture. As long as they participate in the political process, government is going to serve some of their interests because they keep electing people to vote for that.

This is the big trouble with libertarians right here. You keep being politically marginalized because you don't seem to appreciate that government is not some alien thing imposed from without, but the distillation of multiple (and often competing) collective interests. Just as 'war is a continuation of politics by other means,' politics is is a continuation of business by other means. Your 'free market' solution is only going to function if you exclude a bunch of people from the political process because their continued participation has become a major inconvenience for everyone else. As someone with technocratic inclinations I sometimes wish we could do that, because I think the farming lobby frequently epitomizes greed and stupidity. But shutting farmers out of politics would be a huge violation of our constitutional design, not to mention political suicide.