They got away with it in agriculture, so why not everywhere else?

George Monbiot writes about the European Union's corrupt, insane Common Agricultural Policy:

I’m a Remainer, but there’s one result of Brexit I can’t wait to see: leaving the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. This is the farm subsidy system that spends €50 billion a year on achieving none of its objectives. Farmed Out, 12 October

(I would say "stated objectives".) I'm not a remainer, and the CAP is one reason why. There's little to add to Mr Monbiot and others' litany of the CAP's disastrous effects on the environment, small farmers, animal welfare, Africa and human health, but the persistence of the CAP is illustrative:

(1) It's been widely challenged for decades, yet its beneficiaries are wealthy and powerful enough to resist any meaningful reform.

(2) Agriculture in all the rich countries is a sector in which government involvement has been pervasive and long lasting.

The key question is: in whose interests are these agricultural policies? The answer is clear: agribusiness and landowners (especially the biggest). The losers? The rest of us: people who eat, taxpayers, plus the farmed animal population, plus the physical environment. Even would-be farmers don't benefit: they have to buy land at prices inflated by government subsidies.

It's not just agriculture. Increasingly, the complexity both of society and our policymaking process is being weaponised in favour of the people who own and run corporations, or the people they pay (in or out of government) to understand and influence policy. Government and their paymasters can get away with this because we accept a policymaking system that doesn't explicitly target outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. Currently policymakers can - indeed must - express their decisions as vague declarations of intent and changes in institutional funding and composition, or legislation. Their focus is on the supposed means of achieving vague outcomes, rather than on the outcomes themselves.
 
Issuers of Social Policy Bonds would in contrast have to be explicit about their objectives: transparency and accountability are built into a bond regime, as surely as they are excluded from the current policymaking apparatus. Insane, corrupt programmes, such as Europe's Common Agricultural Policy, have platitudinous, vague, mutually conflicting goals, which sound lofty and high-principled but actually end up shovelling vast sums of taxpayers' and consumers' money into the bank accounts of agribusiness corporates and their lobbyists. If outcomes were built into policymaking, as they would be under a Social Policy Bond regime, such policies would get nowhere. Instead they have lasted for decades, at great cost to everybody except a few millionaire businessmen and landowners, a burgeoning, parasitical bureaucracy and lobbyists . Oh, and fraudsters.

It's the persistence of such stupid policies as the CAP, which swallows up about the 40 percent of the EU budget, that makes imperative a systemic change in the way we formulate policy. Twenty-seven years ago, P J O'Rourke could write this, about the American political system in general, and that country's Farm Bill in particular:

I spent two and a half years examining the American political process. All that time I was looking for a straightforward issue. But everything I investigated - election campaigns, the budget, lawmaking, the court system, bureaucracy, social policy - turned out to be more complicated than I had thought. There were always angles I hadn't considered, aspects I hadn't weighed, complexities I'd never dreamed of. Until I got to agriculture. Here at last is a simple problem with a simple solution. Drag the omnibus farm bill behind the barn, and kill it with an ax. Parliament of Whores, P J O'Rourke, 1991

Since then, little has changed in agriculture, but the complexities in society and policymaking have proliferated and continue to perplex ordinary people. Consequentially, the gap between our corporate-political caste and the people they are supposed to represent has continued to widen. Clarity and transparency about policy objectives are essential if that gap is ever to close. Rewarding people who actually achieve these goals, rather than bodies who merely say they will, will also be necessary. Social Policy Bonds would fulfil both requirements.