Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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The concept of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs has frequently been invoked to explain how special interests are so often awarded with lucrative privileges while taxpayers foot the enormous bill.

In a recent blog post on Cato at Liberty,

managing editor of Regulation magazine Tom Firery attempted a thought experiment

to resolve the issue of runaway pork spending.

He discusses his thought experiment in today's

podcast. Concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. What's this all about?

The discussion I give in the blog post is something that all good libertarians, all good fans of limited government, no, which is that government programs typically give a benefit to a small defined group of people.

And that money that they give to them then comes from a large group

of people taxpayers who all together may only pay a dollar or two toward that benefit that's

worth several million dollars to the special interest that gets it.

So this creates kind of a perverse dynamic.

The special interest has all sorts of reasons to want this benefit

and to lobby for it and pester politicians for it

and give campaign contributions to politicians for it.

Whereas for the taxpayer, the individual taxpayer, it's a loss of maybe a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a dollar.

It's hard to get too upset about that loss, even though they do do pile up but it's hard to go fight each

individual program when each individual program is only a loss of pocket money.

Why can't taxpayers organize to counter the special interests?

Well, again, it's this whole idea that's in a sense not worth it.

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