incentives

I'm inspired by coffee, with a target thanks to this article on food-stamp-using hipsters:
http://www.salon.com/life/pinched/2010/03/15/hipsters_food_stamps_pinched/index.html

I'm enthusiastic about the benefits of local/organic vegetables - it seems only positive that the government is sponsoring such things, in contrast to its characteristic (and - alas - still vastly larger) subsidies of monocultured corn and beef.

Could this be a useful model for how to address some of the deep problems of the US system? In other words: what if individuals could vote on agriculture policy with their share of the government's pocketbook? The core issue it would address is how helping the poor leads to the centralization of power and decisionmaking, and from there to (often? or generally?) poor quality if not outright corruption. And it does this basically by putting the power and decisionmaking back in the hands of the millions of individuals - advertising is effective, but not nearly as corrupting as lobbying!

And how could we expand that model to art, urban planning, or - god forbid! - healthcare? It seems that some more obviously governmental functions - like defense, international relations, and (perhaps) education - would remain centralized, but we could certainly learn a lot about those by similarly distributing the decisionmaking.