Well, Maurice Wilder just happened to be profiled in my local Omaha World-Herald this past weekend. While he isn't busy farming farm programs for oodles of cash, he's pumping oodles of Nebraska's precious groundwater. Or, to be precise, somebody else is pumping it for him:

A man who owns 125 Nebraska irrigation wells has never drilled a single one. Maurice Wilder, 66, of Clearwater, Fla., primarily develops retirement communities, recreational vehicle parks and office buildings in Florida and Texas. And he's never lived here.

As noted above, The King of Farm Programs doesn't confine himself to farming, either. Check out the following data on our little buddy:

* Total holdings nationwide estimated at $500 million in 2005.
* Owns 10 office buildings in the Tampa Bay, Fla., area with more than 1 million square feet of space.
* Has 4,500 mobile home lots and 12,500 recreational vehicle lots in Florida and Texas.
* Commercial and residential land holdings.
* Owns 200,000 acres of farmland and ranch land in eight states. That's roughly 312 square miles, or nearly the size of Douglas County.

Wow. Can somebody please tell me what The King has done to deserve $3.2 million from the US Treasury?

This all goes right to the heart of farm program ideology, which I wrote about in a previous post. If you believe farm programs should exist to help family farmers, The King and his millions are an outrage -- an offensive example of wasteful farm program spending.

But as it is, farm programs support every single unit of agricultural production, and there is no real limit on the number of units you can collect payments on. Consequently, the nation's largest farms pull down multi-million dollar subsidy checks, despite the claims of politicians and the media that payment limits do exist. (By the way, The King gets most of his money from commodity certificates, which were explicitly set up to evade payment limits).

To be sure, there will be a big ruffle-duffle over the data, with case studies and finger pointing and rhetoric all around. And when you hear organizations whine about how The King is an aberration, a lone example of farm programs gone bad, don't believe it. All you need to remember is that what The King is doing is perfectly legal, because our elected representatives have made it that way.

Check out the EWG database and get yourself all riled up. Then contact the nearest elected representative and tell them you support limiting farm program payments. This year's Dorgan-Grassley bill is a great place to start.