Ethanol subsidies aren't ambiguous. Nobody seriously disagrees on what they are. People disagree on whether we should have them.
And there are issues where that kind of disagreement is purely subjective, like abortion. Purely a disagreement about principles rather than facts.
But there are also your Bridge to Nowhere type deals, like ethanol subsidies, that are contrary to objective fact. The bill is sold under a particular justification (e.g. reduce dependence on petroleum) and it factually does not do that. There is no principle to disagree about, it's objectively just pork, and the "facts" used by the proponents are lies.
The thing where lobbyists pretend there are zero objective things just because there are non-zero non-objective things is merely a dishonest tactic they use to paper over the unjustifiability of their preferred pork.
> The system is all that keeps you and the corn farmers from picking up a gun and removing ambiguity.
There is a difference between specific rules and the concept of having rules. Basically nobody is in favor of total anarchy or removing foundational rules like the illegality of murder.
But when your tax code is more than a thousand pages, it's past time to throw it out and start over.
This is about, for example, ethanol subsidies. Basically everyone who doesn't receive them thinks they're dumb. It takes more than a gallon of petroleum to produce a gallon of ethanol, it diverts productive farmland from food which makes food cost more for the poor (and everyone), it's an inefficient use of tax dollars, etc.
Yet we continue to have ethanol subsidies, because it gets politicians from districts full of corn farmers to vote for the bill even when the bill contains a bunch of differently-toxic nonsense for other interests in different districts.
And you don't need 100% of the votes to pass, you only need 51%. So all you have to do is construct a bill that allows 51% of the districts to steal resources from the other 49% in various ways like that, and it passes. Which is why everyone hates politics.
But those bills are precarious, because it doesn't pay to have 75% of the vote. An excess 25% would require you to give things to people using resources you could have kept for your existing coalition.
Only that means you can't afford to lose too many of your votes when someone starts to make a stink about a specific inefficient program that was shoring those votes up. If the ethanol subsidies were removed from the bill, you would be short on votes.
Which turns honest outsiders just trying to make a positive impact into political enemies, because they're threatening to dismantle your majority coalition.
And the same dynamic plays out in any system based on majority voting.