The late Gary Becker (1930-2014), winner of the prestigious Nobel Prize in Economics and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was a theorist who developed explanations for common phenomena not normally associated with economic inquiry. He analyzed drug addiction, crime, and family structure among many other topics. Of particular relevance to farm policy and the development of the Agricultural Act of 2014 is Becker’s (1983) theory of political competition between rent-seeking pressure groups which predicts that policies that have enough political support to be adopted will tend to have two attributes.