Curiously none of the jobs you mentioned are well paid (well, I guess it depends on who you mean to include, since owning a farm or being Mario Batali probably isn't bad). But besides that I think we could do the same thing, really. A cynic could say a farmer just grows surplus corn to collect subsidies on ethanol.
Most farmers don't grow ethanol. And ethanol is a fuel, it isn't just paper, regardless of the subsidies.
As far as being well-paid: farmers are fairly well-paid. They have to work hard and use a LOT of what you might call automation (combine harvesters and the like).
But to your point: I sometimes am persuaded by the conjecture that we developed BS paper-pushing jobs for people since we've automated away farming, much of manufacturing, etc. Office Space comes to mind, too.
Well, a lot of people work on a farm who are not by any stretch of the imagination rich, and someone operating a large factory farm is probably not the image that comes to mind when you think "farmer," is what I meant to say.
As for the ethanol, it's a fuel, but without the subsidies and legal mandates would there be a good reason to use it? I'd always heard it's not really efficient and the environmental impact is negligible-to-negative, even though on the surface being renewable is good.
Ethanol mandates really kicked off in the W administration. I think it's worth remembering that at the time, the primary motivation was probably more geopolitical than climate: ethanol is domestically produced, as are many of the energy inputs (such as electricity and natural gas). The US now produces a non-trivial amount of ethanol, enough that if it were removed from the market, we'd probably import significantly more foreign oil.
