How the Government Makes You Fat - The Great Sugar Shakedown

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original article: http://www.fff.org/freedom/0498d.asp

The Great Sugar Shaft
by James Bovard, April 1998
The U.S. government has devotedly jacked up American sugar prices far above world market prices since the close of the War of 1812. The sugar industry is one of America's oldest infant industries — yet it dodders with the same uncompetitiveness that it showed during the second term of James Madison. Few cases better illustrate how trade policy can be completely immune to economic sense.

The U.S. imposed high tariffs on sugar in 1816 in order to placate the growers in the newly acquired Louisiana territory. In the 1820s, sugar plantation owners complained that growing sugar in the United States was "warring with nature" because the U.S. climate was unsuited to sugar production. Naturally, the plantation owners believed that all Americans should be conscripted into the "war." Protectionists warned that if sugar tariffs were lifted, then the value of slaves working on the sugar plantations would collapse — thus causing a general fall in slave values throughout the South.

In 1934, the U.S. government imposed sugar import quotas to complement high sugar tariffs and direct government subsidies to sugar growers. By the 1950s, the U.S. sugar program was renown for its byzantine, impenetrable regulations. Like most arcane systems, the sugar program vested vast power in the few people who understood and controlled the system. As author Douglas Cater observed in 1964, "In reviewing the sugar quotas, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Cooley has had the habit of receiving the [foreign representatives interested in acquiring sugar quotas] one by one to make their presentations, then summoning each afterward to announce his verdict. By all accounts, he has a zest for this princely power and enjoys the frequent meetings with foreign ambassadors to confer on matters of sugar and state."

Sugar quotas have also provided a safety net for former congressmen, many of whom have been hired as lobbyists for foreign sugar producers...

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[drlex]

High fructose corn syrup affects your liver and leptin hormone which is responsible for feeling hunger. In amounts available in soda it has devastating effects. Drink only water.

[Isaidhi7]

Somalia isn't an Anarchy because there are groups of people fighting to form a state in an undeveloped country. It's not an Anarchy, it's a failed state.

[SpellboundSolution]

Governments create the most ironic and insane ideas, institutions and concepts; the US government certainly does it the best.

[Michael Shanklin]

9 government workers watched this...

[Janet Thompson]

No, SpellboundSolution, every government creates something so ridiculous. The US Government just does it more efficiently than others. :-)

[SpellboundSolution]

Sugar smuggling. Only the US Government could create something so ridiculous.

[batfly]

The GM wheat developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) using public funds is engineered to turn off genes permanently. The organization’s intent to turn off wheat genes, however, could affect human and animal genes.

“Through ingestion, these molecules can enter human beings and potentially silence our genes,” says Professor Jack Heinemann of the University of Canterbury’s Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety.

GMO is a collectivist tool

[Eli S]

You have yet to provide anything empirical to substantiate your claims, nothing but sensationalism. Many local farmers in the US, as well as farmers in the third world use GMO crops. GMO rice in particular is responsible for feeding tens of millions in Asia alone, that world otherwise go hungry. I am not a collectivist; your ideological rambling is a complete red herring fallacy.

[batfly]

Local farmers are being forced out of their livelihoods with this identical propaganda and brute force by the likes of Monsanto.

The farmers in poor countries are resisting this consolidation of food production by the elites... And they will prevail.

Only collectivists preach "altruism" and "the ends justify the means" and "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" as they hold dear to their moral foundation of consequentialism and might makes right... It always leads to genocide.

[Eli S]

More sensationalism completely devoid of empiricism. The only notable study on GMO's that has been done, was at the University of Caen or roundup resistant corn; it didn't pass peer review, and has already been torn to shreds by the scientific community. ANY study on cancer formation that uses Sprague Dawley rats or Swiss mice is next to worthless. GMO's are responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of millions of people every year from starvation.

[batfly]

Well, a year has passed since this dialogue and a lot more science has been revealed to show I was underestimating the clear and present danger of GMO.

GMO is biological warfare.

It's an insidious way to depopulate the earth.