the same farm programs in the late 1980s that we had in the early 1930s. Government farm programs have been impervious both to failure and to change.

Agriculture had a special place for the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson celebrated the farmer as the foundation of American democracy. Farmers rallied at the bridge at Concord, formed the core of the infantry in the Revolutionary War, and led the way in securing America's new frontiers. Most Americans were farmers, and the prosperity of farmers was equated with national prosperity.

Since politicians lauded farmers' virtues, it was not surprising that politicians sometimes offered cash rewards for such virtue. One of the first farm subsidies in the United States involved a protection for Southern sugar growers. In 1816, Congress legislated a 3-cent-perpound tariff on imported sugar. This pegged American sugar prices at about double the world price. In 1832, Henry Lee, writing for the Free Trade Convention assembled in Philadelphia, denounced the sugar tariff as a scam on the American working class to benefit fewer than 500 plantation owners:

Admit the principle, that a particular class of men or a particular state has a right to government aid, for the prosecution of a business, which could not be prosecuted without it, and there is no limit to the rightful claims of individuals and states. ¹

The legislature of Louisiana petitioned Congress, observing that "the General Government, if it did not compel [sugar growers to produce sugar], invited them to attempt it." ² Thus, Louisiana politicians argued, the government was obligated to continue protecting sugar growers. In the same way that farm aid supporters warn today of the collapse of rural America if subsidies are curtailed, sugar tariff supporters warned of the devastation of the South if the sugar tariff were abolished. As one Southern statesman noted, "The ruin of the sugar planters would depreciate slave property in the United States by $100,000,000."

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