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-per-
pound 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 protect-
ing 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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