Econ 101

Think if you have ever heard this: "I am a producer of (sugar, automobiles, street music...) and am unable to compete with (foreign sugar, foreign autos, better musicians) and so must receive a subsidy (to be collected from my competitors.

Here is an explanation of what this is, and at some depth, the damage it does.

The income derived from possessing a special privilege is called "rent" (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the monthly payments that tenants make to landlords). Rents themselves are just a transfer of value from some people to others. So, for example, when each American pays an extra $10 annually for sugar because of the special protections that Uncle Sam gives to American sugar farmers, that $10 winds up in the hands of sugar farmers. Each of us who doesn't grow sugar is worse off by $10, while those who do grow it are better off by the sum total.

As someone else remarked, "when the politician controls buying and selling, the first thing bought and sold is the politician."

That $10 for the sugar grower comes generally from a tariff on imported sugar. It's why the government pays ADM a generous subsidy for their corn-based ethanol while hitting imported Brazilian cane-based ethanol with a $.58/gal tariff. As a by-product of this effort, the price of all the meat you buy is increased as the feed corn supply is bid up by the oil companies in an effort to keep in congresses good graces.

It would be a nice constitutional amendment to forbid the government from becoming involved in the operations of business.