President Trump says he got Coca-Cola to agree to replace high-fructose corn syrup with real cane sugar in its flagship American soda. The company hasn’t confirmed the full extent of the change, but just the announcement was enough to send corn refiners into panic mode and free-trade purists into smug mode.
Cato’s Scott Lincicome fired off a typical series of condescending tweets: “Anyone want to tell Tariff Man why Coke puts corn syrup in the worse US version? Spoiler… sugar protectionism.”
Mark Perry, an economist who is an AEI emeritus scholar repeated the same party line.
This really is a party line. It's the sort of thing you used to get instructed in when you showed up in Washington, DC, as a bright young conservative or libertarian and attended think tank talks. Perhaps it still is (it's been quite a while since we broke bread with the fading D.C. "conservative movement"). It was a useful line for the well-fed right in D.C. because it attacks tariffs and an unpopular type of farmer (sugar plantations have had a bad reputation for as long as we can remember) while leaving foreign policy interventionism and the genuinely powerful Midwest farm lobby untouched. It makes the rise of corn syrup out to be the fault of the thing the bipartisan establishment hates more than almost anything: the protection of American producers from foreign products dumped on U.S. consumers.
The problem is that it's just not true.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member