Europe doesn't have a huge corn lobby.
Nor a high tax on sugar ...
The story:
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.
More:
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0498d.asp
Good point. Can there be some truth, though, in their assessment of the damage done to the body by corn syrup, separate from economic reasons? I find where there is smoke, there can be fire. Their reasons do seem rational.