This morning, I was happy to see that Intelligentsia coffee started carrying Mexican Coca-Cola. A lot of people who have been to Mexico elsewhere have commented that Coke tastes better outside the US, but many don't know why. Many people have heard my didactic rant on the topic, but some of you out in the Internets haven't been subjected to it, so here goes:
Mexican Coke tastes better because it is made with cane sugar. US Coke is made with high-fructose corn syrup, which besides not tasting as good as sugar, is worse for you. We use HFCS because it's cheaper. It shouldn't be cheaper (and isn't in Mexico) because we protect domestic sugar producers with a 54-cent tariff and subsidize corn production. Those subsidies are a direct economic attack on third-world farmers whose products are uncompetitive in our market because we dump money in their competitor's laps in ever-increasing amounts.
We don't even need to subsidize corn production because corn is selling at high prices because of demand for ethanol. Ethanol is driving up corn prices because some state governments mandate a percentage of ethanol in gasoline and the price of gasoline has risen to such an extent that it makes economic sense (with the help of the subsidy of course).
If the amount of money we're wasting on ethanol isn't bad enough, we're selling farmers water for irrigating corn in places where it really ought not grow without the cheap water. During a drought, cities make a big show of conservation by banning the watering of lawns, but most of our water is used by agriculture, including the overproduction of corn to make ethanol and corn for our worse-tasting Coke. If we ever made enough ethanol from corn to make a dent in oil imports, the entire Midwest would be a desert in our lifetimes.
And if that wasn't enough, there's a low-labor-cost nation 90 miles away from our shores that makes lots of sugar and could make more with foreign investment. The trouble is that the country is Cuba and our policy of waiting for Castro to die before engaging our neighbor is sacrosanct in certain swing-state circles, if you catch my drift.
Is there anything more messed up about government than the way they wasted billions of dollars, kept millions of third-world farmers in poverty, depleted our natural resources, ruined our Coke and made us less healthy?
Oh right, the Iraq thing.
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