Tweet [1]
Here’s a speaks-for-itself e-mail from Duke’s Ed Tower (links added):
Don, With regard to your Café Hayek discussion of sugar protectionism [2]. Here is my favorite footnote on protectionism. It is from Doug Irwin’s “Free Trade Under Fire [3],” fourth edition, p.88.
The family of Alfonso Fanjul singlehandedly supplies the United States with about 15 percent of its sugarcane through its land holdings in south Florida and the Dominican Republic, collecting somewhere between $52 to $90 million in benefits from the price supports on U.S. production and the quota rents on Dominican sugar exports. Not surprisingly, the Fanjul family could afford to make nearly $300,000 in campaign contributions in 1988. 26
26. Alfonso Fanjul is so politically powerful that President Bill Clinton interrupted a “meeting” with Monica Lewinsky to take a phone call from him. This is according to Lewinsky’s testimony as presented in the Kenneth Starr report.