Great discussion about history and politics surrounding farm policy between Dan Sumner at UC Davis and Russ Roberts on EconTalk.
I enjoyed this story that Sumner conveyed about midway through
“ And I have to tell you, Russ, my favorite story in all this. Back when I was a kid I was a young professor at North Carolina State. I ran a conference: I brought in luminaries of the agricultural economics world. And I invited some local agricultural commodity people. A man named Northly[?] came—he was the Executive Vice President of the North Carolina Peanut Association. Wonderful guy. He stood up as this conference was ending, and he said, ‘Let me tell you about the peanut program. There’s only two people in America who understand how the peanut program works. It’s my job to keep it that way.’ And I took that statement, one, to be true; and two, the fact that he was willing to say it out loud, to us, was a reflection of how irrelevant he thought we were. Now, I don’t think he was quite right that we were that irrelevant”