Well, it's not that it started off as subsidies for these products, the subsidies appeared elsewhere with good intentions (Overproduce, stockpile, prevent famine + destitute farmers). It's just that then others hopped on board to make money on the cheap crops.Fuck me for having to subsidize some jerkoff's Big Mac,and oversized Walmart t-shirt.
Oh, slightly different story from the one I'd remembered. Looking it up, the wikipedial says that subsidies I think I was thinking about started in the 20s-30s, but ended in the 70s?...
A large portion of the Republican manifesto has been rolling back the New Deal. '20s and '30s stuff was all about keeping The Red Menace at bay through selective socialism. Huey Long was pushing hard from the left and Prescott Bush and buddies were pushing hard from the right, so FDR went big into subsidies. Nixon and Ford were bargaining with grain and corn exports to the Soviet Union so they made sure you got lots of money for raising lots of grain and corn. Crop rotation was considered somehow communist.