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Title: Crunchy Con Talk
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: March 16, 2006
Language: en
Topics: capitalism
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/03/crunchy-con-talk.html

Kevin Carson

Crunchy Con Talk

Radley Balko goes after the Cruncy Cons, but just winds up making

himself look bad:

One last little irony in this whole crunchy con business: There are a

few billion people on this planet still in danger of starving to death.

They’re in desperate need of modernity, technology, and all those crass,

crude, unsightly accoutrements of emerging markets (see environmental

pollution, “sweatshop” labor, etc.). Dreher can lament the Internet age,

access to world markets, our abundance of choice, and mass globalization

all he likes. Unfortunately, most of the rest of humanity hasn’t yet

made it to the “lamenting our prosperity” stage of economic development.

Dreher pooh-poohs the tools the very poor need to get to where we are

(globalization and world markets, technology, GMOs)) because he, Rod

Dreher, yearns for a simpler lifestyle.

No, here’s your “little irony”: Balko and Dreher are mirror-imaging.

Despite the fact that one uses “free market” as a god-term and the other

as a devil-term, both apparently understand it to be pretty much the

same thing. For example: Dreher, at CrunchyCon blog, quotes the food

chapter from his book:

We are told that small-scale farming is inefficient — this is true — and

that because our factory farms feed the masses, and do so cheaply, we

should be satisfied.... I understand the free-market reasons why

Americans do this. But I don’t understand why it is called conservative.

Ironically, this comes immediately after another statement by the same

author:

...At first I thought of this small-scale organic farming as a sort of

boutique thing — pleasant to have, liek artisanal microbrewed beers, but

only that. Then I started looking into how the government regulates the

meat industry. It was shocking to see how agribusiness had gamed the

system to keep small meat producers marginalized. Our regulatory system

is designed to favor industrialized meat production....

Not that all Crunchy Cons are this clueless. Mitch Muncy, a Crunchista

who apparently has a tad more critical thinking ability than either

Balko or Dreher, writes:

What some Crunchy Cons identify as the free market run amok looks to me

more like factions using the government to pervert the free market. I

wonder if Crunchy Conservatism wouldn’t flourish under a market even

freer than the one we have.

Caleb Stegall, in the same vein, adds:

...it is “big government” in all its guises that makes most of what Rod

complains about possible in the first place. The cult of corporate

centralization, universalization, and efficiency depends on big

government for its existence. Why do you think our government keeps

getting bigger and more intrusive? It ain’t all (or even primarily) the

fault of the bleeding heart lefties.

Although Balko dismisses the Crunchy Cons as “pretty darned

self-indulgent,” he’s one to talk. It’s hard to imagine anything more

self-indulgent than the Stosselite womb he’s encased himself in, which

bears so little relation to factual reality it might as well be in its

own self-contained space-time continuum.

A lot of those starving people in the Third World want, not to “get

where we are,” but where they were: namely, back on their own land that

was stolen from them by authoritarian governments in cahoots with landed

oligarchies and Western agribusiness interests. I’ve written before on

just how little Third World starvation has to do with any alleged crying

need for GMOs (“The So-Called Green Revolution”) or sweatshops (“Vulgar

Libertarianism Watch, Part I”). As a matter of fact, as I said in the

Green Revolution post, those GMOs are specifically geared to be most

efficient in the kind of state-subsidized, high-input production model

the landed oligarchs engage in on their stolen land, with lots of

irrigation water and chemicals. GMOs and other Green Revolution seeds

are vulnerable to drought, and otherwise far less efficient than locally

improved varieties, when it comes the kind of soil- and labor-intensive

production that peasant subsistence farmers would use to feed

themselves.

It is a myth that Third World hunger results mainly from primitive

farming techniques, or that the solution is a technocratic fix. Hunger

results from the fact that land once used to grow staple foods for the

people working it is now used to grow cash crops for urban elites or for

the export markets, while the former peasant proprietors are without a

livelihood.

What’s more, those GMOs wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell in a

free market, if it weren’t for government R&D money, government patents,

government food libel laws, government labelling restrictions that

violate the right to commercial free speech, and Monsanto thugs hauling

farmers into court for being downwind of their GM pollen.

Finally, the sweatshop laborers in the Third World, like the workers in

the Dark Satanic Mills of our own industrial era, had to be driven off

their land by force before they’d willingly work under such conditions.

To the extent that sweatshops offer the “best available alternative” to

landless peasants, it’s a case of breaking someone’s leg and then

offering him a crutch.

No matter how much he wraps it up in “free market” rhetoric, Balko’s

polemic is just an apology for the boot stamping on a human face. The

Birkenstocked Burkeans’ opposition can’t possibly do real free market

principles any more harm than the Pot-Smoking Republican’s defense.