I gave a lecture on Saturday (October 10) at ISI's National Leadership Conference, Freedom and Virtue: Challenges and Prospects in a Time of Economic Crisis. My lecture was titled Consumerism and Concentration of Power: The (Im)moral Roots of the Current Crisis, and it was a variation I gave as the Calihan lecture Thursday night (October 8). Once I am happy with it, the Acton Institute will publish the text.
Also at the ISI Conference was Robert P. Murphy, author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, who gave a really very talk on how everything you learned in US history about the Great Depression and the New Deal is wrong. Murphy's work is of course very timely, given the parallels between the current crises and the Great Depression, and the current government response and the New Deal.
After my lecture, Murphy asked me a question about buying locally and Wal-Mart. He posted this question on his blog, and I commented, to amplify on my original response. I am reproducing part of the exchange here:
Murphy: People are actually supposed to feel good about "buying local" even when they're from out of town. Do you see how ridiculous that is? Would the waiter have objected if I ordered a cut of meat, raised in Indiana, while sitting in a restaurant in Nashville?
I know I know, one of the reasons you're supposed to prefer locally grown vegetables etc. is that it is fresher. Fair enough. But a lot of the "buy local" people aren't simply saying, "You should do this because it tastes better and is better for you." No, it is a moral argument, that you should provide income to people who live down the street from you, rather than providing income to people who live in other states, or--gasp!--people who live in other countries.
Abela: I think it's important to distinguish between small and local. My talk was about the dangers of concentration of economic power, and so I was mostly focusing on supporting small businesses. Small and local often go together, but the rationale for local is somewhat different. Yes, it's more environmentally friendly, as one of your commentators noted. Yes, in terms of food it also means more freshness, as you noted. More important than freshness, though, is food security. If I buy my milk from a local farmer, the chances of it being contaminated with melamine are infinitesimally smaller than if I buy milk that has been shipped from China, because the local farmer knows that any such trick would spell the end of his business, whereas a global supplier can easily start again under a different name. And therefore (here's an argument a libertarian can love) there is less call for regulation when transactions are local.
I think you can generalize this point: local transactions are easier to monitor by the parties involved, and therefore there is less justification for state regulation, be it for product safety, workplace safety, truth in advertising, etc.
Obviously, much much more to be said and done on this topic.
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