Big-Government Crunchies
[NRO Staff  03/09 08:37 AM]

Another e-mail:

To the degree that "crunchy cons" encourage people to choose to become more self-sufficient, they truly do support power being returned to the individual. But if they want to force that lifestyle on others through government interference, it's hard to see how that makes the individual more free.

Despite his assertion that he doesn't want to impose his priorities on others, Rod Dreher did seem to suggest last week that "factory farming" should be heavily regulated, if not abolished outright:

"As regards factory farming of livestock, if one regards it as seriously immoral, then it won’t do to say, 'But poor people will eat less meat if we ban or at least seriously reform it.' If it were a matter of people starving or animals being treated humanely, then of course people must come first. But if it’s a matter of eating less meat for the moral/ethical gain of refusing to participate in a degraded system of meat production, then that’s a cost I think society should absorb. We eat less meat in my family in part because of this. Society makes these kinds of distinctions all the time. It’s what the minimum wage is about. It’s what safety regulations on industry are all about. Only pure libertarians or anarchists would seriously argue that moral considerations shouldn’t govern to some degree our economic life, even if the state has to impose morality on commerce. Crunchy conservatives didn’t come up with this. But one thing I do say in the book is that people who believe!
in the kinds of ideals I extol don’t have to wait for the government to act; they can, and should, put these beliefs into practice themselves, by changing their consumer habits. Eating better (aesthetically and morally) meat, even if it means less of it, is one small way."

(03/02 11:56 AM)

Because he apparently thinks it is seriously immoral, Dreher thinks we ought to "ban or at least seriously reform" factory farming. Society should absorb the cost of doing so, just as we have absorbed the cost of the minimum wage (an act of government) and industrial safety regulations (another act of government). Crunchies "don't have to wait for government to act" in order to eat more "morally," but they apparently do want government to step in at some point.

So far as I can tell, no one on the blog has objected to this idea of government interference, so the crunchies should not be too surprised if others suspect a totalitarian bent to their philosophy.