Crunchy Cons: Big Government and Meat

For the next few weeks, I'll be reading a book called Crunchy Cons. It has an interesting subtitle, but I'll share that with the reader on another day. The author is Rod Dreher, a writer for National Review and The Washington Times. The book is about counter-cultural conservatives who value tradition, community, small businesses, the environment, healthy diet (e.g., organic food), and aesthetics. For Dreher, the opposite of Crunchy Cons are conservatives who see the free market as the most important institution on the face of the earth.

Although Dreher is critical of libertarianism, his chapter on "Food" highlights how big government does not always stand by the little guy. You've probably heard the usual liberal narrative: There was predatory big business, getting rich as it exploited the little guy, got rid of competitors, ravaged the environment, and sold dangerous products. Then, heroic big government stepped in and instituted some regulations that solved those problems. Now, the evil Republicans want to eliminate those regulations, which do a good job protecting the American people.

According to Dreher, reality is not exactly that simple. Let's introduce two characters. On one hand, you have large meat companies, which pump their animals with hormones, allow them to graze in feces, reduce their nutritional value, and sell meat that is not always safe (remember the Mad Cow epidemic?). On the other hand, there are small, organic meat farmers, who respect the environment and sell healthy, better tasting meat.

Guess which one big government favors? Not only do the subsidies go to the big corporations, but the regulations favor them too. Dreher talked to some organic farmers and found out about the ridiculous regulations that the government was trying to impose on them. Jenny Drake, "a former state health inspector turned organic livestock farmer," was told that she had to build a $150,000 processing facility before she could sell her chickens. The government also required her to install handicapped-accessible restrooms and a paved parking lot. I'm not against these things, but why should someone have to install them if they will never be used? Another farmer, Joel Salatin, said that "the government wanted him to build changing-room lockers for his employees, even though he had no employees on his family-run farm."

So how do these regulations favor the big corporations? Salatin says that they "protect big agribusiness from rural independent competition." Or, if you want the words of an educated economist, Edward Hudgins told Dreher that "it's often the case that big companies willingly absorb the cost of extra regulation because those rules 'have the effect of killing off the competition.'" So much for government regulation being for the little guy!

Ironically, I once had a liberal poli sci professor who told me the exact same thing. We had to read an article about how the American government tends to favor the wealthy and influential, while it ignores the needs of the poor and marginalized. Seeing this as an attack on the American way of life, I wrote a paper that called this claim "absurd." After all, I asked, hasn't the government passed all these welfare programs and regulations that help the little guy? My professor wrote on my paper, "But what if big business actually supports these regulations?" I expected such a comment from a John Birch Society publication, but not from my New Deal-loving professor! I admire his open-mindedness to this day.