Gravel the libertarian?

According to several of those political quizzes circulating on the Internet, Alaska-Senator-turned-bitter-curmudgeon/longshot-Democratic-presidential-candidate Mike Gravel was one of my top matches for president.

I guess should be heartened, then, to see that Gravel is apparently now pursuing the Libertarian nomination.

Gravel’s platform is actually an odd grab-bag of proposals, including replacing the income tax with a “progressive fair tax” and a universal health care proposal. But given his views on the Iraq war, immigration, civil liberties, the drug war, and same-sex marriage, t wouldn’t be completely inaccurate to describe his views as left-libertarianish.

The campaign’s centerpiece is something Gravel calls The National Initiative for Democracy, which is a kind of national referendum mechanism and an interesting proposal for a more direct form of democracy.

Of course, Gravel’s fringe ideas and his cranky and sardonic manner don’t exactly scream viable candidacy. Personally, I like cranky and sardonic people, but I suspect I’m in the minority here.

The church and social justice

Derek and Christopher have both been pondering the issue. Also relevant is this post on Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society from Fr. Chris.

I’ve wondered from time to time if part of the problem isn’t that the church has lost the idea of vocation. Instead of equipping lay people for ministry in the world (including, for those who are called to it, politics), we seem to have shifted to a model where the institutional church is seen as the primary locus of Christian political activity, as a kind of social service agency/political advocacy organization. By contrast, a more vocational model might focus more on spiritual and moral formation in the context of classic Christian practices like worship, prayer, Bible study, and works of mercy.

This isn’t to say that churches shouldn’t speak and act corporately on issues of social concern, but maybe they should be more selective about it. It’s too easy for the church to become identified with a partisan political agenda when it insists on speaking about every issue under the sun, especially ones where sorting out the right position depends on a lot of contentious judgments about matters of empirical fact. The church speaks most powerfully, it seems to me, when it can speak with moral clarity rooted in fundamental Christian principles.

Pew Commission vs. factory farming

Wayne Pacelle’s Humane Society blog reports that the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has released a report recommending a “a phase-out of ‘the most intensive and inhumane confinement practices’—gestation and veal crates and battery cages.” This fall California will be voting on a ballot measure to do just that.

Quote of the day

“Animals are metal“

King’s X - “Over My Head”

I don’t know if folks remember the hard rock/soul/prog/funk act King’s X - this clip is from their 1989 album “Gretchen Goes to Nebraska”:

The band is still together and, in fact, have a new album coming out next month. (They were also, perhaps unfairly, dogged by the “Christian rock” label for much of their career. The first track on “Gretchen…” is called “Out of the Silent Planet,” indicating an affinity for C.S. Lewis.)

Creative destruction

The book reviewed here asks if capitalism as we know it is compatible with reining in environmental destruction. The author is pretty convinced that the answer is no. If this is right, the problem then seems to be that 1. there’s no particularly attractive alternative to capitalism currently on offer and 2. even if there was, there’s absolutely no political will to shift in that direction.

My view up to this point has been that you need some kind of “social market,” that is, a market hemmed in–via laws, norms, etc.–by non-market values. But if growth itself, the very reason for a market economy’s being, is the problem, then I’m not sure that would be sufficient.

The high price of “cheap” meat

From Ethicurean:

Here’s a number to knock you out of that mid-day stupor: every year, taxpayers shell out between $7.1 billion and $8.2 billion to subsidize or clean up after our nation’s 9,900 confined animal feeding operations. That’s the finding of “CAFOs Uncovered,” a new report released earlier today by the Union of Concerned Scientists. That amount, for comparison’s sake, is nearly 400 times larger than the Farm Bill proposal for new funding for organic research and extension.

(A confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) = a factory farm.)

More good news:

That’s not it, either: author Doug Gurian-Sherman, a UCS senior scientist, estimates that another $4.1 billion in taxpayer dollars has been spent over the years to deal with leaking manure storage facilities. Rural communities get an additional kick in the keyster since CAFOs, spewing odor and flies, have reduced rural property values by — get this — an estimated total of $26 billion. And in a final blow, Gurian-Sherman emphasizes that if the government actually tried to “adequately” manage the vast amount of CAFO waste, as opposed to — well, who knows what they’re doing now, but it’s certainly not adequate — “the figure would undoubtedly be much higher.”

Read the rest here.

People sometimes accuse environmentalists and animal rights-types of wanting to interfere with the “free market,” but as this makes clear, and as people like Michael Pollan have shown in exhaustive detail, our current food system is anything but the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

More from Beckmann on food aid and the farm bill

Last week I blogged about Bill Moyers’ recent interview with Bread for the World’s David Beckmann. Beckmann discussed, among other things, how current US farm policy distorts food aid programs for very poor parts of the world. You can read more from Beckmann at the Christian Century here. Beckmann is clear that it’s a complicated issue, but there are some fairly straightforward ways in which current policy favors big US agribusiness to the detriment of the recipients of aid.

Throne and Altar

A troubling article on the treatment of Protestant “sects” under a regime of strengthening ties between the Orthodox Church and the Russian state.

Russophile Fr. Chris has some comments here.

Links for Earth Day

George Monbiot on the food crisis, the environment and meat eating.

Michael Pollan tries to reconcile personal virtue and social change.

How to invest in renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, and rebuild the American manufacturing base while we’re at it.

Dreaming of an eco-apocalypse?

A review of a book about looking for sustainable seafood.

A collection of posts on peak oil from Elizaphanian.

Bill McKibben on how to make markets greener.