Wouldn’t locavorism taken to its logical extreme repudiate formal socialism? It would seem to me that the drive to establish small, self-sufficient local economies would require that little or no transfers of resources ought to take place between those communities. After all, the push for local living is intended to ensure that goods and services do not whiz all over the world and consume resources in the process and thereby trashing the planet. So doesn’t it follow that cross-community redistribution is off-limits?
Wouldn’t the idea of “health care for all” be an anachronism? Wouldn’t providing funding for the higher education of students outside the communities be an anachronism?
If the answer is no, then on what grounds is political redistribution of goods and services across local communities OK, but market driven (and freedom preserving and cost-effective) “redistribution” of goods and services across local communities NOT OK? Finally, what would our locavores argue about what obligations “we” have to people around the world, many of which are not able to survive living locally in arid climates? Is international aid off-limits? What about traveling to help people around the world? It would seem for the sake of consistency that those who promote living locally ought to broadcast these implications as well. And if not, I’d like to know what exempts those activities while condemning the sending of wheat there via a market process?
The buy local trend is one of the more mindless ideas in recent memory.
Ha, ha, Speedmaster. I share your hesitation to call it the most mindless idea, since there is a lot of competition: like eliminating personal automobiles, which Mike referred to just a few posts back.
Now I have plenty of room in my garden for a ton of root vegetables to eat during the winter, but fortunately we have many good grocery stores, including a Wegeman’s, not too far away.
What about the “slow food” movement? I call that … wait for it … slow food for slow minds. 😉
You could almost call the locavorist movement a Robinson Crusoe movement since they are essentially isolating themselves from the world on purpose. Or maybe it should be Jacques Clueso movement? “That is why I have failed where others have succeeded.”
You can think of locavorism, etc. as an attempt to avoid scaling problems.
A few decades ago, JBS Haldane (a leftist intellectual before that became an oxymoron) noticed that a large government could not possibly be fully socialist. That has trickled down to the current idiots on the left, who now oppose anything the U.S. does but approve of nearly anything a two-bit nation does.