Southern Bread Blog

Ok, so I already gave my thoughts on Dr. Moore’s musings about the oil spill, and his idea of an evangelical green conscience a few days ago. Now, it appears that he has also given NPR an interview on the same topic.

After reading the writeup, I just came away shaking my head and wondering what is prompting him to put himself out front in the media on this issue. Doesn’t he realize that the mainstream media uses people like him to drive whatever meme’ they are currently interested in? If he doesn’t, he needs to recognize soon before they just use him as a tool and throw him out. It’s what they do.

But, beyond that concern, I’m even more bothered by the horrible excuse for a logical argument that he uses. He makes this statement:

“There’s really nothing conservative — and certainly nothing evangelical — about a laissez-faire view of a lack of government regulation,” Moore says, “because we, as Christians, believe in sin.”

“That means if people are sinful, if all of us are sinful, then all of us have to have accountability — and that includes corporations.” Moore says. “Simply trusting corporations to go about their business without polluting the water streams and without destroying ecosystems is really a naive and utopian view of human nature. It’s not a Christian view of human nature.”

–NPR, Interview with Russell Moore

As is customary with bad argument analysis here on SB, we need to turn Dr. Moore’s argument into a syllogism for clarity:

• A. Christians believe in sin.(a)
• B. Accountability places a check on sin.(a)
• C. Conservative evangelicalism aims to minimize sin.(a)
• D. Government regulation places accountability on corporations.(a)
• Therefore, conservative evangelicals should be in favor of government regulations on corporations.

I believe that is a very fair representation of his argument. Now, let’s analyze it’s flaws.

Firstly, the most obvious flaw with his argument is that it proves too much. Every one of his four premises are universal positives. That’s always a dangerous way to argue because it ends up proving way more than you would like it to. In effect, I could use his argument to argue in favor of government regulation of anything. In fact, let’s do that:

• A. Christians believe in sin.(a)
• B. Accountability places a check on sin.(a)
• C. Conservative evangelicalism aims to minimize sin.(a)
• D. Government regulation places accountability on churches.(a)
• Therefore, conservative evangelicals should be in favor of government regulations of churches.

Churches do all kinds of horrible things as well. Just look at the Catholic sex scandals of the last two decades. Dr. Moore’s argument is ready and willing to justify government regulation of churches to curb the sinfulness of their congregants and leaders. All we would need to do is just tweak the last noun in premise D and we can justify the regulation of anything at all. That’s the sign of a bad argument.

But, getting back to his argument as stated; while it’s true that Christians believe in sin, and accountability helps to curb some forms of sinfulness, it’s not true that government regulation acts as a check on corporate “sinfulness.” As I show here often, government regulation is the very lifeblood of big business. The oil industry lives and dies by government. They use government regulation to stifle competition by making market entrance cost astronomical. They use regulations to limit their own liability in the case financial disaster. They use regulations to gain unfair advantage over foreign competitors, and on, and on. Government regulations are practically the mission statements of big business. The notion that a large corpus of government regulation places a real check on corporate malfeasance is utterly naive. Regulations don’t check corporate shenanigans, they enable them.

The concept that Dr. Moore seems to misunderstand is that government is inherently unable to perform the role of impartial regulator. It appears that he is under the impression that simply changing actors within the government structure, or perhaps changing the structure itself, would effect efficient regulation of corporate self interest. That is incorrect. I’ll repeat: government is inherently unable to regulate. This is because, no matter what regulatory structure you erect, or who you position within that structure, the undermining fact is that government has a monopoly on the use of force. They are the only ones that are legally allowed to use coercion at the barrel of a gun. You can’t reform that situation. It’s the very definition of moral hazard.

Let’s look at some real life oil spill regulations as an example:

But not as much for BP, thanks to a law passed in 1990 that will limit its liability for economic damages to a small fraction of the likely cost of the disaster.

The Oil Pollution Act of 1990, signed in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster, limits a firms’ economic liability from an oil spill to $75 million — a fixed number that hasn’t been indexed for inflation.

Any costs above that are covered by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund — funded by U.S. taxpayers — which can spend up to $1 billion per incident for oil removal and damages.

And for a company like BP, $75 million is truly a drop in the bucket: In 2009, BP’s daily profits average $93 million a day — which means they could absorb the loss in 24 hours and still have $18 million to spare.

BP has said that it will waive the limits on its liability and pay whatever claims come their way, although there’s nothing in the law that will compel them to do so. And as long as the law allows companies to carry out drilling projects but not face much economic risk in the case of an accident, critics say it gives a green light to risky behavior.

–Chris Cromm, Southernstudies.org

Guess who was the president in 1990. Yep, Daddy Bush. The “conservative evangelical.” The true punishment that the market would inflict on BP has been artificially inhibited by government regulations. Tell me how lassez-faire created that little gem.

On the other hand, there is a mechanism that provides an effective check on sin within the marketplace. It’s called the price mechanism, and it’s guided by the laws of economics. If allowed to function without interference, the pricing mechanism will regulate the behaviour of actors within the market by punishing them with losses or rewarding them with profits. Let’s look at the BP oil spill as an example. In a free market, what would keep BP from polluting and spilling oil all over the Gulf of Mexico? Simple. Every gallon of oil that goes into the water is a gallon of oil that BP can’t use. BP is self-motivated to not spill oil for the same reason that the deli owner is motivated not to leave his meat out on the counter all day. It would go rancid and he would lose money by having to throw it away. That’s a complete waste of money and resources. And you know what the market does to companies that waste money and resources? It drives them out of business.

But, BP has decided it’s far more in it’s own interest to protect itself from waste by lobbying and bribing a lot of regulations into place that insulate it from the harsh reality of the market. If Russell Moore really wants BP to bear true responsibility for the oil spill it created, he needs to take away it’s safety blanket of government and let the free market pronounce judgement on BP the way it’s supposed to.

I came across an interesting article the other day while reading a paper by Alvin Plantinga on the nature of the mind. He footnoted an article entitled Molecular Turnover by John McCrone. He delves into the subject of molecular death/regeneration within our neurological systems. This is directly relevant to a subject that I’ve dealt with here on the blog before. Namely, the problem of persistence of self.

How can our identity and memories persist when our neurological chemistry is in a constant state of death and regeneration? Well, according to McCrone, the problem is much worse than the simple regeneration cycle that goes on in the rest of the body:

The issue of molecular turnover is starting to hit home in neuroscience, especially now that the latest research techniques such as fluorescent tagging are revealing a far more frantic pace of activity than ever suspected. For instance, the actin filaments in dendrites can need replacing within 40 seconds, making microtubules look like positive greybeards (Star et al, 2002).

A turnover time of five days for NMDA receptors seemed pretty steep when it was reported a few years back. (Shimizu et al, 2000). But recently Michael Ehlers at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, reported that the entire post-synaptic density (PSD) – the protein-packed zone that powers synaptic activity – is replaced, molecule for molecule, almost by the hour. Ehlers had expected the turnover to take days and when he found no labelled protein on his first 24 hour assay, he thought he must have mucked up the experiment

Myelin and RNA molecules seem to last months. And DNA is of course fairly hardy, though it still needs continual repair. But on the kinds of figures that are coming out now, it seems like the whole brain must get recycled about every other month. And certainly everything points to the synapses as being about the most dynamic part of the whole system.

–John McCrone, Dichotomistic

So, the question remains as to how, on the physicalist model, an ego is maintained in light of the chemical “boil” that goes on within our neurochemistry. If Dave is identical to Dave’s brain, how does Dave persist when Dave’s brain is dying and being reborn in it’s entirety on a bi-monthly basis? Good luck with that one.

A friend of mine recently reminded me of a stat that I’ve seen floating around. I’ve been meaning to address this in a post but had forgotten about it until now. The stat being thrown around is from a USDA report that claims that for a couple making between $56k and $98k per year, the cost to raise a child from birth to age 17 is $291,570. Here’s the pertinent table from the report:

And to get a glimpse of how this number is being used in the media, let’s look at a quote from the grist.org article that I posted on a few weeks ago:

A childfree life also means a lot more financial freedom. How expensive are kids? Try $291,570 for a child born in 2008 to parents bringing home between $57,000 and $98,000 a year, according to figures from the USDA. That’s for the first 18 years, so it doesn’t include college. If you make more, you’re likely to spend more. Couples bringing in upwards of $98,000 a year can expect to spend an average of $483,750 on a child’s first 18 years. (Dig into the numbers yourself [PDF] for all the caveats and conditions.)

–Lisa Hymas, grist.org

These numbers are so ridiculous that I hardly know where to start. One thing is for sure, though. This report smacks of the same egg-headed naivety that many academic economists fall victim to. They’ve anyalyzed an issue that can really only be understood by an investigation of human behaviour. But they’ve tried to look at it as a simple math problem instead. The end result is that they have come up with numbers that are demonstrably absurd, yet they stand by them as if they are, in some way, useful. Economists do this same thing. They develop mathematical models of the economy and come up with results that are obviously non-real. This doesn’t seem to stop them from touting their useless findings though.

Any father that looks at that figure of $291,570 will know instantly that it’s a load of horse crap, but let’s dig in a bit deeper. For instance, the report says that for the first year of life a child will cost you approximately $11,000. The reason this number is so big is because of the inclusion of stuff like housing in the number. They’ve tried to devise a way to extract how much of the cost of a home is being incurred because of each child. As if couples without children live in single bedroom apartments and only buy houses when they have kids. That’s obviously not the case. Housing has less to do with how many kids you have than it does with your age and income level. For instance, a single guy that used to live across the street from my parents lived in a 3 bedroom, 2 bath. He moved out of that house after a couple of years and moved into a giant house in a wealthy neighborhood near by. Most couples don’t buy large houses when they first get married because they can’t afford it, not because they don’t have kids.

We just had our third child back in March. My wife is breast-feeding, and with this child we started using cloth diapers. We also got lots of clothes from the baby shower. My best guess is that we will end up having spent less than a thousand dollars on her first year of life. And that includes the $200 deductible we had to pay for our hospital stay to give birth. I’m not sure what people are buying that costs $11,000. I’d have to see that to believe it.

Now, if you take our other two kids(ages 8 and 6), I figure they are costing us about an extra $100 a month on groceries. They cost about $200-$300 per year on homeschool supplies. And they cost about $50 a month for clothes since they grow so fast. My wife shops sales and consignment a lot to keep the costs down on that. If you add in about $300 per child for birthday and christmas then I figure we’re spending about $2000 per year on our children’s expenses combined. That cost will probably stay consistent until they get to driving age. I anticipate that we’ll end up spending more for groceries since they will eat more in their teenage years, but other than that, those numbers should stay pretty consistent until they get to driving and marriage age.

So we can roughly sum up that it will cost us about $50,000 to raise three kids to 16. What happens in those age 17-20 years are going to be different for each child. One might decide to work and go to school. Another might decide to get married or start a business, so it’s difficult to say how much that will cost for them and us. But it’s safe to say that $50,000 to raise three kids is a lot different than $291,570. But, then again, the people that come out with reports such as this are working for the government and are making well above what you and I do. So their idea of what constitutes a decent upbringing for a child is probably a lot different than mine. I, for one, don’t think a 4G iPhone is a necessity for my 11 year old.

There’s another aspect to this whole thing that bothers me too. It’s the same problem I have with the overpopulation argument. The core flaw in both is that the person making the argument doesn’t factor in the utility of the person. Humans are not fixed costs. They have production capacity. In fact they have higher production capacity than anything else on the planet. Persons don’t just exist. They cultivate, create, build, innovate, appropriate resources, bring pieces together, etc. People care for themselves and each other. Just one example is our family. We have gone from being completely dependent on store bought food to growing maybe 5% of our food ourselves. We hope to steadily increase that number each year with a target of about 50%. It’s that type of creation capacity that puts the lie to the persons as fixed costs argument.

And a final thing to note is that inflation is highly distortive in a study such as this. It’s the resources that you consume that matter, not how much they cost. In 15 years, that $291,570 number might be $500,000. But, have you used up any more or less resources in the upbringing of a child in 2025 than you did in 2010? No. As I’ve said a thousand times before, money is a medium of exchange. Measuring resource usage against a fiat medium of exchange is like measuring how tall you are using a bungie cord. When the measuring instrument isn’t fixed, the numbers it gives you are meaningless.

Hey you, get away from that!

No wonder people are falling away from the church in record numbers. This puts the “S” in shallow.

2010 Overview from LifeWay VBS on Vimeo.

Robert Higg’s book Crisis and Leviathan documented what he calls the “ratchet effect”, where the state uses wartime to ratchet up it’s power, and then incorporates those new wartime powers into peacetime. The effect is an overall, long term ratcheting up of state power and control through the mechanism of war. For instance, the precedent of nationalizing certain industries was firmly established during World War II when the government took over many companies for the purpose of re-tooling them for war goods production. For that reason, there has been nary a peep from the court on the constitutionality of the Obama and Bush administrations taking over GM and Chrysler.

And that brings me to this story that Drudge linked to this morning: “FAA Under Pressure To Open US Skies to Drones.” Quoting from the article:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Unmanned aircraft have proved their usefulness and reliability in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the pressure’s on to allow them in the skies over the United States.

The Federal Aviation Administration has been asked to issue flying rights for a range of pilotless planes to carry out civilian and law-enforcement functions but has been hesitant to act.

–Joan Lowy, AP

So, given this quote, you might think that the FAA has been hesitant to act because of the implications on our liberty and freedom. Not so. They are more worried about making sure they’re safe:

Officials are worried that they might plow into airliners, cargo planes and corporate jets that zoom around at high altitudes, or helicopters and hot air balloons that fly as low as a few hundred feet off the ground.

On top of that, these pilotless aircraft come in a variety of sizes. Some are as big as a small airliner, others the size of a backpack. The tiniest are small enough to fly through a house window.

–Joan Lowy, AP

But wait, you say. It’s not like the government is going to use these things to bomb cities and such. This isn’t Iraq, after all, where the state war machine can kill people with impunity. This is America. Maybe not:

The Predator B, already in use for border patrol, can fly for 20 hours without refueling, compared with a helicopter’s average flight time of just over two hours. Homeland Security wants to expand their use along the borders of Mexico and Canada, and along coastlines for spotting smugglers of drugs and illegal aliens. The Coast Guard wants to use them for search and rescue.

–Joan Lowy, AP

So, I ask: how long will it be before these drones begin to terrorize anyone who is a threat to state power? Homeland Security(the scariest name for a state department outside of Minority Report) says they will use them to patrol the border and “spot” (i.e. shoot) drug smugglers and illegal alien smugglers. Give it a little time and they will move up to “spotting” (i.e. leveling) meth labs in rural areas. After all, why wouldn’t they? They already send in SWAT teams on drug raids where they often end up killing innocent people by breaking down doors and running in with guns. Wouldn’t it be far more efficient for them to just unleash their indiscriminate destruction from the air?

The story also relates how eager local law enforcement agencies are to get their hands on these drone aircraft:

State police hope to send them up to capture images of speeding cars’ license plates. Local police envision using them to track fleeing suspects.

–Joan Lowy, AP

So, just using some more logic, if the police want to use drones to “track” fleeing suspects, what would stop them from using those same drones to kill fleeing suspects if they thought they were dangerous? Wouldn’t that make the most sense? Cities like Birmingham, AL already have gunshot detectors scattered around the city to pick up the sound of gunfire and alert police. If you combine these with drones that can track a suspect fleeing the scene of a shooting, why not take him out? The police on the ground don’t hesitate to shoot first and ask questions later. Why would that change when using drones?

Civil liberties have slowly rotted away in this country over many decades. I blame myself for being blind to it in the past. I used to be in favor of things such as the Patriot Act because I bought the media hook line and sinker. Now I have seen this type of thing for what it is. Full body nude scans in airports and drones over our cities are not “necessary.” They are techniques the state is using to put us under their thumb. William Pitt said “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” (Speech, House of Commons, 18 November 1783)

I posted my thoughts about Russell Moore’s recent article the other day. But, something else he said in that piece made me want to return to it again. He says this early in the article:

Someone once described Roe vs. Wade as the “Pearl Harbor” of the evangelical pro-life conscience. Pearl Harbor is an apt metaphor. Before that date of infamy, foreign policy isolationism seemed to be a legitimate American option. The “America First” committees and some of the most influential figures in the United States Congress argued that Hitler’s war was none of our concern. We should tend to ourselves, and we could deal with whomever won in Europe and the Pacific when all the dust had settled.

After Pearl Harbor, the shortsightedness, and indeed utopianism, of isolationism was seen for what it was.

–-Russell D. Moore, Blog

Before I move on to analysis, I’d like to correct, for the millionth time, the misuse of this word: isolationism. North Korea is isolationist. Laos is isolationist. Pre-WWII America was non-interventionist. Trade and dialogue with other countries was robust. The only thing America didn’t engage in was military intervention into foreign wars. Isolationism is a politically pejorative term meant to taint the argument toward the speaker’s position before they’ve even made their argument. It’s poisoning the well. Moving on…

Given his above comments, I can only surmise that Dr. Moore is moving into territory here where he hasn’t done much research. The Pearl Harbour period that he describes leaves out crucial context that invalidates his later conclusion that “after Pearl Harbor, the shortsightedness, and indeed utopianism, of isolationism was seen for what it was.” I’m guessing here that by “seen for what it was” he means that the collective American mind began to think that staying out of foreign wars wouldn’t assure them of peace. This leads to two questions. First, why did the American population move toward non-interventionism in the first place? And, secondly, was Pearl Harbour a legitimate proof of the failure of non-interventionism? Let’s explore these.

It is a fact that before Pearl Harbour, polls were showing as high as 80% of the American people were opposed to entering WWII. The reason for this opposition to involvement in the war goes back to WWI. In the words of John Denson, “World War I and World War II were really one war with a twenty year recess and it was the harsh and unfair Versailles Treaty which allowed Hitler to come to power which then led directly to renewal of the war in 1939 in Poland when the League of Nations failed to revise the treaty, which it had the specific authority to do.”

The same players were involved on the European front, and the reasons for the war stemmed mostly from post-WWI treaty abuse against Germany. After losing 117,000 troops in a completely unnecessary war(WWI), the U.S. population was sick to death of European affairs. Much was written after WWI by thinkers such as Harry Elmer Barnes, Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken criticizing Woodrow Wilson’s decision to get us into the war after running his campaign on a peace platform. They further exposed Wilson’s agenda of trying to use the war to create his long sought-after League of Nations and spread “progressivism” to the world.

This was the social milieu to which F.D.R. was trying to attach his war in the late 30′s. It smacked too much of Wilsonian bumbling for the American public to accept. They saw nothing good coming from involvement in another European war. It wasn’t isolationism that drove such overwhelming opposition to entering WWII, it was pragmatism. It would be as if Reagan had tried to invade Vietnam upon taking office. When such painful war memories are still only 2 decades removed, you can hardly blame a wise fellow for wanting to stand this one out.

The other facet of analyzing Dr. Moore’s comments are to research whether or not it was non-interventionism itself that proved ineffectual at maintaining peace. I’ve gone over this before, but it bears constant repeating. We now know that F.D.R. goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbour. The oil embargo against Japan. His moving of almost the entire western fleet to Hawaii in the weeks before the attack. His clearing of the shipping lanes that would be used by the Japanese as a corridor to Hawaii. The fact that it’s now known that U.S. intelligence had cracked the Japanese communications code weeks before the communique from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington declaring the attack was coming. And on, and on. If the government of a non-interventionist minded populace takes it upon itself to secretly maneuver their country into a war, it can hardly be the fault of that policy.

Dr. Moore remarks that “the ‘America First’ committees and some of the most influential figures in the United States Congress argued that Hitler’s war was none of our concern. We should tend to ourselves, and we could deal with whomever won in Europe and the Pacific when all the dust had settled.” Again, he is interpreting historical events in the light of later knowledge. It’s hard to look back now and imagine allowing Hitler to continue with his war crimes against the Jews. But, at the time, none of that was known. The U.S. didn’t enter the European front to stop Hitlerian genocide. They entered the war to help England maintain their superpower status in Europe against a rising Germany and Russia. At the time, a policy of staying out of the conflict and “deal[ing] with whomever won” was an absolutely correct policy. It was widely held at the time that a new war between Russia and Germany would result in the two countries grinding it out for years until they both had, had enough and came to the table. Interference would only extend the war to other parts of Europe and result in needless loss of life.

If America had stayed out of WWII, I don’t know that any different outcome would have come. By the time our troops crossed the Rhine, most of the remaining Jews in concentration camps had been executed or death marched. Yes, we ended up saving some, but we will never know what other options may have opened up in a protracted war with Russia. We already know of a few famous cases of underground Jewish escape routes being managed by such figures as Schindler and Irena Sendler. With a smaller war footprint on the European map and without the urgency which the Germans felt in the last days leading up to the invasion of Berlin, perhaps a more extensive escape network would have formed and fewer Jews would have died. We will never know. But, we do know that it wasn’t America’s role to be a saviour in Europe. That’s an anachronism. And it isn’t clear that our involvement in WWII did anything other than get more people killed across the globe and at home.

I will continue to be a fan of Dr. Moore, and a huge fan of Touchstone, but I would recommend that Dr. Moore find a different historical analogy than Pearl Harbour in the future.

A friend shot me a link to a recent post by Russel D. Moore today. He’s a pastor, the Dean of the Theological school at The Southern Baptist Seminary and a contributing editor for Touchstone magazine, which, as you know, is a long-time favorite magazine of mine. In light of the B.P. oil spill, he makes a few points in his post about conservatism’s shunning of ecological concerns and how this is a liability for humanity in general and Christians specifically. He says at the end:

The protection of the creation isn’t just about seagulls and turtles and dolphins. That would be enough to prompt us to action, since God’s glory is in seagulls and turtles and dolphins (Gen. 6-9; Isa. 65).

Pollution kills people. Pollution dislocates families. Pollution defiles the icon of God’s Trinitarian joy, the creation of his theater (Ps. 19; Rom. 1).

Will people believe us when we speak about the One who brings life and that abundantly, when they see that we don’t care about that which kills and destroys? Will they hear us when we quote John 3:16 to them when, in the face of the loss of their lives, we shrug our shoulders and say, “Who is my neighbor?”

–Russell D. Moore, Blog

His point here is a decent one, but I think he’s on the cusp of over-spiritualizing the issue though. It might be right, in principle, for a Christian to be more in touch with the land and environment around him or her. In fact, I’m in the process of doing that very thing with my family at the moment. We are trying to buy some rural land where we can have livestock and larger agriculture on our homestead. But, tying the reputation of the Christian message to the ecological conscience of those who proclaim it is suspect. Augustine has been quoted as saying “never judge a philosophy by it’s abuse.” It’s the job of the hearer to rightly discern the truth of a particular message, independent of the messenger. If a fellow throws his #2 combo wrapper out of his car window and then turns to the passenger to tell him about Christ, so what? This Christian fellow is simply misinformed about the liability of his littering. He doesn’t understand properly how his actions harm others around him. That’s a separate argument from the legitimacy of the gospel. Confusing the two is strange.

I understand why he is linking the oil spill to Christian environmental attitude though. It’s an easy connection to make if you only read headlines and don’t look behind the curtain of government/media propaganda. He’s almost right when he says:

Too often, however, we’ve been willing not simply to vote for candidates who will protect unborn human life (as we ought to), but to also in the process adopt their worldviews on every other issue.

–Russell D. Moore, Blog

I would put it another way. We’ve been grossly naive to think that politicians who espouse pro-life rhetoric have any intention of actually doing anything about abortion on demand. Bush ran on pro-life this, pro-life that. What did he do in eight years in office? He signed a meaningless executive order to repeal the Mexico City policy. What a joke. Likewise, liberals are finding out the hard way that Obama has no intention of actually carrying through on all of his green rhetoric. I’ve posted here recently on how in bed with the oil industry he is and how the grass roots left are totally confused at how silent he has been on the oil spill issue. The religious right expected the conservative majorities of the 90′s and early 2000′s to gain some serious traction on the abortion issue. They didn’t. And, likewise, the liberal left expects the liberal majorities of today to do the same thing on the environmental issue. They won’t. The problem is not just that we have adopted the worldview of our political blowhards, it’s that we’ve actually believed that they took the issues seriously.

And this leads me to my real beef with his argument. There is an underlying assumption that state power is absolutely necessary, and that social power is only effectual when it is used as a tool to aim state power at a certain issue. He isn’t entertaining the notion that there is any effectiveness in social power itself to solve problems directly. He says:

Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats.

–Russell D. Moore, Blog

He didn’t think that statement out clearly before he wrote it. This is a question of ownership. If I own something, and it makes money for me, I will protect it and care for it. Why wouldn’t I? Allowing my property(an oil field in this case) to be ruined profits me nothing. It’s totally contrary to any logical expectation of human behaviour. You better believe that BP has every incentive in the world to get that leaked fixed and cleaned up rapidly. They are losing millions per week over this. That’s a far more powerful incentive than some government regulatory threat that has no teeth because the people making it are bought and paid for by BP lobbyists. This is the real world, not a naive 12th grade civics class.

He continues:

But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he “believes in young people.”

The Scripture gives us a vision of human sin that means there ought to be limits to every claim to sovereignty, whether from church, state, business or labor. A commitment to the free market doesn’t mean unfettered license any more than a commitment to free speech means hardcore pornography ought to be broadcast in prime-time by your local network television affiliate.

Caesar’s sword is there, by God’s authority, to restrain those who would harm others (Rom. 13). When government fails or refuses to protect its own people, whether from nuclear attack or from toxic waste spewing into our life-giving waters, the government has failed.

…

Moreover, we’ve seen some of the theological and ideological fringes in the environmentalist movement, fringes that enabled us to see them as not “with us,” and, frankly, to enable us to make fun of the entire question as a silly enterprise. But perhaps the void is being filled by leftists and liberals and wannabe liberal evangelicals simply because those who ought to know better are off doing something else. Working with our secular progressive neighbors on, for instance, saving the Gulf no more compromises the evangelical witness than our working with feminists to combat pornography or with Latter-day Saints to protect marriage.

–Russell D. Moore, Blog

If I’m reading him correctly here, he starts off by saying that having government set business regulations is like having the fox guarding the hen house. I would whole-heartedly agree with that. But then he diverts into the typical mistake of using bad analogies to demonstrate how the free market is just like any other organization or group that would be dangerous if given “unfettered license.” The fact is, the free market is not just a different version of a government or corporation. It’s not an entity at all. It’s not a “system.” The free market is a loose set of concepts that identify human behaviour and economic law. It says “when X happens, Y will be the natural economic or praxeological result.” Giving an analogy of pornography as a result of unregulated free speech isn’t a legitimate criticism of the free market. That’s like saying, if you pay someone a salary, they might buy drugs with the money. Therefore, we should heavily regulate wages.

The problem with the BP oil spill is that someone made a mistake and lots of oil is now flowing into the gulf and needs to be cleaned up. That’s it. Period. BP screwed up and needs to clean up their mess. The thing that needs to be remembered is that the oil industry is NOT a free market. They haven’t been a free market in over a hundred years. They enjoy all types of regulatory protection from competition in exchange for lobbying dollars to Congress. Therefore, making arguments about the failure of the free market as it relates to this oil spill is illegitimate. And, likewise, arguing that the government should stay out of BP’s way and let the free market work is also illegitimate, because BP’s market isn’t free. The true solution is to have the government get out of the way altogether so that the economic and praxeological principles of free market exchange can work correctly, unencumbered by artificial influence from the outside.

Conservatives Christians aren’t to blame for turning a blind eye toward ecological concerns. We all operate in a rigged system, where the real answer to the problem is prohibited. But, things are changing. The local, organic food movement is a tide that has been rising for quite a few years now. Farmer’s markets and CSA’s are appealing to people of all political persuasions – conservatives and liberals. These things represent real alternatives to the artifical food marketplace that has been created by misleading government regulation of agriculture. In short, a real market is being born to compete with the fake one. And, people are flocking to it. Just drive around. You’ll see hundreds of people planting gardens for the first time this year. Many of these people are conservative Christians.

My criticism of Russell Moore’s argument is that he isn’t seeing these issues clearly. You can’t say that conservative christians have neglected ecological concerns when the game has been rigged the whole time. When the only options they are given are two different types of new government regulations then what are they supposed to do? If they choose to remain silent in the face of that rigged proposal, that isn’t the same as being unconcerned. It just means they’d rather not choose between two decisions that both serve corporate interests through increases in state power.