We\'re always to obey the government (Romans 13). But that doesn\'t mean we cannot or should not violate the government\'s unjust laws (Acts 5:29). The key is that when we decide to obey god rather than men we must be prepared to face the consequences. For Peter and most of the apostles that meant submitting to the government\'s sentence of death. The same sentence that befell their Lord.

Here's some more data:
"Only 20% of the country’s coffee can qualify as specialty coffee today, implying that the bulk of exported product is low-grade and sells at lower prices."

From this report: http://academicjournals.org/ajbm/PDF/pdf2009/May/...

In other words, Land of 1000 Hills is attempting to sell lower grade coffee as if it were specialty coffee. And that's why when I go to a church or business that distributes Land of 1000 Hills coffee I can't help but think that the ones who made the decision to carry it have been duped.

And just the motto alone should let us know how silly Lo1kH's mission is. Drinking coffee is no more doing good than consuming anything else in the marketplace.

Hey Rick, thanks for stopping by!

I actually know members of Land of 100 Hills's board of directors so I can confidently say that their internal business model is inherently unstable along with their philosophy of free trade coffee being a moral obligation/good (as their motto says, "drink coffee, do good") is unsustainable. And while we can get into a subjective debate over whether their coffee tastes great or whether it tastes like crap (which is my position) we can actually look to more objective evidence in the terms of what the market has decreed the quality of their coffee to be, and I find it telling that no major grocery stores carry Lo1kH coffee and only niche/artificially restricted markets carry it. And what about the moral hazard the whole fair trade concept sets up? Its not a point in your favor at all to say that they raise up more and more farmers in Rwanda as that is exactly the problem! Because of the rich white savior complex of Lo1kH's owner/staff those farmers have a skewed view of the market's supply and demand such that they are not being helped at all by Lo1kH but are being used by them to prop up a crop through artificial price structures. If Lo1kH really wanted to help they would help these farmers transition to more profitable crops, including crops that have more of a domestic demand, so they aren't dependent on foreign saviors and foreign customers who believe that they are "doing good" by buying overpriced coffee.

So in sum; I have actually researched Lo1kH, and its not that the people running it are evil, they are merely victims of their own self-imposed economic ignorance.

Are you saying that Christians shouldn't study economics because eventually the world is going to end? If that's the case then why should Christians study much of anything?

I don\'t see where I mentioned any of those in the post above. Did you mean to post this somewhere else?

Additionally, I don\'t presuppose that secularist ethical theories are false, I conclude they are false elsewhere mostly because 1. any action can be justified in them if we simply tweak the desires or perceived utility of an act and because they 2. fail to provide an adequate ground for moral obligation.

John, what you\'ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought or response to this post (which was about atheistic grounding for morality, not about how Christianity hurts your feelings). Everyone reading this site is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

You forgot to mention how those two dudes had no knowledge of the meatpacking industry, had no interest in even pretending to be objective in their analysis, and only reported the very worst things they found.

You also forgot to mention how, in the end, the laws that were passed to regulate the industry ended up helping the big meatpackers so there was actually a disencentive for them to clean up their acts for the inspectors in the first place.

Like I said earlier; Its bad form to base your political views on fiction. But I guess you can\'t help it if you think that a socialist economic policy is preferable to a free market economic policy.

\"I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.\" -Theodore Roosevelt

And that was from the guy who used his work in order to push through his interventionist policies!

[HT Gero]

Nearly ninety years ago, muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair wrote a book titled The Jungle which wove a tale of greed and abuse that reverberates to this day as a powerful case against laissez faire. Sinclair’s focus of scorn was the meatpacking industry. The objective of his effort was government regulation. The culmination of his work was the passage in 1906 of the famed Meat Inspection Act, enshrined in most history books as a sacred cow (excuse the pun) of the interventionist state.

Were Sinclair’s allegations of a corrupt industry foisting unhealthy products on an unsuspecting public really true? And if so, should the free market stand forever indicted and convicted as a result? A response from advocates of freedom is long overdue. Here’s a healthy start.

The Jungle was, first and foremost, a novel. It was intended to be a polemic—a diatribe, if you will and not a well-researched and dispassionate documentary. Sinclair relied heavily on both his own imagination and on the hearsay of others. He did not even pretend to have actually witnessed the horrendous conditions he ascribed to Chicago packinghouses, nor to have verified them, nor to have derived them from any official records.

Food inspection can be a service provided by the market.

It's bad form to base your preference for government intrusion on a fictional novel expressly developed as propaganda in order to fuel government intrusion.

Yes, since everything she says runs against the grain of \"accepted wisdom\" she must CLEARLY be brainwashed. There is no POSSIBLE way she could have, oh I dunno, researched any of her points. Its not like she was giving a report or anything.

BTW: As hard as it may be for someone who has only listened to liberal sources to believe, the truth-claims made by this girl are facts.