Ten vital commandments for localism in beer.

On Thursday and Friday this week, I richly enjoyed a one-sided debate (we were Netherlands to their ineffectual Spain) about the merits economic localism, which flared up after I published my weekly column at NA Confidential.

ON THE AVENUES: As a journalist and entrepreneur, I’m not tired of the “Buy Local” argument. Not at all.

Yesterday, I revisited a column from 2012.

REWIND: My column at Food and Dining: "Localism + Beer."

Following is an excerpt from the ON THE AVENUES piece. These ten commandments are not unique to the burgeoning world of better "craft" beer ... they just explain that world's origins and vitality, as well as providing a common sense warning of what stands to occur as we allow our world to become exactly like the one we fought a revolution to depose.

---

... Why does (localism) matter? The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (www.ilsr.org) offers these ten vital commandments. The sooner New Albany grasps them, the better, but slowly, the shift indeed is happening.

1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity
New Albany is unlike any other city in the world. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain New Albany’s diversity and distinctive flavor.

2. Community Well-Being
Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.

3. Local Decision Making
Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.

4. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy
Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars spent at national chains. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.

5. Job and Wages
Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.

6. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

7. Public Benefits and Costs
Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.

8. Environmental Sustainability
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.

9. Competition
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.

10. Product Diversity
A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.

Upland opposes HJR-3. So does NABC. So should BIG.

I'd like to thank our longtime friends at Upland Brewing Company in Bloomington for understanding that beer isn't consumed in a vacuum, and publicly joining the struggle against HJR-3.

What is HJR-3?

HJR-3 (formerly HJR-6) is a proposed amendment that would permanently alter the Indiana Constitution to define marriage and could potentially affect hundreds of rights related to marriage under current Indiana law.

In the 2014 legislative session, Indiana lawmakers can choose either to table or vote down the amendment or send it to voters for a statewide referendum next November. If it does not pass or is not called for action, our Constitution will be protected.

In addition to the duplicative and restrictive first sentence of the amendment, no one has been able to clearly define what effects the second sentence would have on existing marriages, domestic partner benefits, human rights ordinances, legal contracts and benefits for unmarried couples.

As a progressive beer guy, it's a confusing time for me.

Republican legislators have been quite friendly when it comes to advancing the interests of craft brewing in Indiana, among them New Albany's own Rep. Ed Clere (District 72). At the same time, the very notion of HJR-3 is potentially damaging to businesses like ours. Rep. Clere is rare among Republicans in that he has opposed HJR-3, and for this we're appreciative. His colleagues supporting HJR-3 are doing so against the wishes of businesses far larger than any brewery, including Eli Lilly and Cummins.

That's right: Republicans legislating against the interests of Indiana business. Verily, it is a strange world we inhabit.

It's my view that if this madness goes to the voters, the Brewers of Indiana Guild as a whole should publicly and emphatically reject it. Upland currently does not have a director on the board, so I'll happily be the one to make the motion. Let's hope it doesn't come to this, and the Indiana GOP somehow becomes reacquainted with the notion of sanity.

Moreover, if craft beer doesn't embrace what's right and reject what's wrong, why are we bothering?