RE: Understanding the Wal-Mart Effect

Steve Brenneis opines:

I recently was listening to a person conduct a continuous screed against Wal-Mart on an afternoon radio talk show. He regurgitated all the standard lies about Wal-Mart: the Asian sweatshops, the ruined Mom-and-Pop businesses, the sub-standard wages, on and on. He then went on to make a couple of outrageous claims. He said that Wal-Mart may claim to create 450 jobs in a market, but they don't tell people that for every 450 jobs they create, 450 jobs are lost in businesses they "destroy." Of course the host of the radio program didn't even question this amazing piece of hyperbolic propaganda. He also claimed that the double-digit IQ wonders who staff your local Wal-Mart could actually make a higher wage elsewhere. Wal-Mart pays an average of $10 per hour. It doesn't take a doctorate in economics to know that your average eighth-grade dropout is not likely to do better than $10 per hour in any legal occupation.

The speaker then went on to bemoan the fact that Wal-Mart's prosperity flowed to the five surviving members of the Walton family. That's when his true agenda became apparent. He was a member of a group of people who Ayn Rand calls the looters. These are people who are too lazy or stupid (or both) to be productive on their own and engage in petty jealousies in the name of "fairness." They believe some authority should move in and confiscate the proceeds and wealth of the productive members of our society to be redistributed among the slackers, and loosers, those Rand called the moochers, simply to satisfy some arbitrary definition of fairness.

I am not a big fan of Wal-Mart, simply because I hate having to dodge crowds of Mexicans and hillbillies just to pick up some shaving cream and plastic laundry baskets. However, I am a big fan of saving money, so I grit my teeth, count to ten, and bob and weave my way through the gaggle of trailer-trash who inevitably find it necessary to hold their family reunion in the center aisle. Of late, the more I hear shrill losers like the fellow mentioned above who feel it necessary to sing the looter's siren song, the easier it becomes for me to tolerate the Wal-Mart herd and the more likely I will be to do more and more of my shopping inside the big, corrugated blue box.