Tag: Walmart

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free trade & free markets too much government

D.C. Protectionism

Some things are a bit hard to grasp. One of them is intra-national protectionism.

Most forms of protectionism try to shield businesses within a country from competition outside, using tariffs or price controls to “even the playing field,” so to speak. What these laws do is make goods more costly for consumers within the protected country, in effect taking wealth from consumers and awarding it to the protected businesses.

In the United States’ capital district, politicians are in the process of pushing through a “living wage” bill that would apply only to big box stores like Costco and Walmart. While Costco and Walmart will be required to pay their employees a minimum of $12.50 an hour, other companies in the district could still pay wages as low as $8.25.

Doesn’t seem exactly fair, does it? The bill has been pushed by organized labor to supposedly help smaller retailers, but — surprise, surprise — exempts unionized grocery chains such as Giant and Safeway.

On the one hand, the Washington, D.C. city council is punishing Walmart, forcing it to pay more than its competitors for labor. On the other hand, the city has spent $40 million in direct subsidies to the company and another $28 million to advance projects that involve building six new Walmarts.

“I can’t imagine that they will proceed on any of the unbuilt stores if this bill passes,” says Grant Ehat, the principal of the company building the two Walmart projects already underway.

Mayor Vincent Gray expressed his hope to “find a way to, say, thread the needle” between the company and the council.

Or our nation’s capital might experiment with common sense laws, equally applied.

Yes, Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

Fifty Out 1.4 Million

Black Friday’s mass anti-​WalMart protests focused on how poorly WalMart treats its employees. Or so run the allegations. A typical sign said “Living Wage NOW.”

But it was a funny sort of labor-​relations protest. There were marchers. And there was media coverage. Lots.

What there wasn’t a lot of, though? Walk-​out WalMart employees. A few hundred showed up, nationwide, says OUR WalMart, the protesting organization; WalMart itself puts the walkout number at about 50.

That’s out of 1.4 million workers overall.

The whole spectacle seems so strange. It’s not the workers protesting wage and conditions, really, but those who don’t work there. The protestors demand higher wages for WalMart employees. But from what I can tell, actual employees feel rather lucky to have their jobs.

Could we be witnessing a new form of unionizing? Outside agitators working to get in? That is, could the protestors be trying to force up wages so that they could replace current WalMart workers?

For many of the most vocal WalMart critics, that seems unlikely. They hate WalMart. One gets the idea, from following their typical spiels, that what they are really up to is hurting the company.

And, if the folks at Reason magazine are right, raising prices. What many object to is the fact that WalMart has succeeded precisely because it has decreased prices to consumers.

In olden days, the common presumption was that cheaper prices were what we wanted from business: more goods for less, thus providing betterment to vastly increasing numbers of people.

On the professional left, such eternal verities no longer seem to apply.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Walmart to the Rescue!

Walmart is still taking kicks, especially in New York City. But as local politicians, union activists, and business bigots (people who develop hatreds for other people’s wage and consumer choices) continue to harass the company, it’s worth taking a step back and appreciating what it does right.

Indeed, it is so successful that it’s worth exporting. Or so suggests economist Tyler Cowen in an interesting interview on the Arabic Knowledge@Wharton website, where he says that companies like Walmart are exactly what the “poor people of Africa” need. Why? These big corporations make food

more accessible and more reliable. It’s not just the pricing at any one point and time. It’s what happens in the very worst periods. Companies like Walmart are very, very good at keeping up supply and being regular.


Anti-​Walmarters in first-​world countries tend to forget how bad everyday life is in poor countries, except when they are trying to find ways to increase foreign aid or pitch a Live Aid concert. They take for granted not only our vast markets, but the Industrial Revolution and our several agricultural revolutions.

And there’s the rub, for the Third World. The “Green Revolution” that staved off mass starvation in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, has “somewhat slowed down,” says Cowen.

This is an unreported story. Crop yields are stagnant. It isn’t a problem we can solve overnight but it’s really one of the biggest problems in the world. It hardly gets any publicity. But for poor people in India, the Middle East and parts of Africa, it really matters.

So Walmart could really help.

But then, so would an end to Third World kleptocracy and its replacement by a rule of law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.