home  |  book  |

The Year of the Looter David Cameron Breathes Life Into Britain's Conservatives

print view

Stand Up for Wal-Mart

by Christopher Chantrill
December 04, 2005 at 5:52 pm

|

SO NOW WE know. About 56 percent of Americans “believe that Wal-Mart is bad for America,”according to a Zogby poll conducted on behalf of wakeupwalmart.com, an activist group that is “working to change Wal-Mart.” Liberals can take heart that their years-long campaign against Wal-Mart is having an effect.

You can see why liberals hate Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart believes in “everyday low prices.” Everyday low prices means everyday low costs. That means lowering costs in the two critical areas that are presently putting unionized companies out of business nationwide: sky-high health care and pension costs. Wal-Mart offers its employees high-deductible health plans and no pension plan. Instead it offers profit-sharing and 401(k) plans. Obviously Wal-Mart is a missile aimed at every unionized retail establishment in America.

For generations Americans have been taught a nostalgic narrative about labor unions. But now, according to political columnist E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, conservatives have succeeded in selling a different story to America, a story about Schumpeterian “creative destruction,” producer groups losing their monopolies and capacity for “rent-seeking.” Meanwhile the liberal story is a muddle. “Much of the left accepts a certain amount of creative destruction because, in Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, there is no alternative.”

Capitalism, all by itself, would never have achieved the rising living standards that were the pride of the United States in [the] 1950s and still are today. The rules enforced by the National Labor Relations Board made it possible for [unions] to organize by protecting workers’ rights.

That’s your story, E.J. But did you ever wonder why unions don’t ever appear at the founding of a company, eager to participate in a bright idea? Unions only appear on the scene after the bright idea has become money in the bank.

Capitalism, all by itself, creates the product. Then unions and governments come along with talk of workers’ rights. Government labor laws can help some workers obtain above-market wages and benefits for a while. But we’ve seen what happens in the long term. We’ve seen that unionized companies can’t adapt and compete. The unions won’t let them.

In the United States capitalism, all by itself, grew our remarkable and productive economy. The U.S. is No. 1 in global competitiveness, according to The Economist Pocket World in Figures for 2006. Of course, it competes head to head globally in all the sexy sectors like software and semiconductors. But there are only a few people working in the sexy sectors—less than one percent of the labor force. It is in the non-sexy sectors that the U.S. really shines. When American retail workers are twice as productive as Japanese retail workers, that makes a big difference. Retail employs 11 percent of the workforce.

Wal-Mart is America’s economic secret weapon. During the so-called tech boom of the 1990s half of the productivity increase was in retail. The tech boom was really a retail boom, and the retail boom was triggered by Wal-Mart. The old line retailers like Sears and K-Mart and the unionized supermarket chains like Safeway found that they had to match Wal-Mart’s innovations in efficiency and supply-chain management or go out of business. By 1999 they had achieved the productivity of Wal-Mart—in 1990.

It is good that E.J. Dionne is learning the language of public-choice economics and learning to be half ashamed of rent-seeking. In the old days left-wingers didn’t equivocate about rent. They were four-square against it. In the first chapter of Fabian Essays in Socialism George Bernard Shaw constructed a likely story about Rent, how the first landowner, “the original Adam,” got the best land and how he got thereby to collect unearned “economic rent” from the less fortunate. If the left’s message sounds muddled to Dionne it is because the left that once recoiled in horror from the outrage of rent now celebrates it when it delivers above market wages, inflexible work rules, and 30-and-out pension plans to the rank-and-file Adam of the union shop. Pity all that stuff drives corporations into bankruptcy.

Privilege and subsidy create rent for the few and poverty for the many. That goes not just for feudal aristocrats of the land and robber barons of monopoly capital, but also for labor aristocrats of the shop floor. And no artfully worded Zogby poll can change it.

The reason that the United States is No. 1 is that, riddled with privilege and subsidy and rent-seeking as it is, it still has less of it than anywhere else in the world.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

 

 TAGS

Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact