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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Thursday, September 14, 2006 :::
Some fishwrap from New York recently featured a story about how free-market think tanks sometimes get money from Wal-Mart or the Walton Family Foundation and then their employees write columns opposed to regulations that would hurt Wal-Mart. Thomas Sowell and someone I've never heard of have pretty well eviscerated the Times.
A reader of the Corner is reminded of an anecdote from his own life:Sowell and McWhorter's counter punch at the NYT reminds me of a conversation I had at a dinner party a few years ago. The hostess, knowing that I'm an economist, seated me next to an economist from the Brookings Institution. I work on Wall Street, which means my research is confined to pretty narrow avenues. I said it must be wonderful to work in a think tank, where you can take the time to dig into the really big things. "It's wonderful sometimes," she said, "but right now I'm writing a study on school vouchers, and I'm having a hell of a time finding a single study that isn't positive. I don't know what I'm going to do."
It was a very long dinner. Both related to this topic, though in different ways, are a George Will piece on the politics of Wal-Mart and a Jonah Goldberg comment on how media bias usually works. George Will, first: The median household income of Wal-Mart shoppers is under $40,000. Wal-Mart, the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy, has almost as many employees (1.3 million) as the U.S. military has uniformed personnel. A McKinsey company study concluded that Wal-Mart accounted for 13 percent of the nation's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation. By lowering consumer prices, Wal-Mart costs about 50 retail jobs among competitors for every 100 jobs Wal-Mart creates. Wal-Mart and its effects save shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion).
People who buy their groceries from Wal-Mart - it has one-fifth of the nation's grocery business - save at least 17 percent. But because unions are strong in many grocery stores trying to compete with Wal-Mart, unions are yanking on the Democrats' leash, demanding laws to force Wal-Mart to pay wages and benefits higher than those that already are high enough to attract 77 times more applicants than there were jobs at this store.
The big-hearted progressives on Chicago's City Council, evidently unconcerned that the city gets zero sales tax revenues from a half a billion dollars that Chicago residents spend in the 42 suburban Wal-Marts, have passed a bill that, by dictating wages and benefits, would keep Wal-Marts from locating in the city. Richard Daley, a bread-and-butter Democrat, used his first veto in 17 years as mayor to swat it away.
Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Goldberg's comment is in reaction to a flawed map of changes in the median wage that was in the Detroit Free Press and has been making the rounds in the blogosphere. After citing an article explaining why it's wrong, Goldberg agrees that ignorance of statistics is more likely at work than malice, and agrees with a "but":I think they're a bit too quick to dismiss liberal bias. Imagine a scenario where the Detroit Free Press reporters came to their editors with data showing that incomes had soared under George W. Bush. My guess is their editors would immediately say "this is fishy" and ask the reporters to double check... Stupidity and ignorance is a problem in every institution. But not all stupidities are caught equally when there's groupthink at work. Labels: Wal-Mart
::: posted by Steven at 9:49 PM
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