So . . a REAL QUESTION: would u repeal the minimum Wage laws? You seem . .kind of . .uncaring if the workers get screwed over they can just continue to get screwed until the market balances it self This isn't .theory . . families are getting hurt in that MEANTIME Rocket River
In Oregon, it's illegal to pump your own gas. Being forced to have someone else pump my gas was painful in a Hank Hill kind of way. It was emasculating. (The rest of this isn't directed at MadMax) If you think of capitalism as an ecology, in which there's a clear food chain of business and workers, all as both food and feeder up and down the chain, Wal-Mart is like kudzu. In Japan kudzu makes a nice little ground-cover vine, and works great as part of a larger system. In the US, however, kudzu has become blight. It is too successful. This is a problem because a kudzu grows more and more dominant; it pushes varieties of plants out of existence. It then climbs up trees and suffocates them from sunlight, causing unhealthy trees. Basically, the plant has gone wild and taken over the SE United States choking out all competitors because it is really good at competing in that environment. That also sounds more or less to me like a fair description of Wal-Mart. Another example would be the E.coli bacteria in your stomach. Your stomach is filled with E.coli. Without them you'd have trouble digesting lots of fibrous plant mater. You and the bacteria have developed a nice little symbiotic balance. A couple of times a year, however, you manage to read about a Jack in the Box somewhere that left its meat out too long and poisoned a bunch of people with E.coli. These are evolved E.coli. They've become better at what they do, but as a result they've ruined the balance that has enabled them to thrive. They end up killing the host and through their success, destroy the environment which enabled them to be successful in the first place. By becoming too competitive, they ensure their own demise. Nothing about Wal-Mart is bad when taken and viewed in a hermetically sealed environment. The problem is that Wal-Mart threatens the health of the entire system, simply from its own success. I know it’s a heresy to say it, as it seems the ‘end of communism’ has brought about a belief that there is an implicit acknowledgement that there can’t be too free of a marketplace, but this is wrong. Capitalism has been shown to have it's own history of self-destructive excess which have to be corrected from time to time. If people don’t see that as a common thread through the history of the United States, then they are living in some sort of pathological ideology world. There’s no one answer to every problem, the key is balance in all things. All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison…." - Paracelsus (1493-1541)
They will, but in the process of consuming enough to create a "dieback" effect as with some out of control weeds, they destroy the fertile soil of the US economy as a side effect. If mult-generational economic malaise is your idea of "normal market corrections" then I guess that's fine. In a grander scheme, I appreciate that it might be better to let Wal-Mart run wild and die back through natural competitive mechanisms, but evoution doen't sound so great when it's not discussed in the abstract and you are T. Rex. Of course it can go the other way, and you end up with Detroit or the airlines, where the companies are perpetually seeking a bailout from the governement when they should be let to colapse in a controled way, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
None of my economics professors ever taught bs like this. Sorry Ottomaton - but Walmart isn't a plant. By your theory - Sears Roebuck should've destroyed America decades ago. We already have anti-trust laws.
Frontline has their Wal-Mart episode available online. Is Wal-Mart good for America? You can use this program to save wmv files onto your harddrive so you watch it all at once. http://sdp.ppona.com/
If your going to dimiss me at least bother to do so with more than a specious ontological arguement on the nature of metaphors. I guess you weren't alive in the 70's? Sears Roebuck, & Ford, & US Steel did their best to try, and we were economically rooted in manufacturing not sercvice at the time. Do your professors teach you exactly what they were taught? If not, how does that affect the fact that they are now teaching it to you?
Comparing Walmart (or capitalism) to some Japanese plant is stetching it. By the way - there's a WalMart in my neighborhood. It's been there for quite a while. Amazingly enough - there are still plenty of other retailers and small shops too.
I remember that Frontline. Good show. Apropos of all its American suppliers Wal-Mart suggests should close up shop and relocate overseas, an easier question is answered by the program: "Is Wal-Mart good for China?"
