The Great Anti-Trust build-up against Wal-Mart is likely in the works. Unless, of course, the Feds can come up with a something else that can prove to be more devastating. So now, the Feds want to nab Wal-Mart for spending its money the way it wishes to spend it? If, indeed, monies were misspent, then it’s a private matter between employee and employer (what a concept!) But the anti-union twist has the monstrous State licking its chops over this one.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/3511/that-criminal-wal-mart/
That Criminal Wal-Mart
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things i think about when people argue over walmart:
1.) particular walmarts have brokered property tax breaks under the guise of “job creation”. this represents a distorted business landscape for individual retailers, though the problem fundamentally resolves to the issue of taxation.
2.) people gripe that walmart relies on sweatshop/slave/prison/child labor from china or other forsaken lands. shame on walmart… shame on people who support this by purchasing those products at walmart… but most of all shame on those people who have enacted laws pinning employment, benefits, and trade-protection to government citizenship and its implicit use of force. people who fail to reconcile the illogic of “taking jobs away from americans” tend to be the same who fail to do the same with minimum wage laws and other “protections”.
3.) anti-trust legislation is the sure road to government-sponsored mass acceptance of monopoly status, making it ever more difficult to dislodge by market forces. though walmart does thrive on bilateral exchanges; frankly i’m putting my money on the long tail, which means amazon not walmart in the mid-term future (~10yrs).
-z
It is … essential to the healthy political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally symbolic–i.e., non-quantifiable. Peace With Honor, Communists in the State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back the Pride–these are the stuff of pageant. They are not social goals; they are, as Alfred Hitchcock told us, the MacGuffin…. The less specific the qualities of the MacGuffin are, the more interested the audience will be…. A loose abstraction allows audience members to project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal. — David Mamet
Walmart is out to make money for itself, not truly caring about its workers or customers or comminities where its stores reside.
Of course, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, but remember, one of the reasons the company is so big in the first place is the government policy of double taxation of dividends which encourages companies to grow bigger instead of return profits to shareholders.
But “Walmart” is a nonentity as far as making money for “itself”. Normally the money is made for the shareholders.
In the above case, someone high up in the corp may have decided to spend corporate money on anti-union activity – and not reveal it, possibly because of negative publicity.
If someone high-up in Wal-mart misspends money it would be the business of shareholders (and the documents normally are public) especially if it impacts shareholder value, and this can be waste or reputation or anything else.
Being Publicly traded makes many things Walmart does public. If someone wants to take the company private and use their own capital, I don’t think it should matter.
I don’t consider it good that Walmart is successful – because it is in the economy distorted by monetary mischief and regulation.
Browne has said Government breaks your legs and gives you a crutch. Antitrust is the crutch that allows one to get around with all the leg-breaking regulations and other distortions. It seems some here would cheer removing the crutches without doing anything about the broken legs.
What a great newspeak word: “misspent.” Spending implies action, and the person who made that action made a choice of the options and decided to spend the money on the best choice. If higher ups felt X action was the best, who is to say that it was wrong besides the shareholders? Obviously the person spending the money is the one they think is the best person to maximize profit.
Newspeak word number two:”anti-union.” I really can’t fathom the implications of this type of spending other than advertisments against or something of that sort, and how is that illegal in the least bit?? This story reeks of totalitarianism and political positioning; just another sad example.
As a former employee of Wal-Mart, I have found the whole case against Wal-Mart totally fabricated.
Though what I find even more sad is the people who do not believe me when I tell them I earned more at Wal-Mart than I do working for my current employer, Target.
– John O.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the Austrian method, Chinese nationalism trumps freetrade. General MacArthur paraphrased Napoleon quite accurately when he said “Do not awaken the sleeping giant, for when the sleeping giant awakens let the nations tremble.”
Foreign policy in reguards to economics should be based on sound principals. While I believe the Austrian method to be quite sound, applying them around the world is akin to putting lipstick on a pig.
There are many not so hidden agendas associated with many of our international trading partners. To say WalMart is simply spreading good ole American freetrade economics is quite disingenuous. One glaring example is the failure of many of our favored trading partners to reciprocate. Sure Many American businesses are thriving in the short term by these unilateral defacto agreements but many are getting burned.
There is a great deal of corruption here under the guise of freetrade. in fact there is nothing free about it. The Chinese will see that we pay.
Scott–
Speaking of being “disingenuous,” it’s logically impossible for “the Austrian method to be quite sound” — assuming by this you mean a priori true — yet also believe that “applying them around the world is akin to putting lipstick on a pig.”
I think this debate would go a lot smoother if you’d lay your cards on the table — are you suspicious of the Austrian claim that trade is ex ante mutually beneficial? Because if you don’t, I fail to see how your claims can be supported by anything more than vague references to “many American businesses … getting burned.”
– Lowell R.
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