If they don’t produce more than they spend, eventually, the bill becomes due.

There are many studies that support the idea that, while ‘Trucks’ do pay road usage and fuel taxes/fees, their damage to said roads is hardly recompensed.

see: In 1991, the late Bobby Green, who was then Director of ODOT, explained it this way: “The Department (ODOT) and the Federal Highway Administration believe the trucking industry should pay the costs of the damages its heavy trucks cause to the state’s highways, roads and streets. The industry has never paid its fair share of such costs, leaving the lion’s share to the average taxpaying motorists who are imperiled by sharing the roadways they support with the heavy trucks they must also support…”

“As a result of the continual increases in truck sizes and weights, as well as the phenomenal growth in the numbers of heavy trucks using these major routes (a 38% increase between 1980 and 1990), Oklahoma’s highway facilities are deteriorating at a rate which exceeds our financial capacity to replace or even repair them.”
from this advocacy group:
http://advancedtransport.org/Articles/1125.htm

past that, amazingly, point #4 misses point #3.
WMT is a huge ‘employer’ of Slave labor, partnered w/ The People’s Army in the PROC, among other unsavory outfits..
see:
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=walmart+slave+labor

you know, it really amazing to see this article, I was just thinking, to myself, earlier this evening, “ya know I really love those guys (LvMI), I just can’t believe they’re so willing to give WMT such a pass..” I guess you can file it under: Ripley’s.

My point? If you hate Wal-Mart, big boxes, suburbanization, etc., blame Uncle Sam.

We have better (& more) options because of the thrift and entreprise of our forefathers, who patiently and diligently built up the huge capital structure upon which we now draw our economic wellbeing, and that which the state is constantly trying to distort/dismantle/destroy. If we are not careful we just might well end up back in the sweatshops ourselves soon.

If that “i.e.” (“in other words”) had only been an “e.g.” (for instance”), that would have been right. As it is, it’s wrong because it leaves out a very common case: the sweatshops themselves aren’t doing that sort of thing, but the local kleptocrats are, and the sweatshops are what gives the kleptocrats an incentive for it, through the kickbacks, taxes, dispossessions/evictions of peasants so their land can be sold to the sweatshops, and so on that they provide. The sweatshop managers on the spot know this full well, and it’s only wilful ignorance of the globalising owners that keeps them from knowing it too. How common was a case like “…[for] some laid-off child workers in Bangladesh, the next best alternative was prostitution or starvation” in the days when outside interests hadn’t taken up local resources, like turning land and water resources over to factory or cash crop use? It still happened, but rather less (British understatement there).

As it happens, factories are usually much less harmful that way than cash crops, even so called “fair trade” versions, because “fair trade” only helps those locals who still have a stake in it. It hurts those who were squeezed off subsistence plots, both by forcing them to race to the bottom for paid work in the cash economy (the “Iron Law of Wages”) and by bidding up the local price of staples because of a reduced supply. With factories, there would be almost no problem if it weren’t for the kleptocrats putting on the squeeze.

As for school choice, this is really a local matter and is very much complicated by the extent to which school funding is paid for out of property taxes and tied geographically to home prices. In any case, changes in who can hop school zones is really a decision about the management of public property that has nothing to do with free enterprise as such. A free enterprise solution would be to privatize the schools, and let them include or exclude whomever they wants on whatever basis they want.