Part-Time Pundit: MSM Continues Anti-Walmart Jihad

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May 5, 2005

MSM Continues Anti-Walmart Jihad

At Wal-Mart, Choosing Sides Over $9.68 an Hour

The ongoing media and leftist jihad against Walmart continues. They continue to bash on Walmart for paying low wages but the odd thing is, I'm not sure why they never seem to mention places like McDonald's, factories, college-town jobs, or countless others who pay minimum wage whereever possible. The assumption is that either minimum wage should be raised because it's unlivable, or that Walmart should just pony up more. It's time I beat this myth down.

You can't make a business pay taxes. Sorry. Business do one thing, and on thing only. The provide a service and pass the costs down to the consumer with some profit. If you artificially increase costs (i.e. telling them they have to pay more, raise taxes on them), they do two things: cut costs elsewhere (like firing people) or raise prices. A business that cannot recoup its costs when setting prices has a technical name... "bankrupt".

Now, in particular, raising wages across the board does two things. Either the cost of living increases because everyone who has to pay more on labor will pass those costs down with increased prices or they will simply employ less people. It's just that simple. What's worse, having people who make 80% of what's needed to live and have reasonable unemployment, or have some more people have enough but the rest make 0%. But there is another solution...

No matter what you do to a business, tax them, sue them, whatever, those costs are passed down to the consumer eventually and the consumer can't pass those costs off to anyone. They make what they make. The solution here to address people who can't get by on minimum wage is to LOWER the cost of living instead.

How can you do this? Tort reform is a part, and I don't mean simply capping damages. The problem with suing a company, let's say a doctor, is that they don't really pay in the end. (Sure, lost time defending and all that, but they don't cut the check). Liability insurers that no matter what a company does aside of outright murder can be reduced to a predictable line item so they can set prices.

Phillip Morris pays X amount of insurance a year to cover tobacco settlements. They pass that premium down in covering that cost in sales. Doctors do the same thing, they figure out their premium and other costs, then set prices. A could start would be to find a way to make companies instead of consumers pay for the **legitimate** harms they cause (and there is a healthy amount of illegitimate cases going through the courts to make companies pay for other people's bad uses of their produce which is another problem).

The solution here is to reduce the cost it takes for companies to make their products and the savings is made up for by consumers who can much more easily get by. It's simple economics. So let's stop with the Walmart jihad and deal with the problem now.

Posted by John Bambenek at May 5, 2005 6:58 PM