This is a thoroughly unimpressive article written by an economically illiterate journalism professor in Seattle. I'm hard pressed to think of a position more sure to be had by a radical lefty than a journalism professor at a university in Seattle. The article shows the lefty bias.
I'm touched by the professor's concern for his aunt who had to drive miles to the Walmart outside her little Iowa town. However, here's a reality check from someone who worked in a little grocery store in a small Iowa town: Everyone drives to the store, especially little old ladies.
The parking lot of a small town store is the same size as that of a city store because everyone drives in America. Small town, big town, no difference. If anything, small town shoppers in Iowa drive more because it's a long walk from the farms. So this concern about people having to drive further for the Walmart is bogus.
The professor's rage against low prices seems a pretty odd argument to make, too. Yes, low prices are good. Low prices means that your wage is worth more. The fact is that the old mom & pop stores in small towns charged you more because they had higher relative overhead. People run to shop at Walmarts because they can buy a greater variety of products at a discount.
The professor's rage against forty labor law cases seems a pretty weak attack as well. Forty lawsuits against a giant enterprise like Walmart is small potatoes. That sounds like a relatively well run business. And of course, many of these lawsuits will turn out to be bogus.
The most intellectually dishonest argument the professor makes is that gap between the rich and poor is widening with the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor who are getting poorer. First, a gap between the rich and poor is good. There are some people who work harder and smarter than the rest and they deserve what they earn. It would be an immoral society that levelled the difference in income, stealing the wages of the hard-working to give to those who refuse to work.
The second dishonest point the professor makes is that there are permanent classes of rich and poor, that the poor of ten years ago are the poor of today and they are getting poorer. In fact, there is tremendous turnover of the rich and poor. Most poor move up. Most rich fall down. Only 2% of those people in the lowest quintile of income will remain there twenty years later. The overwhelming majority of them move up into the middle class and beyond.
The fact that the professor leaves out is that one reason the stats for the poorest people in America seem worse is that we are importing poverty from Mexico. Many of the poorest in America are immigrants who arrived poor. The professor ignores this and argues that it is American capitalism that makes Americans poorer when in fact it's American capitalism that is making everyone richer, so much so that it sucks poor people in from south of the border.
Most of the rich blow their money in their lifetimes and return to the middle class or lower. Only a handful of the richest families in America in 1900 were still the richest in 2000. Wealth naturally disperses through inheritance and foolishness. Most of the people with high income or wealth earned it by working their butts off providing goods and services that people wanted. That means doctors working twelve hour plus days and small businessmen living in their business and ordinary people who saved their money. They deserve their wealth.
Tantor
