Heh, you are implying that I am quixotic...
Well, I think you are a giant, and I am going to slay you I guess...
Dick
I love Walmart for their efficiency and effectiveness. I hate protectionism, and I hate the minimum wage. Eliminate the minimum wage and you've made Walmart's current business model much less appealing.
Heh, I'm sure that IG Farbin made efficient use of its concentration camp victim/slave laborers as well.
I'm not sure where I stand on things like free trade and protectionism, I have to learn more. I know I'm against minimum wage too though.
The only real problem I have with Walmart is that as a company it often encourages employees to seek (and provides information for) state welfare/medicare/etc. aid instead of paying decent wages and benefits. So it's an extremely successful company that is subsidized by taxpayers.
That and the Walton family, worth tens of billions of dollars, gives hardly anything at all to charity. That's not nearly as offensive to me as the eagnerness to tap into taxpayers instead of their bottom line, though.
Yeah, encouraging employees to collect state welfare sounds sleazy. I think taking advantage of Chinese slave labor is sleazy too though.
I hate WalMart because it's always so crowded. I try to find what I need at KMart instead.
But the quoted post is pretty much true. WalMart is just running a very successful business model and they obviously fulfill a huge consumer need for inexpensive products.
Plus that $4 prescription plan they started (now copied by other retail drug outlets) was a great idea. If that isn't free market showing government how it's done, somebody tell me why not.
The real problem is the policies, both gov't and private, that sent all these manufacturing jobs overseas where items can be produced far more cheaply. Ask the big labor unions why American companies can't compete. Ask the politicians who voted for NAFTA why American companies can't compete. Ask the politicians who continue to give China "most favored nation" trading status why American companies can't compete.
Wal-Mart takes advantage of Chinese slave labor to provide cheep products.
May not be illegal, but it's probably immoral, and we are going to have to pay the piper one day, as long as we continue to sell our soul to this system.
$4 prescription plan that works? Sounds like successful free market capitalism, I think that's good.
I happen to agree with you that trade Unions grow to a point where they kill their host, and that's not good for anyone. If a company like that dies, then the free market has spoken, but when Lee Iacoka get's a government bailout because of it, then that's a government policy that hurts us all by inflating our dollar.
Is NAFTA another government policy that hurts us all? Probably I guess, but I do need to learn more about that.
Like I said, the point of this whole project is to use our ideals to create a competitive market place, so that we can use it to effect political change.
Ultimately it's the Fed that we need to do away with, and perhaps NAFTA too, I don't know for sure yet.
But I do know that we need to organize ourselves into an effective socio/economic/political machine, so that we can have the power to effect the changes that we need to make.
ALL it's money? 
