WALMART AND GLOBAL DOMINATION

Go to Business Insider and read 16 facts About Walmart that Will Blow your Mind.

I don't want to pick on Walmart because I know they've provided a lot of jobs. We shop there all the time because, for many items, we don't have much of a choice. All that aside there's one thing about Walmart that really bothers me. This company has become so large, so powerful and in may ways so necessary that if it were to fail it could take the world economy with it. And that's the problem with unhindered free markets and the Objectivist view of the world. When any company becomes as large as Walmart the free market disappears in relation to it.

Tell me that Walmart cannot influence governments to act in its interests. Tell me it cannot encourage behavior by its suppliers that would be detrimental to its competitors. Who's to stop it? Certainly not the U.S. government or any of its regulators. With this fragile economy America can't afford to piss off Walmart.

The only way to protect the free market is to limit the size and power of any given company. This isn't to say that a guy that has an idea, risks it all and succeeds shouldn't get rich. There has to be a reason to risk because without risk there is no advancement. But no one or company should be able to control the market or the political system to such an extent that they can destroy the freedom of others. George Soros comes to mind but it could just as easily be someone from the right. And Walmart is the easiest example of a corporation with the same kind of power, maybe even more.

We've gone beyond the point where much can be done about it but, after the collapse, maybe while we're putting things back together we may want to consider just how much of any given market any company should be allowed to control. I mean, how is Walmart different than the phone company? Busting up Ma Bell may have caused some short term problems but it sure allowed for a whole bunch of competition and innovation in communications.

True free markets require small businesses with as much free enterprise as possible for as many as are willing to take a risk. Huge multinational corporations are the polar opposite of freedom.

The article excerpted below, an interview with author Christopher A. Ferrara, is well worth the read. Click on the link at the end.

"Those “traditionalists” who equate Socialism and Distributism have no idea what Distributism is or else are presenting it dishonestly. I am amazed at the level of obfuscation that has surrounded this simple matter. Distributism means simply the widest possible ownership of private property—that is, widely distributed ownership, hence Distributism.
Distributism means a society of small owners, which is what the whole pre-Socialist Western world was under Catholic social order. It means as much free enterprise as possible for the common man. As Chesterton put it so brilliantly: “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”

Carping “traditionalist” critics of Distributism spend a lot of time rooting about in the works of particular distributist sources, such as the writings of Penty, in order to find evidence of the spectre of socialism—the same bugaboo liberals always raise to herd the masses into the concentration camp of rampant economic liberalism, where Wal-Mart with its Chinese wage slaves is portrayed as a bulwark of human liberty.

But in principle, Distributism is the polar of opposite of Socialism. Nothing about Distributism involves government seizure of anybody’s property. On the contrary, Distributists seek drastic reduction in the power of government precisely because Big Government has always favored Big Business and helped it to crush the small owner in a thousand different ways. As government recedes, and with it the massive advantages of Big Business over its small competitors, small ownership would return naturally.

Capitalism, as I show in the book, is not even at the midpoint between the two poles of Distributism and Socialism, but has actually evolved Leftward into a privatized socialism—Big Business in league with Big Government and Big Finance all over the world. Exhibit A: Bill Gates, promoter of socialism. Exhibit B: Warren Buffet, promoter of socialism. Exhibit C: Wal-Mart, which urges its employees to rely on government-subsidized health care. Exhibit D: The entire capitalist-created network of fractional reserve banking, which goes back centuries, was invented by financial “entrepreneurs” and is now protected by government at the behest of Big Finance. Exhibit E: Limited liability, publicly held, multinational mega-corporations, which are purely the inventions of government saddled to capitalist interests. Pius XI specifically condemned the innumerable abuses arising from this legal invention in Quadragesimo anno.

Anyone who thinks that Wal-Mart and its communist government-subsidized legions of wage slaves in China, or any of the other globe-spanning corporate megaliths that free-ride on government privileges and outsource labor, represents “free enterprise” versus evil Distributism needs to acquaint himself with the Church’s social teaching immediately.

Why do certain “traditionalists” oppose Catholic social teaching? For the same reason I once might have: They do not understand that they are bourgeois liberals who merely think they are “conservatives.” They have accepted the false dichotomy by which Liberalism has overtaken and overthrown all that remained of Christocentric social order: “freedom” or “socialism.”

To read more go to The Distributist Review.

WALMART HAS LOW PRICES EVERYDAY - NOT SO MUCH

Wal-Mart is quietly raising its prices, in some cases up to 60%. I've been noticing this over the last few months because we shop at Wal-Mart on a fairly regular basis, not because I want to but because there isn't a lot of other choices around here.

At some point this would seem to be inevitable. Wal-Mart stores used to be small and simple. Now they've become massive, and by Wal-Mart standards, glitzy. That means that overhead had to go up. And quite honestly, the parking lots are not as full as they used to be and the carts seem a bit emptier, too.

This is the free market in action. It is entirely possible that Wal-Mart believes they can increase their prices because they've effectively wiped out a good deal of the competition over the years so their market should be safe. They've become, in some ways at least, a virtual monopoly. The question though is whether the consumer is willing to pay a higher price when going to Wal-Mart just isn't that convenient because of its size? Given a choice between parking in and walking through a giant parking lot, and then dragging my sorry butt across acres of store just to get a simple bottle of soap, I'd rather go to the local grocery store if pricing is close and get in and out quickly. The same is true for clothes and everything else Wal-Mart sells.

Wal-Mart's size, always having been their advantage, may be starting to work against them. My family no longer shops there for groceries because we've found we can spend less at a local store and get in and out much quicker. The selection isn't as great but really, how many different brands of green beans do we need? I never have bought meat at Wal-Mart because I get it from friends or my local butcher. It may cost slightly more but its fresh and I know where it comes from.

So it'll be fun to see how this plays out. Over time I imagine that Wal-Mart will make substantial changes to their business to accommodate a population with less disposable income. This may mean that they begin to reduce store size and selection or maybe they don't expand into new areas as quickly. Maybe they'll go back to being more of a rural store, like they used to be. Or maybe they'll figure out some way to dominate the markets just as they always have and will continue on as before.

My guess is that as prices at Wal-Mart continue to rise competition will rise along with them. I hope that people start to realize that local merchants with local interests at heart are better for the community than giant box stores. With the economy spinning into the toilet we'll see changes in the retail world in a rather short period of time that will be astounding. We are returning to a smaller world, whether we like it or not. Wal-Mart is going to have to make adjustments to this new reality to survive. Raising prices won't help them.