A New "Wal-Mart is Evil" thread...

Not sure what your point is. It wasn't a free marketplace that brought us the institution of slavery. That should be obvious to you. Slaves didn't voluntarily work as slaves, and they obviously made the cost of labor cheaper (since they had to work for free) than the marketplace would have dictated if there was a free and open market.

So I assumed that by making the parallel you were saying we have an institution, such as slavery, that is interfering with the labor market's ability to price jobs at Wal-Mart freely. That was why I asked.

What exactly is the factor that's anywhere near the factor slavery was on the labor market, that is pricing jobs at Wal-Mart artificially low?

 

1) Yes, I am a libertarian. 2) I'm not the one who just resorted to, "my thinking is airtight, so it's unchallengeable." By all means, challenge me. I am a reasonable person and I'm easily swayed by reasonable things. So please, come back with something less arbitrary than "use some common sense." I promise I'll listen.

But if all you offer is, "use some more common sense," well, honestly, your common sense is not universal and it's kind of arbitrary. Your ideas about "wisdom" and "compassion" certainly are arbitrary.

And arbitrariness in matters of life, liberty and property creates problems, it doesn't solve them. At it's worst, it's how we end up with institutions such as slavery, to use your example. At it's best, we get well-meaning people trying to do well-meaning things... and creating huge unanticipated consequences that leave us worse off in the aggregate.

We live in a world of scarce resources. And no matter how we allocate things, someone's ideas about "wisdom" and "compassion" are not going to be met. If we let a free and open marketplace determine something's value, essentially we are letting everyone weigh in and valuing it accordingly. Honestly, that's what actually does sound like common sense to me.

But feel free to show me the error in my thinking that, if there is one.

 

"Collective bargaining" isn't a cure-all that creates money from thin air. And no one forces anyone to work at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is actually union-proof all on its own. This should be common sense to anyone. In order to collective bargain effectively, you need leverage. In other words, you need to have something to bargain with--you have to offer skills that are not easily replaceable, and have all of the workers organized enough to create leverage from the fact that they can't be easily replaced.

It's why major league baseball players can collectively bargain very effectively--if the players walk out, the replacement players aren't as good. It's why highly skilled jobs can effectively collective bargain. They may be replaceable, but replacing them is costly.

It's also why low-skilled workers, like the guy working the register at Wal-Mart, have no collective bargaining power. That guy is very easily replaced by some other guy who is just happy to have the job.

This has been borne out by the fact that in most places a Wal-Mart opens, the pool of applicants is much greater than the number of jobs. That would suggest that the wages are "fair," in the sense that Wal-Mart is paying just enough to attract a good pool of qualified applicants, and there is a pool of people willing to work for what Wal-Mart is offering.

When you say that unionization would mean Wal-Mart workers could collectively bargaining for "fair" wages and benefits, I assume you are saying that "fair" means a wage that is higher than what the market is dictating, and "unionization" means some sort of iron fist that dictates Wal-Mart having to pay more than what the market bears for labor. Because a pool of largely unskilled high school graduates is never going to be able to collectively bargain well on the merits of what they have to bargain with.

I'm also not sure how "fair" it is, if you somehow dictate your "fair" wage and cause the end result that is inevitable--you kill jobs.