Wal-Mart: A Shining Example

WAL-MART- A SHINING EXAMPLE

By Ryan Hampton


You better watch it- the anti-free-market finatics are working and have been working on a goal- to destroy Wal-Mart. It’s not just minimum wage that they want, apparently they want to destroy any business that seems to have success.
Many of them probably mean well. They have a heart, and their heart tells them that Wal-Mart is greedy, and regulations should be put on Wal-Mart. They think with their heart, but sometimes I wish people could think with their brains instead.
They even have a new movie coming out now- WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Prices. It is supposed to change the way you think about our favorite family friendly store. They, according to these people, cut people’s pays, and make prices so low that they will enter into the monopoly. Never mind that we thought the same thing of Sears, and it never reached the monopoly and no government interference was needed. It’s time we start digging a little deeper into this issue. What is a monopoly? Well, it is where one business controls all or just about all of a given area. But there is two kinds of monopolies: the government controlled, and the free market controlled. The free market, as it has with Wal-Mart, keeps prices low. The government applies force to do whatever it wishes. Why don’t we complain more about the government’s monopolies? Look at education (a government/teachers union controlled monopoly), and the phone services that used to be government controlled monopolies. Sometimes, the same people who want the government to put regulations on a free market monopoly (which Wal-Mart is not even completely in yet) want the government to continue to use force in government schools, and other government controlled monopolies. This is the ground-work for communism.
We think that Wal-Mart is bad for “under-paying” employees. But I don’t even know how under-payment can exist in a free market, other than someone being underpaid and doing nothing about it (which is their own fault). We hear of a few horror stories of people working at Wal-Mart, but none of them were forced to work at Wal-Mart. If they got mad at Wal-Mart and left, then fine, but don’t turn to the government for help. Unfortunately, they’ll listen to the “poor working consumer.” For most Wal-Mart employees, if Wal-Mart went out of business, it would do more harm to them than good. Wal-Mart is a good starting place in a lot of ways. It is a hard job, and you don’t get paid a lot of money, but you can work yourself up the ladder of free trade, and then be the business man, and do what Wal-Mart did to you.
Fortunately, there are some people in the media, or who get a lot of attention, who are supportive of Wal-Mart. Ted Turner said, "America is about competition and rising above that competition. That's at the basis of what makes our … economy and our society tick." He is right. That is why Wal-Mart. Is successful. They have taken on the competition head on, and have done good with it. But we get the idea that they leave nothing for us with all the money (never mind they save us money when shopping). We think that as said on Talladega Nights, “If your not first, your last.” We are not falling behind because Wal-Mart is mean. We can always get ahead ourselves. Another example, which was used by philosopher David Kelly, is that of a pie coming around after supper. "It's like we're all children sitting around the dinner table and a pie comes," said Kelley. "If I get a bigger piece, you get a smaller piece. But in reality, there's no mom there putting a pie down on the table. We're producers, we create wealth." He is right too. Wal-Mart has created wealth. They have done nothing more than find a good strategy to make money- and it worked. We can all find good strategies, and we can do good. Partly due to technological advances, and partly due to business, we are advancing economically. We make more money than in the past. If Wal-Mart went out of business, we would be no better off- we’d probably be worse off. Wal-Mart would definitely be worse off. Get the government out, and let Wal-Mart continue to be a shining example of a free market.