When Wal-Mart and its bitter antagonist, union SEIU, issued a joint letter supporting Washintgon D.C. controlled healthcare, it was welcomed by the Left but little surprised those who have watched Wal-Mart feed the crocodile these past years.
Megan McArdle breaks down Wal-Mart’s anti-liberty move even further.
I find it hard to believe that none of the liberal commentators breathlessly celebrating Wal-Mart’s “capitulation” on national health care have even entertained the most parsimonious explanation: that Wal-Mart is in favor of this because it raises the barriers to entry in the retail market, and hammers Wal-Mart’s competition. Yet somehow, this appears nowhere in any of the analysis. [...]Wal-Mart is always going to have a seat at the table when employer mandates are discussed, because Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest private employer. Target and Macy’s probably won’t have a seat at the table.
This fits hand-in-glove with how Democrats have approached Cap and Tax …
Eighty-five percent of the carbon permits will not be sold at auction — they will be given away to utility companies, petroleum interests, refineries, and a coterie of politically connected businesses.
…outright bribery.
Make no mistake, with Sam Walton dead and Orrin Boyle in charge, Wal-Mart employees will get about, oh say, five, maybe eight, years of “employer-provided health insurance” until Wal-Mart’s competition is damaged or gone, then they will be dumped onto the taxpayers Obama’s serfs.
(h/t Little Miss Attila)
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UPDATE: Dicentra in The Pub
Make no mistake: the urge to acquire massive amounts of power is found in both big government and big business. Bill Gates did not aspire to create the best software company in the world but the only software company in the world. The former I could respect — Microsoft is the biggest because it’s the best — but the latter? Not for a minute.The unfettered desire to exercise that much power over others — and the willingness to engage in ethically and legally questionable practices to get that power — is always morally wrong and is always what destroys a nation from within. [...]
There’s those what believe that people ought to be controlled and there’s those what don’t. Which are you?
Hank Reardon or Orrin Boyle? Only one is a capitalist.
Comment by Joe on 7/3 @ 9:28 am #
I am shocked, shocked that this kind of stuff is going on.
And Sam Walton may have played along too for a chance to drive out the competition, although since he is gone I am willing to give him the benefit of doubt.
Comment by B Moe on 7/3 @ 9:30 am #
Damn. And I liked Wal-Mart. Oh well…
Comment by Bob Reed on 7/3 @ 9:35 am #
Walmart is ensuring it will be hard for any competitors to rise up, while removing one of the union’s main talking points for mandate the organization of Walmart’s employees…
It’s in their interests; but not ours…
I don’t shop much at Walmart, hardly at all; but this development makes me wonder whether I’ll patronize them ever in the future.
Comment by SBP on 7/3 @ 9:36 am #
“Regulatory capture”. It’s what’s for breakfast.
Comment by Carin on 7/3 @ 9:36 am #
It’s easy for me to give up on Walmart. Meijers is closer to me anyway.
BYE BYE WALMART!
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 10:16 am #
I doubt that squeezing the competition has much to do with this as WalMart already does that quite well. I’m guessing that it has more to do with taking the “Evil Walmart” target off their back, and lowering their health care costs. It’s rather capitalistic at the end of the day.
Comment by LTC John on 7/3 @ 10:25 am #
Pablo, using the G as a club against your enemies? None too capatalistic to me…
This would stop one of the unions main talking point – “see, you have healthcare…for now.”
Comment by Salt Lick on 7/3 @ 10:36 am #
…using the G as a club against your enemies? None too capatalistic to me…
Some people are using that “f” word.
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 10:43 am #
LTC John, as I said, I doubt that’s the motivation. Having one less reason for the unions to be all over their ass seems more likely to me. WalMart’s business model is all the club they need against their competition and always has been.
Comment by B Moe on 7/3 @ 10:43 am #
Google “company store”
Comment by Joe on 7/3 @ 10:53 am #
You can owe your soul to the company store…
Comment by Joe on 7/3 @ 10:54 am #
B Moe, just had a friend back from some work at Google. It is as strange as you might think. And they so sever lamb medalions and lobster every day.
Comment by Darleen on 7/3 @ 10:59 am #
Pablo
If Wal-Mart wanted to get the union(s) off their ass they could have supported single-payer
but going the “employer mandated” route while they have the ear of government and can craft just how that policy gets written tips the scale towards using the government to slap down their competitors.
Beautiful two-fer and really from the Orrin Boyle School of “Business”.
Comment by geoffb on 7/3 @ 11:00 am #
This is one of those, feeding the others to the alligator hoping he eats you last, situations. They never end well except for the gator.
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 11:09 am #
I think John Carslisle is on the mark. From the “feed the crocodiles” link:
Comment by Joe on 7/3 @ 11:10 am #
They serve lamb medalions and lobster every day, and stock options. Keep your crew happy.
Meanwhile geoffb hit is exactly right on Walmart’s strategy. The only one who will benefit is the gator.
Comment by dicentra on 7/3 @ 11:10 am #
I doubt that squeezing the competition has much to do with this as WalMart already does that quite well.
Bullsplat. The competition is never squeezed well enough until they’re dead dead dead. Yeah, they’re happy to get the unions off their backs, but don’t be fooled: Big Businessmen can be every bit as power-hungry and totalitarian as government hacks.
My comment got too big for this section, so I put it in the pub.
Comment by B Moe on 7/3 @ 11:13 am #
Which is precisely why it it so important to keep business and government separated, when business gains the power of the police state… bad things, dude. Bad things.
Comment by 11B40 on 7/3 @ 11:14 am #
Greetings:
The “love affair” you address wouldn’t have seemed “strange” to F.A. Hayek. In his “The Road to Serfdom”, he asserts that monopolistic corporations and monopolistic labor unions would have no problem signing on with a collectivist government.
Your use of “serfs” as a descriptor would seem to be totally appropriate.
Comment by SDN on 7/3 @ 11:15 am #
Rent seeking will always be with us as long as the government controls the business environment.
Comment by geoffb on 7/3 @ 11:19 am #
Sorry Darleen, I somehow missed your link above that Pablo quoted from.
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 11:20 am #
And that usually happens pretty quickly when WalMart moves in. They didn’t get to be the largest company on the planet by accommodating their competitors.
Comment by Darleen on 7/3 @ 11:24 am #
Pablo
Target effectively competes with Wal-Mart because they tweaked their business model and marketplace image a bit to peel off from Wal-Mart shoppers who might like a bit better quality.
Wal-Mart hasn’t killed Target in the marketplace with honest head-to-head competition — getting the government to do it is the next step.
Comment by dicentra on 7/3 @ 11:28 am #
They didn’t get to be the largest company on the planet by accommodating their competitors.
And yet Target still exists.
Make no excuses for WalMart, me hearties. Any time lots of power is concentrated in one place, you get creeps and degenerates running the show, as Mark Steyn recently pointed out.
Comment by B Moe on 7/3 @ 11:33 am #
And Dollar General at the other end. This will probably hurt the lower end of the spectrum more than the top.
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 11:33 am #
…by virtue of being big enough to compete. Lots of business that weren’t no longer exist.
Comment by dicentra on 7/3 @ 11:38 am #
Lots of business that weren’t no longer exist.
Look. It’s one thing to beat your competitors because you do things better, smarter, more efficiently, etc. That’s all cool.
It’s another thing to use your strength and influence to use the gubmint to wipe them out for you.
The pursuit of excellence is a good; the pursuit of dominance is not.
God is not a capitalist (or a socialist or a communist or a corporatist). Don’t forget that free-market capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the rest.
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 11:46 am #
Do you really think employer mandates are gonna kill Target? Is the impact on their labor costs going to be any different than the impact on WalMart’s? I have a hard time seeing an implausible outcome as a primary motivator. Tilting the playing field against WalMarts substantive competition seems an implausible outcome.
Comment by Darleen on 7/3 @ 12:01 pm #
Pablo
Indeed.
Comment by Joseph Hertzlinger on 7/3 @ 12:10 pm #
Of course, the left will cooperate with business. That way, if their plan fails, they can always blame capitalism.
Comment by B Moe on 7/3 @ 12:13 pm #
What about Dollar General? Or Family Dollar? Or any of the other little regional brands that would like to get a share of the market?
Comment by happyfeet on 7/3 @ 12:17 pm #
If companies like Wal-Mart didn’t embrace fascism it wouldn’t be fascism.
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 12:21 pm #
That’s based on a mighty big if. Is there reason to believe that WalMart’s current healthcare spending is twice what Target’s is? It’s not as though WM can have health insurance mass produced in Chinese sweatshops. I can’t find hard numbers, but Target appears to have a number of options available and fairly satisfied employees, while WM has legions bashing it for its stinginess.
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 12:27 pm #
Oh, I’m sure they’ll be fucked. But is that really substantive competition for Wally?
Comment by SBP on 7/3 @ 12:35 pm #
If companies like Wal-Mart didn’t embrace fascism it wouldn’t be fascism.
Krupp, Ferdinande Porsche, Hugo Boss…
Comment by B Moe on 7/3 @ 1:09 pm #
There was a time when K Mart said the same thing about Wal Mart.
Comment by Ernie G on 7/3 @ 1:18 pm #
This incident is only a small part of a much larger problem with recent legislation like the Stimulus, and Cap-and-Trade. People who caution against pork miss a larger point: rent-seeking. Rent-seeking does not require outright appropriations, or government expenditure of money, and is harder to prove that it was done with malice. Lobbyists can influence the drafting of Federal Regulations as well as laws. An obscure and cleverly turned phrase can make a fortune for me, or ruin a competitor.
Ignoring the pork, how much rent-seeking is buried in the over 1,000 pages of the Cap and Trade Bill?
Comment by Challeron on 7/3 @ 1:51 pm #
I seem to recall that one of the reasons that Wal-Mart got as big as it did was that Sam Walton would wait to see where a K-Mart had been built, and that if the K-Mart was successful, Walton would build a Wal-Mart right across the road, thus saving himself all of the Marketing R&D money that Kresge had had to spend to figure out where a K-mart might be successful….
Blaming this Corporatism on the part of Wal-Mart on anything other than old Sam himself seems a little, uhm, ahistorical….
Comment by dicentra on 7/3 @ 2:18 pm #
Lobbyists can influence the drafting of Federal Regulations as well as laws.
Influence? They WRITE the damn things, thus saving Our Lazy Legislators the trouble of all that paperwork.
Pablo: I don’t understand your reluctance to believe that WalMart can/will use employer mandates to cripple Target. Was the lobbyist lying? If so, why?
Maybe the angle isn’t obvious to you or me, but it’s not inconceivable that WalMart has it all worked out.
Comment by geoffb on 7/3 @ 2:33 pm #
Correct but the fascism comes from the government side, they have the power. They then make the companies an offer they can’t refuse. Fascism is a criminal gang that grows to be a government.
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 7:33 pm #
I just don’t see it as plausible, dicentra. And I don’t know about lying, but I find it hard to believe that WalMart is currently spending twice what Target is on health benefits (per capita, or per manhour, or whatever.) If that isn’t happening, the theory fails.
Comment by Pablo on 7/3 @ 7:34 pm #
Oh, also, “Was the lobbyist lying?” is a very funny question.
Comment by LTC John on 7/4 @ 7:38 am #
“It’s not as though WM can have health insurance mass produced in Chinese sweatshops.”
I rather like that line. It made me smile this morning…
I like to think of my company as having a bunch of white haired, exacting Swiss craftsmen with jewlers lenses, laboring over heavy wooden tables turning out masterpieces of commerical general liability insurance.
Comment by nate on 7/6 @ 1:24 am #
Wal-mart is just using a similar strategy that they learned while doing business in China. As the US become more Marxist, companies like Wal-mart have to adjust to the reality of trying to function in their host countries political environment. I don’t think you can blame Wal-mart for warming up to the communists in order to continue to do business. It doesn’t matter if the communists are in China or in Washington.
Comment by Zack Rowe on 7/19 @ 6:02 pm #
Of course Walmart LOVES ObamaCare. Obamacare as everyone knows is Medicaid coverage at 30 to 40 percent less than private insurance companies. Wait until you see what Medicaid dosn’t cover that your private insurance does cover. Oh yeah you can keep your present insurance as long as you don’t change jobs. Will your employer keep paying for it?