It is remarkable that Wal-Mart, a company that makes a modest profit margin (typically between 3 percent and 3.5 percent) selling ordinary people ordinary goods at low prices, is the great hate totem for the well-heeled Left, whose best-known celebrity spokesclowns would not be caught so much as downwind from a Supercenter, while at the same time, nobody is out with placards and illiterate slogans and generally risible moral posturing in front of boutiques dealing in Rolex, Prada, Hermès, et al. It’s almost as if there is a motive at work here other than that which is stated by our big-box-bashing friends on the left and their A-list human bullhorns. Ironically, the anti-Wal-Mart crusaders want to make life worse for people who are literally counting pennies as they shop for necessities. Study after study has shown that Wal-Mart has meaningfully reduced prices: 3.1 percent overall, by one estimate — with a whopping 9.1 percent cut to the price of groceries. That comes to about $2,300 a year per household, savings that accrue overwhelmingly to people of modest incomes, not to celebrity activists and Ivy League social-justice crusaders. Ultimately, these campaigns are exercises in tribal affiliation. The Rolex tribe, and those who aspire to be aligned with it, signal their status by sneering at the Timex tribe — or by condescending to it as they purport to act on its behalf, as though poor people were too stupid to know where to find the best deal on a can of beans. Or call it the Trader Joe’s tribe vs. the Wal-Mart tribe, the Prius tribe vs. the F-150 tribe. We see this everywhere: In Ferguson, self-righteous and self-appointed spokesmen for the marginalized point to the fact that the criminal-justice system generally produces far worse outcomes to the poor and the non-white than it does to the well-off and white. This is, generally speaking, true. And though the dynamics are equally complicated, the same thing is true of the government schools, which do a pretty good job for rich white kids in the suburbs while functioning as day prisons and incubators of dysfunction for poor minority kids, especially in big cities. But the social-justice warriors in Ferguson will fight on bloody stumps to prevent reform of the government-school cartels, the endless failures of which do far more to harm the lives of the economically and socially vulnerable than any police department does. Why? The teachers are part of the tribe, and the cops are part of a rival tribe, which is why nobody ever bought a Rolex out of the royalties of a song titled “F**k the Milwaukee Public Schools.” On the one hand, we have Wal-Mart, which makes a modest profit margin by helping to feed and clothe people who typically do not have a lot of spare money. On the other hand, we have a grotesque exercise in snobbery — snobbery frequently compounded by stupidity. The view from Fifth Avenue is rather different from the view from Columbia County.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 14:46:50 +0000
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