Reply #54: "No one is forced..." [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

yadda yadda yadda.

Libertarialoon's screen name says it all.

The comfortably affluent always come up with that callous, smug, self-serving, evil (yes, I literally mean "evil!") libertarian sophistry when confronted with an example of exploitation.

I first heard that excuse when the clerical employees of Yale University were trying to organize in the 1970s. The lowest paid clerical employees were paid so poorly that they qualified for food stamps, and the president of Yale made some remark about how secretaries who didn't like their wages should just go to school and qualify for better jobs.

It's obvious that Libertarialoon has never thought about the downward spiral. WalMart buys cheap goods from the Third World, which drives U.S. manufacturers out of business, sells them at rock-bottom prices, which drives local independent merchants out of business, which reduces employment alternatives in both the manufacturing and retail sectors and choices for shoppers, which eventually forces large numbers of people to both buy and work at WalMart.

Hating WalMart isn't "hating capitalism." I am a small-business owner myself, fortunately in a service industry, not retail.

When I was younger, the "American Dream" was about building up a successful business in which you made a comfortable living while providing products and services that people needed and good jobs for the local population. It wasn't about becoming richer than several Third World countries combined and still thinking up new predatory ways to screw workers and communities.

WalMart actually epitomizes the kind of capitalism that Marx wrote about.