Nationalize Wal-Mart (or should Illinois take it over instead?)
When I studied Economics in College, we on the left advocated nationalizing basic industries. Robert Samuelson explains the case for nationalizing Wal-Mart today.
It's not surprising that, as The New York Times reports, leading Democratic politicians have latched onto bashing Wal-Mart as a "new rallying cry'' that "could prove powerful in the midterm elections and in 2008.'' America's political culture routinely demands at least one hideous corporate villain. In recent decades that role has fallen to General Motors, IBM, Exxon Mobil and Microsoft; now Wal-Mart has assumed the mantle. But these wishy-washy politicians have missed the obvious solution to the Wal-Mart problem: nationalization.So let the Feds, or Illinois, or Cook County or the City condem Wal-Mart and seize it; and start paying each and every employee including my kids a middle-class salary.
Congress should just buy the company and then legislate good behavior. Wal-Mart executives "talk about paying them (workers) $10 an hour,'' Sen. Joseph Biden told a rally in Iowa, according to the Times. "How can you live a middle-class life on that?''
I used to defend FDR's TVA as a great example of it.
Footnote: you know how politics has changed when you realize no one would defend nationalization (unless I get surprised here with comments).
August 15th was the 35th anniversary of Nixon's Wage-Price controls under his (not Lenin's) New Economic Policy. I remember making the signs to hang in my Dad's Dime Store on South Oak Park Ave explaining to shoppers and employees the number to call if they saw my Dad had violated wage-price controls. Feds required every store in America to display such a sign and they drafted the language for it.
Wish I had saved it.
9 comments:
State ownership of a predatory enterprise whose entire business plan relies on importing cheap goods from China to undermine good-paying manufacturing jobs here, mistreating its workers, and using its monopoly position in the marketplace to unfairly drive competitors out of business doesn't solve the problem.
We need a new way of doing business at WalMart, not a change of ownership.
Dog, that's the point. If we owned it, we could eliminate all those bad behaviors.
The City took over the street cars, buses, and 'L'.
We have the RTA.
So why not municipal ownership of the big boxes if they're such tyrants?
They're certainly precedent for it with the cooperative movement.
Marxism shows more and more in the Democratic Party and the even have someone to lead them.Arod Stalin with all of his socialist programs.
Nationalizing Wal-Mart would mean its extinction. Look for the unions to back that.
YDD,
We've nationalized public education. Look how well that turned out.
I'd rather outsource Public Ed. to Wal-Mart. Prices would drop, quality would increase, and the army of patronage and pension drones (talk about "predatory")would be sent home, just like the inefficient and high-priced "mom and pop" stores.
You dream about nationalizing WalMart (always the low price - always), I'll dream about de-nationalizing "Ed-Mart" (always the high price - always).
Fund Children - not Bureaucracies.
I'm actually somewhat intrigued by the idea of, e.g., the City of Chicago responding to the threat by Target and WalMart to move out of the city by opening up its own big box. I'm intrigued not because it's a good policy idea (to me, it sounds like reductio ad absurdum or setting up a straw man), but because it provides an interesting point of discussion.
However -- and this is meant as a serious question -- would this sort of activity by a city hold up to constitutional scrutiny in a federal judiciary dominated by conservatives?
On a different note, does it really make sense for a government-owned entity to enter into competition with small businesses? Wouldn't the government have an unfair advantage, similar to the unfair advantage that WalMart exercises through its monopsony power?
And doesn't it make sense for nationalized industries to be those that provide essential goods and services -- such as utilities? Are cheaply made-in-China baubles really essential goods and services?
For me, the answer always comes back to the one issue that supposedly pro-free market conservatives refuse to discuss. Our markets in most sectors of the economy do meet the test of an efficient market (in the economic sense of the phrase), mostly because of the behavior or size or business practices of private firms. Why is it that free market advocates never talk about enforcing or creating laws that would create classic free markets, rather than oligopolies or oligopsonies?
I think that it will be better for both customers and companies to have a green number for reporting the violation of wage-prices. This fact will help the economy to develop faster and more legal.
Rich Whitney has a plan to give Illinois workers a first right of refusal, and receive state financing to buy their employers' factory and run it as a cooperative, in the case than an employer becomes a runaway corporation.
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