Walmart: Yay or Nay?

[contentless]

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In the long term, you get a very high degree of specialization, but before you get to that point, a lot of people are left behind - people who cannot change.

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We must have a subsidy for Buggy Whip makers. How dare we leave them behind. Stop progress now!!

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I wasn't arguing for that. I'm just pointing out how some of this resistance may occur. I still see the parallels between automation and efficiency (no surprise there).

And although you argue for progress, monopolies and massive corporations aren't the best way to achieve that progress.

[Jakesta]

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Go read Atlas Shrugged right now.

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Rand's philosophy is founded on unremarkable restatements of the obvious, prizing material achievement, self-centered pride, and unfettered commerce as virtues over love, humility, generosity, and faithfulness. Followers of objectivism, called randroids, tend to be a rude, selfish, condescending bunch, intolerant of anything that does not perfectly match their ultra-naturalist, laissez-faire dogmatism.

It's a load of horse crap, but horse crap is tastier.

[shadow29]

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In the long term, you get a very high degree of specialization, but before you get to that point, a lot of people are left behind - people who cannot change.

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They are inefficient, not fit, and have no place in the economy and therefore will be phased out.

This doesn't mean that we can't help them. Education grants that reward workers from trying to become part of the new globalized economy would be a form of this help. Some form of welfare to work in which inefficient workers attempting to gte a new job through education, but in the mean time need some assistance from the state to eat would be fine too. Why? Because in the long run, they'll produce more than they consume on a welfare program. This welfare program would be significantly different from our current system, however. See "Trampolines" in The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman.

[Broken Glass Can]

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walmart is the perfect example of how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. while productivity is maximized, jobs are lost as a result. the solution to this problem should be to filter the money from walmart back into the economy and as a result, create more productive jobs.

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This sounds like the argument for the inevitability of the demise of online poker. Walmart is like the good players who are just killing off online poker. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

[Cornell Fiji]

I found this NYTimes.com interactive slideshow extremely interesting and enlightening. I feel that it might be a bit biased but it presented the information in a way that I had never seen before. In a nutshel, it made the argument that Cambodian workers find sweatshop work to be the top level employment in their country and many yearn for a job that good.

The interactive article is by Nicholas Kristof and is an audio article

The article is in the middle of this page (it is a javascript app so I couldnt post directly to it) and is entitled Realities of Labor from January 14th, 2004 link

[vulturesrow]

I have a lot of problems with Rand's philosophy in general. But the post I was responding to was basically the situation right out of that book. Thanks for the lesson on Objectivism though.

[Jakesta]

I see. Please don't forget that Atlas Shrugged is a novel, and that we are talking about real-life situations here.

[vulturesrow]

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I see. Please don't forget that Atlas Shrugged is a novel, and that we are talking about real-life situations here.

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Oh I get it. There are no valuable lessons or warnings to be gleaned from novels. State ownership of any business rarely turns out well. Ayn Rand illustrates this very nicely in Atlas Shrugged.

[Jakesta]

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I see. Please don't forget that Atlas Shrugged is a novel, and that we are talking about real-life situations here.

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Oh I get it. There are no valuable lessons or warnings to be gleaned from novels. State ownership of any business rarely turns out well. Ayn Rand illustrates this very nicely in Atlas Shrugged.

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Judging by how badly some privately owned businesses have turned out, I don't really see how experimenting with some state owned businesses could be any worse.

[vulturesrow]

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Judging by how badly some privately owned businesses have turned out, I don't really see how experimenting with some state owned businesses could be any worse.

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Bad private businesses cease to exist (sans government bailouts). A government owned business would live forever, despite it's performance. Ask the Soviets how it worked out for them.