Why Walmart Is Evil

Via Mistermix, do read this post by Kathleen Geier, “No, Walmart doesn’t create jobs.”

Guess what? Contrary to the happy talk, Walmart does not create jobs. Actually, it kills them.

Here’s why: first, at the local level, all Walmart does is put mom-and-pop stores out of business. The overwhelming body of evidence, including the most rigorous peer-reviewed studies, suggests that when Walmart enters a community, the most likely result is a net loss of jobs; at best, it’s a wash. In fact, the biggest, best scholarly study about the impact of Walmart on local employment was done by an economist at University of California at Irvine named David Neumark, who is not exactly a wild-eyed liberal. He’s the kind of economist, actually, who writes anti-minimum wage op-eds for the Wall Street Journal.

The devastating impact Walmart has had on jobs becomes most clear when you go macro, and look at its impact not just locally, but on the national economy. In its relentless quest for low prices, Walmart strong-arms its suppliers to cut labor costs to the bone. What this has meant in practice is that many suppliers have been forced to lay off workers and ship jobs to low-wage countries overseas. Because of Walmart, countless jobs in the U.S. have been lost, mostly in manufacturing.

Anyone of a certain age from just about any southern or midwestern small town can tell the story of how the old Main Street businesses died after the Walmart opened. The Walmart not only represented a net loss of jobs; it also changed the way money circulated in the community. It used to be that all the little stores and businesses were owned by local people who also shopped in the community, so the profits they made in their businesses went back into the local economy. The old home town seems poorer and shabbier now.

And, of course, to add insult to injury, taxpayers subsidize Walmart profits by providing government assistance to its employees, so they don’t starve on what Walmart pays them.

Walmart is to the U.S. economy what cancer is to a body.

Morans at Sea

I’m struggling to not enjoy this too much

A leap of faith that sent an Arizona family bound for the South Pacific in a sailboat has returned them in an airplane after a harrowing ordeal at sea that saw them adrift and nearly out of food in one of the remotest stretches of ocean on the planet.

Hannah Gastonguay, 26, and her husband, Sean, 30, were fed up with abortion, homosexuality, taxes and the “state-controlled church” and so “decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. With them were Sean’s father and the couple’s two daughters, one 3 years old and the other an infant.

A few weeks into their ultimately 91 days at sea, the Gastonguays encountered “squall after squall after squall” that damaged their boat. Originally on a heading for the archipelago nation of Kiribati near the international dateline, they changed course to the Marquesas Islands, but were unable to reach them either.

Along the way, they apparently suffered damage to their mast and, unable to set a foresail, made little westward progress.

They were down to “some juice and some honey” and whatever fish they could catch when a passing Canadian cargo ship tried to help out with supplies. But when it came alongside, it did even more damage to the tiny sailboat.

Eventually they were picked up by a Venezuelan fishing boat, which transferred them to a Japanese cargo ship, which dropped them off in Chile, where they apparently still were when the news story was written. Wait; the State Department of the evil and satanic U.S. government arranged for them to fly home to the states. I assume this was paid for by the oppressive taxes the family didn’t want to pay.

Apparently they had no experience sailing and navigating in open ocean, and they did this damnfool thing with a baby and a toddler on board, and they were heading off to an island chain that is sinking because of global warming and whose government is telling citizens to give it up and move somewhere else. Brilliant.

I loved this part —

Gastonguay told the AP that she never thought the family was going to die: “We believed God would see us through.”

If we’re lucky, maybe they will stay in go back to Chile.