Wally World

As most of you know, I am a huge Wal-Mart fan. Here is something that I just read from Lew Rockwell. I couldn't agree more.

"The key to the story is antitrust regulations pushed by business
competitors and cheered on by an envious public ignorant
of economics. It’s pretty much the same with Wal-Mart. Companies
with whom Wal-Mart competes are only too happy in the
short term to see the company get hammered for undercutting
them on price. If you have been trying to fob off products for
high prices for years—and these are essential to your profit
margins—it must be torture to see Wal-Mart doing so well selling
at a fraction of the old market price.

Herein lies not only the origin of antitrust but of vast numbers
of business regulations. They are advocated by dominant
firms that seek to impose harmful costs on smaller competitors
(such as when Wal-Mart itself was pushing for a higher minimum
wage) or by smaller firms that hope to impose punishing
costs on more successful firms. The notion that these regulations
are designed to benefit the public is just the ideological
junk food that is fed to Congressional committees and the general
public.

The way to address this problem is for the state to cease to
offer business the chance to unfairly compete in this way. If
there were no regulations and no antitrust laws, businesses
would not face the near-occasion of sin to use government as a
way to clobber its enemies. They would face no choice but to
innovate, cut costs, and serve consumers better than the other
guy.

Much more troubling and mysterious are public attitudes.
Wal-Mart was made successful because people like buying
there. They like the prices and convenience. The public could
bankrupt the company in a matter of weeks simply by failing to
show up to make purchases. People are free to do so. That’s the
way the market works.

Maybe you hate Wal-Mart. Fine. Don’t shop there. What’s so
hard to understand about that?

Why would the same people who enjoy the fruits of Wal-
Mart’s entrepreneurship also celebrate laws that harm the company?
They believe that they can have their cake and eat it too.
There is a lack of economic understanding in operation here.
They have failed to understand that one of the reasons Wal-
Mart can offer such good deals is that they are running an efficient
enterprise.

But does it not come at the expense of the labor force? Of
course all workers want raises in all forms, just as all consumers
want products and services to be available at the lowest price.
These are conflicting demands. At some point in the scale of
wages and prices, the tradeoff between the two demands finds
a clearing point. What that point is cannot be worked out by a
central planner. It has to be discovered by the market.

The moral import of the market is its noncoercive core. The
workers who work at Wal-Mart would rather be doing so than
any other activity that is open to them. So too for the shoppers.
It is the matrix of exchange that has made Wal-Mart a success.
Unlike with government, no one has a gun pointed at his head.
Everyone is making a noncoerced choice in favor of exchanging
as versus not exchanging. Everyone benefits."