Why Liberals Hate WalMart

George Will looks at why liberals hate WalMart and how it is they don't understand why very few others feel the same way.

While Will uses the recent Chicago anti-WalMart bill as an illustration, he could have also used Maryland's since struck down anti-WalMart legislation. Many of the same type of players were involved, particularly organized labor.

In 2004 [John Kerry] tested what has become one of the Democrats' 2006 themes: Wal-Mart is, he said, ``disgraceful'' and symbolic of ``what's wrong with America.'' By now, Democrats have succeeded, to their embarrassment (if they are susceptible to that), in making the basic numbers familiar:

The median household income of Wal-Mart shoppers is under $40,000. Wal-Mart, the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy, has almost as many employees (1.3 million) as the U.S. military has uniformed personnel. A McKinsey company study concluded that Wal-Mart accounted for 13 percent of the nation's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation. By lowering consumer prices, Wal-Mart costs about 50 retail jobs among competitors for every 100 jobs Wal-Mart creates. Wal-Mart and its effects save shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion).

[...]

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots, and announce -- yes, announce -- that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by ... liberals.

Yeah, like I need people that have problems running their own lives making decisions for me about mine. They don't know me, my needs or my wants. They don't know me from Adam, but they want to run my life. That's the problem with the Anointed. They assume they're smarter than everyone else, can make better decisions than we can. I wonder, are these the same kind of folks that backed Neville Chamberlain in an effort to secure “Peace in our time”? That was a brilliant decision on their part. But I digress.

While there have been a few cases of anti-WalMart sentiment here in New Hampshire, for the most part they've been quite welcome. The doom and gloom predicted by so many of the liberals when WalMart announced they'd be coming to one town or another never materialized. And if people were able to stretch a buck a little farther, so much the better.

Our neighbors to the west, Vermont, have taken a different tack on this, successfully keeping a number of WalMart stores from being built. How this was supposed to help the residents of the Green Mountain State I have no idea. But then, Vermont's traditional Yankee character has been supplanted by those with a much more liberal bent.

Many of the laws that have been passed and taxes levied over the years have the earmarks of liberalism. There has been wholesale redistribution of wealth, usually to the detriment of all. Those few pockets of traditional Yankee conservatism in Vermont have made noises about seceding from Vermont and joining New Hampshire. They are sick and tired of being treated as low level morons with big pocketbooks to be rifled “for the good of all.”

But that's the liberal mantra, isn't it? They know better how to spend your hard earned money than you do. And heaven forbid if you should complain about your betters. After all. don't you understand the evil inherent in being able to save a few bucks by shopping at WalMart? They're trying to save you from yourself.

Yeah, and pigs can fly.....