On a personal note, with my finances not being anything to crow about, I’ve considered shopping at Wal-mart. However, I can’t bring myself to do it (yet). Hopefully things will improve.

Wal-Mart is especially popular among low-income shoppers who cannot afford the prices of the more upscale stores. It has put other stores out of business, but that is the way capitalism works. The automobile replaced the horse and buggy. Sound motion picture replaced the silents. No one has a “right” to business success or a “right” to be protected from competitors through government intervention. One only has a right to try to compete through voluntary trade. In a free economy, companies that offer the best value for the dollar win and the losers invest their money elsewhere.

It is also true that Wal-Mart pays lower wages than many unionized stores. But it must offer a market wage or risk its employees going elsewhere, and it deals with employees on a voluntary basis. Those who do not like its terms are free to do business elsewhere. This makes the company especially hated by “organized labor,” such as the grocery unions. By coercively restricting the supply of labor, these unions, backed by government laws and regulations, have been able to extort wages and benefits far above those which would exist in a truly free labor market. In a free market, how many people doing relatively unskilled work would get $17-19 per hour plus full medical benefits? Unions, of course, have the right to organize and picket but not to benefit from government regulations which give them special favors. No one has the right to dictate what a company offers to pay others.

There is only one morally proper way to keep Wal-Mart out of any community: don’t patronize its stores. If Wal-Mart cannot make money in a given location, it will either not move there or will close the store. So far, however, it makes money everywhere it opens a store for one simple reason: customers want to shop there. The low prices Wal-Mart offers make people wealthier. They can buy a wide range of quality goods that they could not otherwise afford and they can use the money they save for other purposes (like cheap diabetes supplies).

Local government should not be allowed to abuse their power by keeping out stores that consumers want to shop in. Nor, of course, should Wal-Mart be allowed to use eminent domain laws, as it is trying to do in several states, to force property owners to sell their land. But given that it refrains from using eminent domain, we should welcome every store that Wal-Mart builds. We should thank this great company for being so good at giving customers what they want that they make huge profits, which enables them to build more stores, hire more employees, give more profit opportunities to suppliers and make even more customers happy.

Wal-Mart should not be feared but should be admired as an American ideal–a classic rags to riches story. It is the quintessential example of an innovator left free to function. Only in a country where individual rights–at least what’s left of them–including the right to earn a profit, are recognized, could a company like Wal-Mart arise and prosper. Trying to stop Wal-Mart is not only morally wrong, it is un-American.