God bless Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is pressing onwards!

I love stories like this-- they provide great barbs when people try to argue that Wal-Mart is anything other than one of the world's leaders in making people better off. Their support of the minimum wage is a great example, too-- and un-rebuttable (yes, I just made that word up), as anyone schooled in economics enough to explain why their minimum wage stance is a bad thing (considering the vast majority of wages they pay are above minimum wage) is similarly schooled enough to know that Wal-Mart isn't a bad thing at all.

As I stressed in the previous blog post, however, the debate over Wal-Mart, sadly, doesn't come down to economics. It comes down to:

Person 1: "Wal-Mart is bad! Lou Dobbs told me so!"
You: "But they hired more people when the economy wasn't in great shape."
*Person 1 searches for response, confounded by the apparent contradiction*

or

Person 2: "Wal-Mart is evil! Network news told me so!"
You: "But they support the minimum wage!"
*Person 2 searches for response, confounded by the apparent contradiction*

They're not economic arguments-- not in the least. But policy debate on Wal-Mart doesn't dwell in the land of economics, and if it did, the debate itself would exist for about 5 seconds.