Posted on 12/09/2003 1:51:27 PM PST by presidio9
"Is Wal-Mart Good for America?"
That is the headline on a New York Times story about the country's largest retailer. The very idea that third parties should be deciding whether a particular business is good for the whole country shows incredible chutzpa.
The people who shop at Wal-Mart can decide whether that is good for them or not. But the intelligentsia are worried about something called Wal-Mart's "market power."
Apparently this giant chain sells 30 percent of all the disposable diapers in the country and the Times reporter refers to the prospect of "Wal-Mart amassing even more market power."
Just what "power" does a sales percentage represent? Not one of the people who bought their disposable diapers at Wal-Mart was forced to do so. I can't remember ever having bought anything from Wal-Mart and there is not the slightest thing that they can do to make me.
The misleading use of words constitutes a large part of what is called anti-trust law. "Market power" is just one of those misleading terms. In anti-trust lingo, a company that sells 30 percent of the disposable diapers is said to "control" 30 percent of the market for that product. But they control nothing.
Let them jack up their prices and they will find themselves lucky to sell 3 percent of the disposable diapers. They will discover that they are just as disposable as their diapers.
Much is made of the fact that Wal-Mart has 3,000 stores in the United States and is planning to add 1,000 more. At one time, the A & P grocery chain had 15,000 stores but now they have shrunk so drastically that there are probably millions of people -- especially in the younger generation -- who don't even know that they exist.
An anti-trust lawsuit back in the 1940s claimed that A & P "controlled" a large share of the market for groceries. But they controlled nothing. As the society around them changed in the 1950s, A & P began losing millions of dollars a year, being forced to close thousands of stores and become a shadow of its former self.
Let the people who run Wal-Mart start believing the talk about how they "control" the market and, a few years down the road, people will be saying "Wal-Who?"
With Wal-Mart, as with A & P before them, the big bugaboo is that their low prices put competing stores out of business. Could anyone ever have doubted that low-cost stores win customers away from higher-cost stores?
It is one of the painful signs of the immaturity and lack of realism among the intelligentsia that many of them regard this as a "problem" to be "solved." Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.
How could industries have found all the millions of workers required to create the vast increase in output that raised American standards of living over the past hundred years, except by taking them away from the farms?
Historians have lamented the plight of the hand-loom weavers after power looms began replacing them in England. But how could the poor have been able to afford to buy adequate new clothing unless the price was brought down to their income level by mass production machinery?
Judge Robert Bork once said that somebody always gets hurt in a court room. Somebody always gets hurt in an economy that is growing. You can't keep on doing things the old way and still get the benefits of the new way.
This is not rocket science. But apparently some people just refuse to accept its logical implications. Unfortunately, some of those people are in Congress or in courtrooms practicing anti-trust law. And then there are the intelligentsia, perpetuating the mushy mindset that enables this counterproductive farce to go on.
This refusal to accept the fact that benefits have costs is especially prevalent in discussions of international trade. President Bush's ill-advised tariff on foreign steel was a classic example of trying to "save jobs" in one industry by policies which cost far more jobs in other industries making products with artificially expensive steel. Fortunately, he reversed himself.
Is it still news that there is no free lunch?
BTW, I agree with an earlier post that once more and more people know how to do something the price for that service will drop, with or without foreign competition. It just seems to be dropping much faster since many services are portable due to technology. I am not a protectionist.
Radiologist don't, for the most part, see patients, or take x-rays or other images. They read them. The images are digitial and can be shipped anywhere for reading, and their report can then be shipped back. Just as easy to ship it to India as accross town. I'm pretty sure my two MRI's, were read by Indian radiologists, although I don't know where they were physically located, they could have been next door to the radiology clinic for all I know.
Then presumably we are paying our radiologists a lot more than we need to. In a country where medical expenses are a huge concern, this is a problem.
Where was I arguing against adaptation?
Taking the x-ray can be done by a technician on site. It can be emailed anywhere in the world for a professional reading or diagnosis. Not long ago I reviewed a contract a Carolina hospital has with a radiology practice in California for reading its x-rays. If they can read it in California, they can do it in New Delhi.
No, that person is a technition. Takes 1-2 years of post high school training, maybe less. The radiologist is the doctor who looks at the images and tells your doctor what seems to be wrong, if anything. The images can be, and are sent all over the world and the "reading" returned to your doctor.
I just love it when you protectionists reduce economic freedom to a McDonald's in the Forbidden City...
As evidence of prejudice against immigrants, one writer claimed that in "two or three centuries there might be more ‘Chings’ and ‘Changs’ than Smiths or Browns." He also added the fear, unfortunately common, that the time would come when there would be so many Chinese in America they might insist "all white barbarians must ‘get up and git’ out of the country."
Ralph Pumpelly, writing in Galaxy 8 (July 1868) and in the March 1870 issue]
Nowhere. That was just my response to your observation.
How did they do this? Through competitive pricing?
Chinese voices on the labor issue are largely unrecorded, but:
Kim Wing, a San Francisco merchant, visited Texas and encouraged the use of Chinese labor, believing that the labor needs were so great "only the Chinese could help" solve the need.
[Galveston Daily News, July 9, 1869]
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