Posted on 04/12/2005 3:59:22 AM PDT by The Great Yazoo
The irony of that statement is Wal-Mart is a notorious offender of people's private property rights. All over the country, Wal-Mart has been cozying up the local city councils and having the seize private property owners' land by eminent domain. The scam offered by Wal-Mart is one of their "big box" stores on that spot will bring in more tax revenue. So the city councils usurp the private property rights of a private citizen to give them to another private citizen.
The result is the private landowner doesn't get to choose. He or she doesn't get to choose whether he or she keeps the property or gets to sell to someone else. The right to own property is one of our basic rights, and I frankly believe the Founding Fathers would have enthusiastically gone to war against Wal-Mart for this very reason. And yet, everyone seems to thing Wal-Mart is so wonderful because they offer "low prices."
So much for choice and limited government. It reminds me of the famous Hillary Clinton quote, "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
The ONLY way Wal-Mart would ever please the left is to open abortion clinics in their stores...
"It's interesting that certain self-asserted "conservatives," while insisting upon absolute fealty to "limited government," contemporaneously would restrict others' freedom to choose Wal-Mart!"
The biggest issues with walmart are that many of their goods come from a disproportionate trade with the chinese, an entity that crushes individual freedom and religion. And our current administration, as those in the past, does very little to publicly curtail it. Don't believe me? Check the trade stats over the past 15 years.
That's why I'm for full color, 1"x1" country flags on all product labeling and packaging. And I do not mean that subtle, raised or idented 2-Font lettering that currently exists. Let people be more informed about a government that is spending actually increasing the money on military weaponary (to what end?).
One of the reasons given by the Wal-Mart bashers for not shopping at Wal-Mart is that they sell goods made in China. A couple of months ago I started looking around at various stores in the area doing some comparison shopping and looking at point of origins labels and I have some bad news for them - It's everywhere.
My wife and I have been on the Wal-Mart band wagon for 15 plus years buying Wal-Mart stock and my wife is in a management position there. She didn't start out in management but got there rapidly with only a high school education at that time. All of their their hourly workers are eligible for the same opportunities.
So go ahead and bash away but know this, it's not a conservative principle to try to stop free enterprise through legislation.
Will you cite me some examples of that, with references?
You sound like the MSM - give me specific, concrete eamples where this occurred. It hasn't in my area.
The people who are trying to prevent the proletariat from rising up to the level of a comfortable life are suffering from IGM or "I've Got Mine" -- they are all for upward mobility and freedom until they have achieved it, when they want to kick the ladder out from under the next guy and prevent everyone else from getting what they have. The more they can restrict the membership into "Our Class", the better they can feel about themselves.
This is both a sure sign of the old Dorothy Parker opinion that "A goosegirl in ermine is a goosegirl still, and geese will gabble everywhere she goes" (or you can take the girl out of the trailer...) -- and an extension of the same desperate sincerity that goes around slapping hamburgers and cigarettes out of the hands of adults and trying to prevent them from driving the automobile of their choice and build the home of their dreams.
I personally shop at both Wal-Mart and Neiman-Marcus, and frankly I can afford Neiman Marcus for the things I need there, because of the money I can save at Wal-Mart on necessaries. And my mother works at Wal-Mart (she's 77) and they treat her like a queen and give her every possible aid and comfort in her need to take time off to take care of my father, who is 84 and not in the best of health. The town they live in has 1100 people in it, and a lot of them work at Wal-Mart who would otherwise be sucking your tax dollars down at the local bar and grille.
Ditto.
That would seem to be the core of the hardening case against Wal-Mart. Who pleads that case? The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, backed by no-growthers and take-your-progress-and-shove-it types who want the chain's expansion halted.
The sure thing that could be said for this America last crowd is :
They are hateful, vengeful and are literally seething on the inside with a "root of bitterness" that will destroy them and others who agree and practice it!
But only if Wal-Mart employed abortionists from The United Federation of Abortionists and Baby Killers Union(UFABKU)
Where I shop and how I spend my money is nobody's business, except for my wife.
Ah, but big employers, that is another thing. Here, you have many more employees per management team member, and with numbers, there is strength, or so goes the reasoning.
Back in the early part of the 20th Century, when automobile manufacturing was ascendent in this country, the biggest of the manufacturers was Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford organized his company for the purpose of manufacturing automobiles. His goal was to offer a good product, fairly priced, for the common man to own.
The unions, which were little more than organized gangs of thugs, set out to organize the workers at automobile plants. Ford was the major target, even ahead of General Motors at the time. Now old Henry was a sly sort of fellow, well versed in the psychology of overcoming adversaries, and his offer to his workers was, yeah, you can join the union if you want, but your wages will DROP to the level the unions are asking for. Then he always made sure his workers were paid just a little more in terms of hourly wages than the unions had won from Hudson or Dodge or General Motors. Thus it was not economically sensible for the worker to insist on unionization, as Ford was already paying better than anybody else, and overall, the working conditions were still better than those offered by the other manufacturers.
Still the organizers showed up at the gates of the Ford plants, trying to lure away the workers as the left or arrived for their shifts. To keep the plant open, the private guards, augumented by the Dearborn police, rounded up and carted away the union agitators, who had in mind the objective of breaking up the Ford Motor Company. Understandably, Henry was not disposed to view this favorably.
Wherein the FDR Administration and its legion of legal talent became involved, trying to drag Henry into court for years, to force a vote on the union. Henry beat them at every turn, because of the pro-Communist sympathies of FDR and the legal talent, which did not sit well with the courts at the time. Remember this was in the 1930's and the New Deal had not yet had an opportunity to get their own people on the bench. Most of the judiciary then were leftover appointees from the Coolidge and Hoover administrations, and it took years to get the New Deal approved by the courts. When it finally reached the point that a sufficient number of more liberal judges were sitting on the bench, and it looked like Henry could not keep the unions out any longer, Henry called up Walter Reuther of the UAW and invited him in to organize the workers. Even with this virtual blank check, the unions could not organize everywhere in the Ford industrial complex, as Ford would continue to pay the workers who chose not to join the union a higher wage than the union was demanding for their members.
Union thugs finally took Henry's son Edsel out back and beat him up so badly he later died of the injuries, so they did not have such clean hands either. Then they had to deal with Clara, Mrs. Henry Ford. Upon the death of Henry the first, in 1947, Clara engineered the takeover of the company by her grandson, Henry Ford II, and while there was still enmity between UAW and Ford (Walter Reuther thought he was going to get a place on the Ford Motor Company board of directors), at least an uneasy peace was in place in the workplace.
Then in the late 1950's, a flood of imports was unleashed on the US market. This eventually destroyed almost every one of the smaller automobile manufacturers in this country, and rocked the Big Three pretty violently. The flood almost drove the unions, particularly UAW, into a corner, and they finally emerged, much diminished in numbers and influence. So what unions do, apply coercion to the workplace, will eventually backfire, and take down not only the workplace, but the unions who pretend to represent the rights of the employees.
I'd like to hear the answer to that question as well.
I'm not especially sentimental about smaller retailers but they do offer variety at a price premium, and when they are gone so is the variety, at any price.
In Salt Lake County, UT an area known as Fort Union was once small farms and homes. They were near a freeway exit and so they were ripe for picking. A Redevelopment Agency declared the area economically blighted and execised eminint domain to force the private land holder out. It is now the address for Walmart and some other big box stores.
The "war on Walmart" is a war on the free market. It's as simple as that.
How can you make such broad statements without citing even 1 example. You sound like part of the union and no growth groups.
Would you please reference that statement by showing one instance where Walmart instructs city councils to seize PP?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.