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It's a War, Stupid Physics, Religion, and Psychology

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Wal-Mart Wins a Battle; The War Continues

by Christopher Chantrill
July 23, 2006 at 3:53 pm

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ON JULY 19 a federal court judge struck down Maryland’s “Wal-Mart Law.” That’s the law cooked up by the nation’s labor unions to force Wal-Mart to pay 8 percent of payroll into employee health benefits or be taxed for the difference.

In recent years labor unions have been finding that the “first dollar” health plans they bargained for and won years ago are coming under terminal threat from cost-conscious companies like Wal-Mart. They figure that forcing up Wal-Mart’s costs is a pill that will spell relief for its unionized competitors.

Of course the judge did not rule on for or against “first dollar” union health plans. Nor did he say that the Wal-Mart law was a direct attack on Wal-Mart’s eternal quest to deliver Everyday Low Prices to its customers. He merely ruled on the narrow ground that Maryland’s “Fair Share” Law violated the federal Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).

It is a very human impulse to try to force the world to pay your bills, to stake out the land and declare that what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable. It’s the most natural thing in the world for a robber baron to build a castle on a mountain pass and prey on all the travelers passing by. Many people think that the only way they can get what they need is to take it.

But our age has vomited up a paradoxical idea opposed to the age-old ethics of the raider and the robber baron. It proposes that the way to get on in the world is to give to the world. Instead of hoarding your wealth and snatching other people’s wealth, you build and offer to the world cool products at great prices—or even ordinary products at Everyday Low Prices. You don’t go to the government to get special subsidies for your business. You don’t agitate to get exemptions from the laws on combinations in restraint of trade because you are a labor union. Instead you just work away at making your product better and better so that people will still want to buy it.

Many people do not get this. In Mexico City the disappointed supporter of defeated presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador wails that AMLO was “the only one with a heart, who cares for the people.” In the United States Democratic politicians believe that the only way for working families to obtain a decent standard of living is to squeeze it out of the rich and the corporations. These people do not believe that the world returns gifts with increase.

To believe that the world is a bounteous place you need faith, sometimes a lot of faith. That is why religious entrepreneurs have been offering for quite a while the idea of a loving God who cares about you. Secular prophets have advanced a slightly different idea: the Invisible Hand that seems to guide the actions of people to “promote the public interest” by pursuing their own ends in the lawful market.

To keep this faith it helps if you have something to give. Many of us fear that we have nothing to give the world, and so, just to be on the safe side, we attach ourselves to some political robber baron who promises to take from the world what we need by force—or, to use the modern euphemism, by government program and beneficial legislation.

Entry-level Wal-Mart employees are not, you would think, people with very much to give. Logically they ought to combine behind a charismatic union leader and force Wal-Mart to give them more. Yet Barbara Ehrenreich, when she worked for Wal-Mart for a month to research her Nickeled and Dimed, found it hard to persuade her fellow employees to take what they deserved by voting for a labor union.

The fact is that lots people want to work for Wal-Mart. Usually, when Wal-Mart opens a new store it expects to get about 3,000 applications for the three hundred jobs. Sometimes things can get a little out of hand. When Wal-Mart opened a store just outside the city limits of Chicago recently, 25,000 people sent in applications for the 325 jobs that opened up.

The battle over Wal-Mart is a real contest between two world views contesting for ascendency. One view experiences the world as a battle for survival in which you carve out in blood the best deal you can using power and solidarity. The other experiences the world as a cornucopia of plenty. In that world what you get depends on what you give.

If the truth is somewhere in between, where would you draw the line?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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