[extropy-chat] Seven cents an hour? (was: Riots in France)

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

It looks like whenever the name Wal-Mart is uttered, it occasions an
outpouring of statements so silly as to be childish.

Like "money is bad" (was it Stuart who wrote it?). It is purely
puerile, and so surprising coming from Stuart who is otherwise quite
smart.

Or consider this gem:

> So do you consider Walmart's increasing of the number of
> people living below the poverty line to be a win or a loss ?
>

Dumb, whoever wrote it. Walmart obviously is not increasing the number
of poor people, it is paying them money, not taking it away from them.
Anybody with even a modicum of economic sense will see it.

I bet the stupid losers who were running around the English
countryside three hundred years ago, breaking steam machines, were
screaming the same inanities: " 'Tis an Outrage, for the pestilential
Engines to rob the honest Countryfolk of their Income, and consign
them to the wretched Lives of Vagabonds!"

Luckily, the Constables made short work of Nedd and his ilk, so we can
now enjoy the fruits of Mechanical Progress.

It might be helpful for the Walmart-bashers to try to think about the
object of their hate as nothing but a machine for conveying goods from
point A to B, like a truck. Obviously, a single truck makes a dozen
burro-teams obsolete - but I do sincerely hope that nobody on this
list will argue in favor of banning semis and opening the highways to
mules and oxcarts. And equally obviously, a faster, cheaper, safer,
more reliable truck is always better (and I mean better for everybody,
for the whole society, not just its owner) than the older one based on
the T-model - and Wal-Mart is better, too, in the economic and moral
sense of improving the fulfullment of human aspirations.

Wal-Mart is nothing but a glorified trucking business, not a coven of
Satanists, nothing worth writing 70+ posts about. Why don't the
extropians argue about the Singularity, or methods for interstellar
propulsion, or something else that's not wta-talk stuff (i.e. leftist
claptrap)?

Rafal

PS. Here is another piece of nonsense:

> Employing people who previously used to work for slightly more
> money, in sweatshops for Walmart's previous competitors, which
> went out of business due to price pressure...
>

Tell this to the Chinese peasants who buy their first cars thanks to
the massive growth in industrial productivity in part spurred by
increased export opportunities to the US.