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

[Rik van Riel]

On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:

> > 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.

Like the folks at Berkeley, who quantified some of the
disadvantages of Wal-Mart economy:

http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/lowwage/walmart.pdf

> Wal-Mart is nothing but a glorified trucking business,

I'm not arguing with that.

What I object to is that Wal-Mart is introducing socialism
through the back door, by underpaying its workers so badly
that they have to rely on government help to make ends meet.
This is a travesty of capitalism.

To quote some figures from the Berkeley paper:
 - The families of Wal-Mart employees in California utilize
   an estimated 40 percent more in taxpayer-funded health
   care than the average for families of all large retail
   employees.
 - The families of Wal-Mart employees use an estimated
   38 percent more in other (non-health care) public assistance
   programs (such as food stamps, etc) than the average for
   families of all large retail employees.

Now you tell me how increasing the reliance of workers on
government assistance is good capitalism.

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan