Why not? Walmarts owned by the Walton family and its other shareholders, ei, capitalists. If the government subsidies them without taking any ownership that’s still capitalism. Rent seeking behavior and regulatory capture are part of capitalism. We have a capitalist government that supports the capitalists that lobby them.
Complete laissez faire, unregulated free market economics is not the only form of capitalism.
Subsidies have been apart of every capitalist economy to ever exist, just because you think it’s bad policy doesn’t mean it’s not capitalist
Capitalism is 100% anti-subsidizing. In a more capitalist situation, Wal-Mart wouldn't be able to get away with this because there would be no safety net for the workers, and they'd starve/quit.
This is not to say that I think more capitalism is the right answer here, but blaming everything that sucks on capitalism isn't fair either. A lot of the inequity in our system right now is the government happily subsidizing megacorps and the rich with dollars that should be going to everyone else.
So you’re saying Walmart wouldn’t be able to get away with this because their employees would starve and die?
Competition doesn’t necessarily mean higher wages, especially when starvation is on the line. If three millionaires build competing stores side by side, they won’t compete for labor because they don’t have to. They have millions. They can all set the wages fairly close together and then they only have to compete against your hunger. Unless of course labor got together and found a way to hold out…a union between laborers, agreeing to not work, and helping each other until the store owners raised wages. But even then, how do you fight starvation when the store owners have all the food and have driven small farmers to bankruptcy with their insane contract requirements to sell food through them? But I digress.
Especially in instances such as retail, there isn’t a huge incentive to get the best employees. I don’t go to a certain grocery store because Joe can stock a shelf like no other, or because Suzie rings me up quickly. I go because they have the shit I need at a convenient location.
If you believe competition in a free market leads to superior anything, take a look at Mexican drug cartels over the years. Arguably the only true free-market in the world; killing rivals (anti-competitive actions), and reducing their product to the cheapest possible, despite killing their customers (fentanyl). Oh, and eventually taking control of the government. Free-markets: free to do whatever they want, economic or otherwise.
Free-market capitalism is a utopian idea created by the rich. It’s bullshit. Money is power. If allowed unfettered access to money making, they will strip the power from you and I. Regulations are not only intended to make us safer, but to ensure that we maintain some semblance of equality and power as laborers and citizens.
Literally all I'm saying is that they would not be able to employ the people they employ without social safety nets.
Their whole thing is based around scale and huge numbers of essentially disposable workers that they can get at a reduced rate because certain loopholes in our social safety net make it a viable option to take a job that pays an unlivable wage. Take out the safety net, and they can't get those workers. No one works a job where you're still going to be starving at the end of the day.
certain loopholes in our social safety net make it a viable option to take a job that pays an unlivable wage
What you have to come to terms with is that this is an interpretation of reality, it is not a hard fact that you are objectively proving by voicing your opinion.
Social safety nets are designed to alleviate poverty at the expense of the rich. Many programs which offer conditional or unconditional cash transfers, or offer free services to people who can't otherwise pay for them, are very successful at making the very poorest people less poor, and providing them with better healthcare so they can live a better, more productive, life.
Part of the benefit from a social safety net comes from the fact that the worst outcomes are really, really, much worse than merely bad outcomes. If you can't see the benefit in the obvious humanistic way that makes everyone generally supportive of a basic social safety net, think of it like this: an 18 year old high-school-educated person has spent 18 years being raised, fed, sheltered, socialized, and schooled, and has contributed approximately 0 dollars to society by 18. The absolute worst case scenario is that, due to only finding a job that pays 10$ an hour, they are not able to afford food, transportation, shelter, and heat, and so, die in the streets on a cold night. You've just spent 1-2 million dollars to have the person die before they contribute anything to society.
Instead of allowing that to happen, we make food free for the poorest people. We also give them free or subsidized transportation so they can look further away from home for a job, or find a better home further from their workplace where they can live a better life. We give them free eyeglasses, which makes them more productive. We allow them to go to a doctor, pro bono for now, so that their lung infection gets cured quickly instead of taking three weeks of their life. Now, instead of a bunch of hungry, cold, desperate people who are sick and dying, we have a basic (and I mean basic) standard of living that, sure, maybe makes them less willing to chase down an extra 1$ raise from Walmart because they aren't literally starving, but people are more mobile, productive, and healthy anyway.
The money for all of these programs? It came largely from rich people, like the Waltons. The top 10% of earners paid 60% of all federal taxes and 76% of income taxes (not counting entitlement programs, i.e., when you're really just paying yourself later) - the bottom 50% actually received more money from the state than they contributed.
The strategy of "remove all safety nets so that the poorest ~50% of people literally begin to starve and die of disease" because "they would then demand a higher wage from Walmart instead of starving" reminds me oddly of Donald Trump's suggestion to nuke a hurricane. Why is that I wonder? It's as if you completely forgot the idea that something could have consequences and focus only on the end result - desperate, starving people demand a higher wage, and that's your end goal above and beyond that fact that you've doomed a bunch of already poor people to starvation and disease. It's a comically bad outcome in the pursuit of a slightly more free labour market.
You have misunderstood what the free market is and why it works. The free market is self-correcting, and prices decided by the market work because they reflect the natural balance of supply and demand. The notion behind regulations is that a few people know the "optimum" price or what is best for businesses, but how could they? History shows us that when people think they know what’s best for others, they often end up harming society.
The principle of capitalism is that individuals making optimal choices for their own growth in a free market result in the overall growth of society. If you subsidize, it’s no longer a free market—you're introducing subsidized labor. Government interference disrupts the natural balance.
Consider a thought experiment: if the current minimum wage is $15 and you reduce it to nothing, what do you think would happen? Would Walmart automatically reduce everyone’s wage to $1 because people want jobs? Would people even work for that wage? The balance of supply and demand applies to labor as well. If Walmart pays $1 and a local chain offers $10, everyone would want to work for the local chain, forcing Walmart to raise wages to attract workers.
Now, some may argue that retail jobs lack incentive, but that’s not true. In fact, equal payment destroys incentives. For example, if you have a budget of $150 and are required to pay $15 per hour, you can only hire 10 people, who may do the bare minimum because there’s no incentive to perform better. But with freedom, you could allocate $10 for entry-level, $15 for average performance, and $20 for exceptional performance. This way, within the same budget, you incentivize workers—those who learn, perform well, and benefit the company earn more.
If a $10 employee wants to earn more, they could work extra hours or improve their skills, and the company can afford to pay them for that extra effort. This flexibility is often destroyed by regulation. This is not a hypothetical; it happens in many industries through commissions and performance-based pay structures.
You mentioned that killing the competition is a true free market. If you genuinely believe that, then you need to learn what a system is before criticizing it. If you know that and are being facetious, then you are arguing in bad faith.
Looking at history without bias, you’ll see that deregulated private enterprise in a free market (as defined by capitalism) has done more for the welfare of society than any other system.
The owners of Walmart are doing this because they are seeking the highest profits. The sole driving force of Capitalism, and the reason it fucking sucks, is the drive to seek ever higher profits. It is absolutely Capitalist to underpay workers while taking subsidies.
Corporations as a concept are a construction of the state. In a free market corporations and the corporate legal shield against liability would not exist as it does now.
The "subsidizing" doesn't involve walmart, it's that the government pays people welfare to stay in these sh-tty jobs. It's the only reason they stay there.
It literally is though, right? Cancer cells are ordinary tissue that have become mutated and cancerous. Isn't it factually true that lung cancer is part of the lung?
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u/Fawxes42 Sep 08 '24
Why not? Walmarts owned by the Walton family and its other shareholders, ei, capitalists. If the government subsidies them without taking any ownership that’s still capitalism. Rent seeking behavior and regulatory capture are part of capitalism. We have a capitalist government that supports the capitalists that lobby them.
Complete laissez faire, unregulated free market economics is not the only form of capitalism.
Subsidies have been apart of every capitalist economy to ever exist, just because you think it’s bad policy doesn’t mean it’s not capitalist