Anti-WalMart Campaign?

[Propertarian]

[ QUOTE ]
I think we should write some anti-Wal-Mart legislation. We need to protect these people from making bad choices. Down with Wal-Mart!


WTF, seriously, these people must be retarded if they work at Wal-Mart since there are so many better options out there.

[/ QUOTE ] Do you honestly think that people like working unpaid overtime, or not getting anymore raises, or being passed over for promotions because of their sex?

People work there mostly because they have no better options in the area, or don't find out about these problems until it is too late.

What "we need" to do is to provide all people with decent options.

[Propertarian]

[ QUOTE ]
The people working at WalMart must still like their job else they wouldn't be doing it.

[/ QUOTE ] OH really? Have you ever heard of food and shelter before?

[hmkpoker]

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What "we need" to do is to provide all people with decent options.

[/ QUOTE ]

Can you do that without taking away my options?

[Propertarian]

Possibly.

And some options people just shouldn't have: killing others, busting unions, discriminating on the basis of sex, requiring unpaid, forced labor, etc.

[BCPVP]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The people working at WalMart must still like their job else they wouldn't be doing it.

[/ QUOTE ] OH really? Have you ever heard of food and shelter before?

[/ QUOTE ]
Agh, last one, I promise!!!

So the worker does benefit from their dealings with WalMart. They are paid. Voluntary trade partners each believe they benefit from the trade or they wouldn't trade. If the employees at WalMart really hated it, they would do something else. The employee makes a greater than minimum wage salary and gains work experience and Walmart gets a productive employee. Both believe they're benefiting or they'd refuse to trade. Agree or disagree?

[hmkpoker]

Funny, considering that your plans are always funded by taking my money.

[Propertarian]

Well, obviously they both benefit under some definitions of the term. But it does not follow that if they "really hated it, they would do something else". Because they might really hate all options.

let us say slavery is legal. And, a situation occurs were a person can either become a slave, or die (actually, the choice will usually be between slavery and a life of crime for the unfortunate, but anyway). A man decides becoming a slave is better than dying. We could say the same thing here as in the wal-mart situation: both partners believe that they benefit from the trade, so they trade (One gets a slave, the other survives).

Slavery is, of course, still unacceptable. It is deeply implausible to care only about the choices people make; the conditions under which people choose (example: they may be uneducated or brainwashed or threatened or insane, and hence would not be likely to make decisions that benefited them), and what options they have to choose from are also of extreme importance. (In fact, choices may not even be worth looking at without looking at the other two: to hold somebody who was kept in the basement his whole life and never given an education or exposure to social life responsible for his own decisions would be massively tragic, for example, as would expecting his decisions to "benefit" him.)

The point is: Because a transaction is voluntary under CERTAIN conditions and situations only does not make it acceptable and certainly does not do anything to validate or justify the conditions and situations that exist.

Here is an example for you: taxes. Just because you pay taxes does not mean you like paying taxes, or that taxes are justified because you "choose" to pay them. Unskilled workers are in a similar, but much larger, predicament. Because they will end up working a job they do not like, and get very low pay, while the more fortunate will often still have high relative and absolute pay and/or a job they like even with taxes. That is the fortune they have run into.

[New001]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I think we should write some anti-Wal-Mart legislation. We need to protect these people from making bad choices. Down with Wal-Mart!


WTF, seriously, these people must be retarded if they work at Wal-Mart since there are so many better options out there.

[/ QUOTE ] Do you honestly think that people like working unpaid overtime, or not getting anymore raises, or being passed over for promotions because of their sex?

People work there mostly because they have no better options in the area, or don't find out about these problems until it is too late.

What "we need" to do is to provide all people with decent options.

[/ QUOTE ]
I'm just curious to see if you agree with the following statement. Americans who work at Wal-Mart are more well off than they would be if Wal-Mart did not exist.

[WordWhiz]

[ QUOTE ]

let us say slavery is legal. And, a situation occurs were a person can either become a slave, or die (actually, the choice will usually be between slavery and a life of crime for the unfortunate, but anyway). A man decides becoming a slave is better than dying. We could say the same thing here as in the wal-mart situation: both partners believe that they benefit from the trade, so they trade (One gets a slave, the other survives).

[/ QUOTE ]

How did this man get into this jam? Did he, for example, kill someone, and the legal system he's in says that the victim's family can demand his death as retribution, but he offers them the choice of being their slave instead to help make up for the lost income of the slain family member, and they accept? If so, then I'd say it is quite the mutually beneficial transaction and the parties should be allowed to proceed. If the choice arises because he is "born a slave," or someone puts a gun to his head, then we go back to libertarian ethics of non-coercion.

[ QUOTE ]

The point is: Because a transaction is voluntary under CERTAIN conditions and situations only does not make it acceptable and certainly does not do anything to validate or justify the conditions and situations that exist.

[/ QUOTE ]

Newsflash: all transactions occur under "certain conditions." We all have to work to eat. There are millions of people in the third world who would give their right arm to have a cushy job at Walmart, putting in 8 hour days in an air conditioned store, making a hundred times what they currently earn.

The fact is, if you're an unskilled laborer, or just plain stupid, you'll probably have to work a pretty crappy job most of your life. In a free market, various employers will compete for your labor, but the less it's worth, the less you should expect for it.

[ QUOTE ]

Here is an example for you: taxes. Just because you pay taxes does not mean you like paying taxes, or that taxes are justified because you "choose" to pay them. Unskilled workers are in a similar, but much larger, predicament.

[/ QUOTE ]

Men with guns will put me in jail if I don't pay my taxes. Does Walmart do the same to people who don't work for them?

[Propertarian]

[ QUOTE ]
Men with guns will put me in jail if I don't pay my taxes. Does Walmart do the same to people who don't work for them?

[/ QUOTE ] IF walmart is there best option or only option they end up with a worse fate if they don't work for them...and I don't see what your point is.


[ QUOTE ]
Newsflash: all transactions occur under "certain conditions."

[/ QUOTE ] Completely irrelevant. All transactions also contain two or more parties. Who cares? My post illustrates the importance of looking at what the conditions under which transactions made are, as does yours.

[ QUOTE ]
then we go back to libertarian ethics of non-coercion.


[/ QUOTE ] The libertarian ethic is opposed to state coercion...it allows for economic coercion caused by say, for example...a regime of inequality in resources, property and wealth that is held together via the protection of that distribution by the "men with guns who will throw me in jail (or worse)" who you complain about.

[ QUOTE ]
How did this man get into this jam?

[/ QUOTE ] A couple of ways are possible: bad luck in terms of inborn of nurtured ability, relative or absolute poor education, lack of enough living wage non-slave jobs, poor parenting, discrimination, lack of inheritance etc. That is how people working mind-numbing, hierarchial jobs like Wal-Mart got into their situation.

Here is John Stuart Mill on this topic, from his Chapters on Socialism

"No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing. Is it a necessary evil? They are told so by, those who do not feel it---by those who have gained the prizes in the lottery of life. But it was also said that slavery, that despotism, that all the privileges of oligarchy, were necessary."