I admit that I once was a strong “Free Trade” advocate, but seeing what the likes of Walmart have done over the past 30 years I now accept the old adage that nothing in life is “Free”.

The Waltons were brilliant - they knew exactly how to ride the global free trade wagon to hire near-slaves in the poorest parts of the world. Yes, Walmart sells “Made in America” products overtly labeled as so, but the ultra-low price leaders in the store are often made overseas.

Walmart has also demonstrated that there is an excess of labor available in the US, and this means they could bid down the price for workers. This is a problem our society was warned about, when it became clear that the industrial revolution first made the old trades obsolete, but then automation (robots) made many of the new jobs obsolete also. It just doesn’t take as many humans to build an object anymore, so we have a surplus of workers.

Our society just has never figured out a way to deal with this problem. I was warned about it in philosophy class (amazingly) over 30 years ago - that we didn’t have a system of dealing with the new “leisure” society where everybody was not needed to labor.