re: #228 freetoken

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.

I’ve been thinking about this lately too. Like so many other issues, I think most of us are missing the point. I don’t like Walmart either and I don’t shop there. The problem isn’t really Walmart itself, but the culture that keeps it in business. As long as poor people are eager to waste their money on cheap crap they don’t need then Walmart is going to make lots of money, there’s nothing you can do about it. Same with the economic crisis. Bankers are easy villains but the core problem is people willing to use their homes as bottomless ATM machines but buy stuff they don’t need. Here we are bitching about globalization on computers made under horrific conditions in Asia. At this moment we’re all probably using twice as much electricity as needed. We are the problem, populist solutions are just excuses to continue the behavior while blaming others.