This is an opinion piece from the Washington Post, discussing the subject of class in politics that the Wal-Mart debate raises.
The concerns over minimum wages have always brought along discussions of poverty and the increasing social gap between rich and poor.
An interesting fact: A McKinsey company study concluded that Wal-Mart accounted for 13 percent of the nation's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation.
Another: Wal-Mart saves shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion).
Apparently, the Democratic struggle to increase the wages at stores like Wal-Mart stem from these private sector retailers' lack of unions. Workers have no means within the company of expressing concerns over hours or wages, so many think the government needs to step in and protect them.
It seems silly that people expect Wal-Mart to be more open to high wages than they are to unions. The writer of this article doesn't see what's so bad about Wal-Mart, and even likens it to other American images like baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. I think he is taking the anti-liberal argument a little too far here, but I do understand the comparison to Chevy and I agree that this is an example of liberalism as condescension. The spin of the minimum wage into a moral issue does show a philosophic and almost intellectual distaste for the upper-class. There is no hiding that this a crusade against the privileged, and we might have a class battle on our hands.
