Rostra commenter “Gwendolyn” and I have exchanged acerbic comments here on the Wal-Mart ban. Naturally, she cited labor union/left wing “studies” intended to show how evil Wal-Mart is. Of course, I could counter with free market-friendly website rebuttals.
But I don’t have to.
Instead, let’s go to an impartial source — a leading economist in the Obama administration who has clear-cut liberal credentials. Economist Jason Furman was an early supporter and adviser of Obama. He’s now Obama’s Deputy Director of the National Economic Council.
Granted, the hard left considers him rather centrist (by their standards) which makes him a pretty good researcher into the effects of Wal-Mart.
In spite of his liberal tendencies, Furman has concluded that Wal-Mart is, as he describes it — “a progressive success story.”
I’ll not belabor the obvious — Wal-Mart has been a great benefit to the poor and working class folks of America. And the negatives of Wal-Mart (as seen by labor unions) have been overblown, to put it mildly.
You can (and should) read his 16 page Wal-Mart study summary here:
www.americanprogress.org/kf/walmart_progressive.pdf
In addition, here’s a blog item U-T opinion editor Chris Reed wrote about the planned Wal-Mart ban this past spring. He references the Furman study (and yes, Chris Reed is pro-free market):
Low prices? Evil. Non-union jobs? Evil. Coherence? Absent.
Written by Chris Reed
3:51 p.m., Apr 15, 2010
Five years ago, the argument that the largest U.S. provider of inexpensive goods and groceries and the largest U.S. employer of those with limited job skills was actually bad for poor people was so thoroughly pulverized by a prominent liberal economist that it began to recede from serious public discourse.
Writing in the American Prospect magazine, Jason Furman – senior economics adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 and now one of the two or three most influential economists working in the Obama White House – described Wal-Mart as a “progressive success story.”
Read the rest of the Reed article here.