The Big Box

I read this article a couple months ago, but I see that Cafe Hayek has linked to it which gives me an excuse to highlight it.

Charles Platt is a journalist who decided to pull a Barbara Ehrenbacher and get a job at Wal-Mart to see what life is like on the inside of the "notorious" discount retailer. What he found might surprise those of you who thought that Wal-Mart is a modern day Simon Legree. Platt found working at Wal-Mart was hardly oppressive and that, more surprisingly, Wal-Mart's employees had a lot of autonomy, including the ability to place large merchandising orders. Platt does allow that working at Wal-Mart is not a high-wage job, but that leads him to some conclusions that would appall the Progressive Set:

I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.

In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.

The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don't create an equal amount of additional value, there's no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.

This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.

When he says "no one," he means liberals and progressives in the intellectual, media, and political elite. Some of figured this out during our first after-school job.

Having dissed the unions, Platt then goes off on public schools and (by extension) our useless teachers:

To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn't pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

Damn right. Think of all the time wasted in high school (and earlier) on learning about stuff like Earth Day, "A Color Purple," Kwanza, sex ed., etc. Think of the millions of average kids forced to spend hours yawning through the schoolday, learning nothing (or close to it), until they graduate and SURPRISE! they struggle to find post-high school work.