Hurting The Poor

Here's something I really hadn't thought likely. Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post is slamming the Democrats - hard - for their antics about Wal-Mart. He makes some points in this piece that should be evident to even people who have no clue about economics. Which appears to describe the majority of the people jumping on the anti Wal-Mart bandwagon.

Other Democrats reaffirm their centrist credentials while calling upon Wal-Mart to pay workers more. "We are not here today because we are anti-business," Bayh asserted in Iowa recently as he demonstrated against Wal-Mart — a contention that the retailer's shareholders, who have spent millions defending their brand against Wake-Up Wal-Mart, may have a hard time swallowing. But the idea that Wal-Mart pays below-market wages is false. Otherwise nobody would work there.

Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Kerry have attacked Wal-Mart for offering health coverage to too few workers. But Kerry's former economic adviser, Jason Furman of New York University, concluded in a paper last year that Wal-Mart's health benefits are about as generous as those of comparable employers. Moreover, Clinton and Kerry know perfectly well that market pressures limit the health coverage that companies can provide. After all, both senators have proposed expansions in government health provision precisely on the premise that the private sector can't pay for all of it.

The truth is that none of these Democrats can resist dumb economic populism. Even though we are not in a recession, and even though the presidential primaries are more than a year away, the DLC crowd is pandering shamelessly to the left of the party — perhaps in the knowledge that the grocery workers union, which launched the anti-Wal-Mart campaign, is strong in the key state of Iowa.

The call of this circus train that the Wake Up Wal-Mart unions backers are running appears to be too hard for Democrats to resist. But it is precisely this kind of foolishness that keeps making the Democrats less and less electable. My posts on this here and here. That last one contains internal links to other posts I've done on this subject as well.