By CHRIS POWELL
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Money manager, cable television commentator and former Connecticut U.S. Senate
candidate Peter Schiff undertook a cute stunt the other day to counter the
clamor for a higher minimum wage and the clamor against big, bad Walmart.
With a video camera recording him, Schiff walked around the parking lot of a
Walmart store purporting to represent a group he called “15 for 15” that seeks
to persuade Walmart to put a 15 percent surcharge on its prices to pay for
raising the minimum wage of its employees to $15 per hour. Instead of "Low
Prices Every Day," Schiff said, Walmart could change its motto to "High Wages
Every Day."
But as he surely anticipated, Schiff found no shoppers interested in paying
higher prices to underwrite higher wages for Walmart employees. The shoppers who
talked with Schiff said they felt pressed financially themselves.
That is, Walmart isn't Neiman Marcus or even Sears. Rather, Walmart is where
people shop to save money, and Walmart stores are busiest in the hours after
welfare and Food Stamp debit cards get recharged by government agencies.
If many Walmart employees aren't earning much, many Walmart shoppers aren't
earning much more, and many aren't making anything at all beyond what they get
in government stipends.
If Walmart is too profitable for some tastes, it's still subject to the same
labor and tax rules covering all other companies, and of course nobody has to
shop there. Indeed, complaints about the supposed greed of corporations, their
cutting labor costs and moving from high- to low-tax jurisdictions, are only
reflections of human nature and individual interest.
Shoppers want low prices just as stock investors want high prices, and while
most people are ready to tell others what to do with their money, they are not
so ready to be told themselves.
* * *
Now the thought police are prosecuting thought crime in America. Because he
remarked in a magazine interview that he considers homosexuality sinful and "not
logical," the A&E television network has suspended an actor in the program "Duck
Dynasty."
So are people really once again to be disqualified from employment on account of
their mere opinions and politics, as they were during the Red Scares of the
1920s and 1950s?
Homosexuals long were a persecuted minority, but now that society is becoming
more libertarian, what entitles those who are gaining dominance in opinion to
persecute those who disagree?
Must the price of political incorrectness include even denial of a chance to
work and make a living? Do the opinions of actors really matter that much?
It's not as if this particular actor is oppressing anyone or advocating
oppression. All he did was express his opinion -- an opinion shared more or less
by the recent bishops of Rome, whom no one proposed to fire or suspend though
many disagreed with them.
Power corrupts and the political left has become just as totalitarian as the
political right used to be.
* * *
But big media always get a pass from the political left. The other day
Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, was trivializing his
office again for a little publicity, stuck in his habit from 20 years as state
attorney general, urging the manufacturers of the Red Bull and Rockstar
caffeine-loaded beverages to remove their product emblems from children's toys.
Meanwhile mass shootings by the deranged, like the one a year ago in Newtown,
are proliferating, likely inspired in part by the prurient gunplay pervading
television, movies, and video games. But political criticism of that stuff has
faded to almost nothing.
Instead, Republicans are defending the constitutional right of any psychopath to
own military weapons, and Democrats are getting too much campaign money from
Hollywood to notice its poisoning of the culture. No, what worries Blumenthal is
the caffeine industry.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
