Wal-Mart Crime of the Day: Cutting the Price of Fabulous Big Televisions

This BusinessWeek story examines an action by Wal-Mart that is pro-consumer, pro-efficiency, pro-productivity, and pro-progress and somehow manages to present it as rapacious and damaging to everyone. How so? Well, you see, Wal-Mart cut the price of its 42 inch, flat panel television to less than $1,000. This might sound great. But, the story points out, it hurt the competition, hurt the bottom line of marginal stores, and infuriated the producers of the television.

It’s About Energy, Not Climate

The environmental movement has been doing its utmost to sabotage energy production since the 1960s, long before it was able to latch onto the prospect of global warming. Its opposition to atomic power has nothing to do with global warming, nor does its opposition to the construction of dams to provide hydro-electric power. Indeed, if global warming and the consumption of fossil fuels, which it alleges is the cause of global warming, were really its concern, it would be a leading advocate of atomic power and of the construction of new and additional dams to provide hydro-electric power.

Our Kind of Central Planning

What was wrong with the leftists’ worldview in the 1990s and today? Essentially it is this: they see society as unworkable by itself. They believe it has fundamental flaws and deep-rooted conflicts that keep it in some sort of structural imbalance. All these conflicts and disequilibria cry out for government fixes, for leftists are certain that there is no social problem that a good dose of power can’t solve. The problem is that the right shares that view, only with different applications.

Shostak on the Current Climate

MAN Financial chief economist Dr Frank Shostak has a warning for investors. The Reserve Bank’s monetary policy is “out of control” and that means inflation is heading up, interest rates are set to rise and the share market is only being supported by excessive money supply.

He believes the Reserve Bank uses incorrect definitions of inflation and even money itself. As a result, he says, the bank is actually causing inflation, rather than combating it. “

Bush has NOT cut taxes

There is general agreement that Bush, and the Republican Party in general, is in favor of tax cuts. Let’s consider the validity of this assumption. Do Bush’s policies demonstrate that he’s in favor of reducing taxes? He has engaged in tax shifting and in hiding the burdens of his expansions of the welfare and warfare state, and he has demonstrated that he’s opposed to lowering our tax burdens. Deep into his second term, we have plenty of evidence to show that Bush should be blamed for increasing our tax burdens at a phenomenal pace. Mark Brandly looks at the numbers.
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