On Walmart.

From urban explorer, cataloger of Baltimore’s recent unrest,i and keen-eyed boxer cum intellectual Mr. James LaFond comes “The Hoodrat Hatchery : A White Wednesday Man Question from Gene : on Wal-Mart and Suburban Blight,” an open response to some dood who honestly thought that letting Walmart into your community wasn’t a recipe for turning it into a welfare-dependent drug den that poisons the earth, humanity, and basically anything worth experiencing with a sober mind (via dat channel) :

decimation: “These employees will bring their families to the area. There will also be an influx of welfare families fleeing the city ahead of the drug gangs and predatory police along the bus lines set up at tax payer expense so that you can save 25 cents on a dozen eggs, which requires some schlep to stock them in that upright cooler on a wage that cannot support an automobile. These families—by law—may not have a father. Therefore, 15 years from that Wal-Mart going up, you will have a full generation of violent, rootless, fatherless youth grown up with no sense of community, responsibility, or decency, who will instead be infused with a sense of entitlement, righteous oppression, and slave class envy for you, the guy buying the house down the street as its value plummets. ” << He’s describing the classic ‘baptists and bootleggers’ economy.ii

mircea_popescu: “As Wal-Mart gets the lion’s share of food stamp transfers [EBT cash and food] than this operation amounts to a 19th century Appalachian coal mine with its own company store, with over half of the employees spending most or even more than their salary at the Wal-Mart register, literally a captive market and labor force in one.” << This is actually an excellent point – Walmart is not a shop, it’s a shit circuit.

decimation: It’s been well covered in the US media that Walmart ‘arbitrages’ USG benefits/slaves into profit. Mr. LaFond makes a novel point (to me) that the rich folk (think jwz) are equally complicit, thinking that saving $0.25 on eggs at Walmart is purely neutral.
mircea_popescu: I dun think this is much of a novel point. Fundamental point. “Be the change you wish to see,” etc.iii

hanbot: People are going to be sucked into convenience > quality (sanity) so long as they can’t appreciate what quality is.iv I had a visitor in Romania who had never seen good egg yolks, thought they were “suspicious.”v
decimation: In the US, to be against ‘Walmart profits’ is to be labeled a socialist. It’s rarely the case that someone points out the degree to which Walmart profits are dependent on socialism themselves.

hanbot: Right, because why proclaim something that might lead to having to do more work.

That pretty much says it all. Walmart is the USSA’s General Store,vi selling you plastic junk subsidised with your own tax dollars so that, just like the poor folks who put their Snickers bars on layaway, you never feel the full brunt of the cost all at once.

If shopping at Walmart feels less expensive initially, it’s only because sweet ol’ Uncle Samvii is protecting your impoverished head from calculating the time-value of money, the cost of environmental degradation, social decay, and a billion other socialised externalities smothered under the smiley yellow button and those rollbacked yellow price tags.

It’s no wonder that the old grade 7 math is the new grade 9 math – it’s not that math is less important in a world where calculators are in everyone’s pockets, just the opposite, it’s that smart shoppers soldiers are shitty soldiers. For the same reason that you never hire the really really smart job applicant, you don’t foster creativity, individuation, and thoughtful questioning of the established doctrine when your entire economy is predicated on a virtueless turdsnake that recursively eats its own corn-speckled tail. It’s just bad business.

LaFond, in closing :

Dude, you are providing—through your thankless toil—a much needed public service. How else is the war on drugs, that is the singular obsession of the Federal Sate and Municipal governments of this nation, going to expand, if the drug economy does not expand, and how is the drug economy going to expand if your neighborhood is not turned into a drug market? And no better method has been found for emptying suburban municipalities of businesses and generating vacancies that might be used for crack houses and heroin dens, then building a Wal-Mart!

Who knew that supporting Walmart was the same as volunteering for the army ? With the tens and even hundreds of millions of domestic Walmart shoppers, I guess Uncle Sam won’t be needing that conscription bill he had lined up after all.

Pity, he could use a good war right about now!viii

___ ___ ___

  1. You will recall an excerpt of LaFond’s sharp observations in Why did blacks stop caring about respectability and acceptability in USistan ? Because there’s none to be had, footnote iii.
  2. Have you ever wondered why it is illegal to purchase alcohol in many U.S. cities, states, and counties on Sunday? It is not illegal to drink alcohol on Sunday. Professor Bruce Yandle explains that such laws benefit two distinct groups: bootleggers and Baptists. The Baptists benefit because they have seen to it that alcohol sales are nonexistent on Sundays. In their view, this means a reduction in the alcohol available. Bootleggers also like these laws. Sunday is the day they can sell alcohol—often purchased from legitimate stores on Saturday—for a handsome profit.

    The bootleggers and Baptist theory of regulation can be extrapolated to other types of regulation, and helps explain characteristics of government regulation. It has to do with coalitions of people who do not necessarily meet and organize but who want the same outcome. In the case of bootleggers and Baptists, both groups like to see liquor stores closed, albeit for completely different reasons.

    via Learn Liberty.

  3. Want to bring about change but feeling lost like Alice in Wonderland ? Follow that brave blonde’s lead and don’t take any more bullshit from that despotic Queen of Hearts.

    Do use language to figure out the difference between what things are and what they appear to be.
    Don’t drown in a pool of your own tears.

    Capiche ?

  4. This isn’t entirely true. Quality is readily apparent when you’re not being mentally taxed at 100% with social media and trivial fucking “popular entertainment” that you’re in control of because no one could be bothered to beat your useless head into a useable shape lest they be kidnapped by the state and sentenced to work on their personal Mein Kampf for “abusing” you.

    Not to mention that optimal stock theorists are current running amok like chickens with their heads cut off, bleeding their dying breaths of stupidity everywhere, poisoning our air and water while idjits fuss about ±0.2C over a generation.

  5. As someone who eats a two- or three-egg omelet every morning for breakfast, I can attest to the fact that the run-of-the-mill eggs in North America, even the “organic grain fed” grocery stores ones costing $6.99 per dozen are, by and large, of atrocious quality. Pretty much regardless of variety or price paid, they’re all as pale as Hamlet’s post-humous pop and as tasteless as the body of Christ (or so I’m told!)

    This is why I buy eggs from the Hutterites at the local farmer’s market every second week, alternating with pick-ups from the University of Alberta’s Poultry Research Centre, which raises “heritage” hen breeds that some old guy at the University of Saskatchewan had maintained as unselected populations since 1965. Both of these types are deliciously yellow and simply scrumptious!

  6. Y’know, like during the Gold Rush, where you pay inflated prices for basic necessities because you’re part of a captive market. Good times if you’re the store owner! Just ask the Walton family.
  7. Yes, by this point Uncle Sam has made the ultimate actor’s mistake : he’s gone full retard.
  8. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784) : when a man knows he is to wage war in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

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