None Dare Call It Fascism

Wal-Mart, the company the left loves to hate, has crawled in bed with Obama

Recent press reports, including a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, have the news that Wal-Mart has signed a letter to President Obama endorsing the idea of an “employer mandate” – a requirement that employers offer health insurance to their employees.

Why would Wal-Mart – the nation’s largest employer – endorse such an idea?

Simple: It would cripple many of their competitors. (Source: Heritage Foundation)

Back in the 80's and early 90's Wal-Mart and Microsoft prided themselves on staying far away from politics: No lobbyists and no political contributions. They dedicated themselves to selling stuff and making software. A mere ten years later, each company had a legion of lobbyists permanently stationed in the nation's capital and they were busily shoveling political contributions into the hog trough trying to stave off deleterious government regulation while encouraging rules that would benefit them.

Business-state entanglements are much more dangerous (and expensive) than any imagined church-state partnership
When the state starts picking winners and losers, all businesses must swing some of their resources away from productive work and dedicate them to paying obeisance (and money) to Washington.

Big Government and Big Business: A Torrid Love Affair
And this is where government gives advantage to the big guys. Jonah Goldberg explains is best in Chapter 8 of his excellent book, Liberal Fascism. It is cheaper for a big corporation to comply with the millions of pages of government regulation than it is for a mom and pop operation. Big corporations love big government: They use it's regulatory schemes to snuff the competition and to erase the scary, unpredictable vagaries of of the "free" market. In return, they do the bidding of DC while keeping the political machine well-oiled.

Destroying Capitalism to Save It
Corporatism didn't start with Obama. It started with Woodrow Wilson, continued through FDR's administration and ebbed during the Reagan years. President George W. Bush taught us how to save capitalism by destroying it, showering Wall Street banksters with trillions from the treasury. Next, in a fit of collective madness, we elected a man who had never run anything larger than a shake-down operation, and who had never thought about anything larger than his own young life.

We've hit the inflection point
Now we have the once proud Wal-Mart urging Uncle Sam to require all businesses to provide employee health care. Why? Because a nanny-state swaddled in government mandates is safer and more predictable than anything-goes free-market. Most importantly, once we hit the inflection point where the critical mass tips towards state-sponsored corporatism, even giants like Wal-Mart must bend to the state's will or risk going out of business.

Heritage-Walmart
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