More Evidence for Wal-Mart's Nobel Prize

Because you can never blog about Wal-Mart enough... 

As you have probably seen on TV and elsewhere, in September 2006, Wal-Mart launched its $4 prescription program.  Now, 18 months later, it reports that it has saved consumers over $1 billion (yes, billion) as a result of that program.  That's $1 billion that poorer consumers have to spend elsewhere on the things they need (or that is reducing insurance costs and premiums), not to mention they can now buy prescriptions they might not have been able to afford before or not have to cut pills in half to save money.  Moreover, that program prompted Wal-Mart's competition to create similar programs, the benefits of which can be placed on top of that $1 billion.  For some strange reason, the major media didn't cover this story when Wal-Mart's press release went out last Friday.

Is Wal-Mart my favorite place to shop?  Nope.  But then for me, price isn't the key variable.  For many Americans it is.  And it continues to astound me how so many on the left, who claim to be so concerned about the plight of lower-income families (the "working poor" included) nonetheless have no hesitation in turning Wal-Mart into the Great Satan of the 21st century economy. (UPDATE:  Oh, say, like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.)  It's all about intentions vs. consequences:  you don't have to "like" Wal-Mart to realize the ways in which it has both dramatically increased the productivity of the US economy (and contributed to higher wages in the process) and reduced the cost of food and other basics for the people who need it most.  Then you can tack on the over 1 million jobs it's created and the legions of folks in the Third World it has enabled to escape poverty. 

If Wal-Mart were a government program that created that many jobs, lifted that many out of poverty through higher wages, and gave poor folks back a billion dollars to spend while providing them needed prescriptions, you better believe the left would call it the greatest anti-poverty and healthcare program ever.   But when the suppliers profit from it, the consequences take a back seat to the intentions. 

And folks on the left have the chutzpah to say conservatives and libertarians are uncaring and blinded by their ideology?

(See my earlier post on Wal-Mart and the Nobel prize here.)

Comments

[Perry Eidelbus]

Gee, Shane, copying and pasting someone else's work isn't even worth a professor's time to flunk it for plagiarism.

You evidently missed the entire point of the blog entry. Name one government program, just ONE, which worked as effectively as Wal-Mart's program. You can't. We're talking about a program that made Wal-Mart a profit, yet saved consumers $1 billion by giving them an alternative to higher prices. On the other hand, by 2006, Medicare Part D had *lost* $32 billion over 158 million prescriptions. That's $202.53 per prescription!

http://www.coxwashington.com/hp/content/reporters/stories/2007/11/01/BC_MEDICARE_DRUGS01_COX.html

Now, what if the feds had merely spent, oh, several million dollars to do no more than *refer* people to Wal-Mart, if their prescriptions could be filled generically?

You proceed from the fallacial belief that "making a profit" equals "not caring about the poor." Both are not only possible simultaneously, but in fact the best way to go. Proponents of a free market care about "the poor" far more than you realize. They care about poor people being lifted out of poverty by lasting economic changes, rather than the poor "assisted" by government programs (funded by coercive taxation) that merely give poor people incentives to remain in poverty.

[Perry Eidelbus]

Ah, Professor Horowitz, I guess you already deleted Shane's pithy comment?

[Daniel Reeves]

It sickens me that people automatically link "profit" with "bad." If Americans-- from the "intellectuals" to the journalists to even the average folks-- don't pass Econ 101 and Common Sense 101, then we're all screwed.

[Ryan]

Do they really give back a $1 billion to poor by achieving economies of scale? Is a dollar spurned a dollar earned?

[Ryan]

Do they really give back a $1 billion to poor by achieving economies of scale? Is a dollar spurned a dollar earned?

[Steven Horwitz]

Note I said "saved" not "gave back." And yes, a dollar you don't spend on X is a dollar you do have to spend on Y. "Falling prices" is essentially the same as "rising income."