The American Enterprise Institute has published yet another predictable piece of schlock entitled, The Wal-Mart Revolution: How Big Box Stores Benefit Consumers, Workers, and the Economy. It demonstrates that the only use these so-called conservative “think” tanks have for intellectual inquiry is the use of a couple ethically-challenged PhDs to lend credence to whatever strenuous distortions and selective interpretations of reality best serve their pathologically selfish, ultra-wealthy, anti-government donors. National Review Online interviewed one of the authors, Richard Vedder (who has contributed to such illustrious projects as tobacco industry junk-science, similar to his also ethically-compromised co-author Wendell Cox).

Vedder goes beyond defending the corporation – with his effusive, gushing praise, he clearly likens the advent of Wal-Mart to something on par with the second coming. Though Wal-Mart has joined the Center for American Progress in a coalition advocating universal healthcare, this coincidence of interests in no way absolves the corporation of its other questionable practices, and certainly doesn’t prevent us from being critical of it.

Vedder begins by claiming that by lowering the cost of goods “Wal-Mart has done more to help poor people than probably any bloated government bureaucracy or any other private institution.” Of course, enabling people to consume more goods for cheaper improves their welfare in only the most narrowly economistic sense. It says nothing of the (nonexistent) prospects for upward mobility in a high-turnover, sub-living wage occupation.

Asked how the corporation is received overseas, Vedder actually uses the corporate slogan in defending its appeal! (“But I can’t see how ‘every day low prices’ and greater consumer choice will resonate badly with European consumers…”). He says that the company pays generous salaries with ample benefits, by citing an average wage of over $10 that must include managers and/or executives, since the average store worker takes less than $250 home each week and makes a below-industry-average $7.50 an hour. He claims the workplace being union-free is because, like most of the labor market, its happy workers have resisted unionization, when the company’s anti-union stance has caused complaints of worker intimidation, misinformation, and led to complaints being filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

Vedder believes that Wal-Mart, like ExxonMobil, is viewed as evil just because it is large. To some extent, this is true, but only because large corporations are often more capable of committing flagrant violations of various regulations without any serious, deterrent consequences. He evades the question of Wal-Mart’s discrimination of women (currently a pending class-action lawsuit) and then claims they promote by merit, and only that can explain a gender disparity.

Finally, he opines that Wal-Mart joining CAP and the SEIU in a coalition is a dangerous mistake that will hurt the national economy and, in turn, the corporation. In fact, Wal-Mart joined because universal health-care is cheaper than the alternative of inevitably being forced by state-level legislation to buy more employees more expensive private health packages.

The book, like the think tank that spawned it, seems to be a veritable piece of shit. Wal-Mart isn’t just evil, it is a mixed bag. It has displaced local businesses and committed questionable labor practices, but is also a very large employer, an efficient and massive component of the national economy, and regardless of motivation, is finally responding to pressure from progressives and activists to clean up its act. Vedder and Cox aren’t going to successfully whitewash the corporation’s history with their painfully un-subtle PR attempt, and they aren’t going to change the mind of Wal-Mart execs on pursuing universal health care. If anything, by embracing what the company does well, and continuing to criticize what it does poorly or unethically, as progressives usher Wal-Mart in a better direction, other corporations will follow suit.