Excerpt of the Day: The Real “Redliners,” and Their Motivations
In a subscription-only editorial from Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal throws the decades-old “redlining” charge back in the anti-capitalists’ faces, and shows how it’s hurting residents of Chicago:
Last week the City Council voted 35-14 to impose a hyper-minimum wage on “big-box” retail stores with more than $1 billion of sales. The new law will require the likes of Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, and Home Depot to pay every worker — regardless of experience, education or skill — a minimum wage of $13 an hour by 2010 ($10 in salary and $3 in health benefits). At least another dozen cities, including Washington, D.C., are considering copy-cat laws.
This means major U.S. cities are preparing to require minimum wages more than double the national minimum of $5.15 an hour. Incredible.
….. MIT professor Jerry Hausman has found that, although Wal-Mart does slightly reduce wage rates in nearby areas, its lower prices swamp that effect. The biggest beneficiaries are families with incomes of less than $10,000 for whom “a super center makes a 30 percent difference in what they can buy.”What we have here is what liberals used to call the “red-lining” of poor neighborhoods, though this time by the left itself. Liberal advocates have long complained that banks, grocery stores and retailers charge higher prices or refuse to do business in inner cities. But now the very superstores that offer lower prices are being treated as unwelcome.
These policies come at a very heavy price to the city. When activists kept Wal-Mart out of Chicago’s South side last year, the company opened the store in nearby Evergreen Park instead. Now that store collects an estimated $530 million a year in sales from Chicago residents without a penny of sales tax going to Chicago. The location where Wal-Mart was going to build remains an empty lot. Partly as a result of such anti-business policies, Chicagoans spend $5 billion a year shopping in the suburbs.
Liberals who dominate big-city politics talk endlessly about economic justice and fairness, but what is just or fair about a law that punishes the least affluent? Some lucky few workers earn more from super-minimum wage laws, but the price is paid by those with low incomes and skills who are the first to be priced out of the job market. Mayor Richard Daley fumed this week that aldermen voted for the law because political activists threatened to campaign against them. So we guess Chicago’s politicians really were voting to protect high-paying jobs in the city: their own.
And isn’t this special: Unionized retailers, some of whom pay less in wages and benefits than Wal-Mart and other non-union stores will be required to pay, are exempt.
