VARIATION ON BASTIAT'S "WHAT YOU SEE..."

When the government controls businesses, it also controls, by proxy, all those people who supply goods or services to those businesses, as well as those who patronize that business. When the government tells Walmart they can’t build a store in a town because it would drive the mom and pop stores under, the government is also limiting the freedom – ie, control of private property – of: the truckers who would haul goods to that store, the people who would be employed by that store, the people who would patronize that store, the people who would build that store, and the people who would provide goods and services to the truckers, employees, construction workers associated with that store.

There is another element of this that is UNIVERSALLY ignored by both the Left and the Right: If the premise is that Walmart must be prevented from undercutting their prices of the little stores and thereby breaking them, then IT IS AXIOMATIC that the people of the community will be forced by their government to pay artificially inflated prices for goods and services. The employees who might have left the little stores for the higher wages and better benefits of Walmart will be forced to endure a lower standard of living than they would otherwise have. The money that shoppers might have saved, and the wages the workers might have earned will NOT be available to support new businesses in the community, new technology that might enrich the lives of the human race, or charities that might have sustained and succored the needy.

Thus, the little stores have been saved, but at what cost? The cost is the freedom of everyone associated with that community or that Walmart. How many new businesses will be denied existence? How many young people will be denied the opportunity to start their own businesses? Yes, it is sad to see the little stores with which we grew up go under, but that is life. Yes, life. Everything dies. Even Walmart will die. Under a free, ie, capitalistic market, the people decide what businesses live and die. Under statism, the government decides. Either way, businesses will fail.

But under a statist government, freedom fails, too.