Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Thomas DiLorenzo rips Barry C. Lynn

Should Wal-Mart Be Broken Up?
It is Lynn who advocates heavy-handed, fascist-style regulation and regimentation of industry by the state, including the "break up" of Wal-Mart and other successful corporations, yet in fine Orwellian fashion he refers to these free-market success stories as resembling "the Soviet Union in 1950" with "a certain Stalinist flair." He makes such stupid remarks because of his fundamental misunderstanding that Wal-Mart — or any other private business — has no "power" at all to coerce anyone to do anything. They can only hope to succeed by persuasion; it is the state that has a legal monopoly of coercion that it every so often uses in Stalinesque ways, including many of the ways that are recommended by Lynn.

Read the whole thing.

Lynn works for these guys and wrote "Breaking the Chain: The Antitrust Case Against Wal-Mart" for Harper's Magazine as well as the book End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation.

He's incited lots o' commentary.

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