Wal-Mart not to blame

EDITOR,

The manager of Save Mart is concerned about having to lay off about half his work force if Wal-Mart eventually opens. I wonder if he had the same compassion for all the workers at Liberty Market, for it closed shortly after Save Mart opened.

And Mike McLaughlin (Your Voice, Feb. 7) suggests that Wal-Mart is a significant contributor to the present government-involved real estate fraud. Using that astute logic, we can also blame them for the Iraq War, the Great Depression and the lady that had eight children.

And then he suggests that unionizing employees and ending purchases from China will solve our economic problems. As it turns out, there is a large business in the U.S. that does not buy from China, and is highly unionized with health care and benefits for their retired workers. All this makes their average line worker’s cost run to about $65 per hour.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about General Motors. If it wasn’t for the billions of dollars of tax money recently given to GM and taken from mostly lower-paid, nonunion workers with few of the benefits that the United Auto Workers enjoy, GM would probably be bankrupt at this time and the autoworkers would be out of jobs. Remember, a high rate of pay times zero hours worked still gives zero. Any more good ideas, anyone?

Most don’t realize that high wages do not create prosperity, but prosperity creates high wages.

Earl Hiatt, Patterson