JayB

Echoes of Luke and Darth Vader...

You know better than to foist this troll bullshit. The Dems are not pushing universal health care; the country is. The idea is now supported by a majority of Americans regardless of political affiliation. "LIFE, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." Pretty clear to me. At the center of this troll is the idea that only lazy shitbags get sick, and they do so because of poor life habits. In fact, they deserve it, right? It's simply a story people tell themselves so that they feel better about abandoning so many of their countrymen in need. I'd have more respect for the opponents of universal health care if they just came right out and said they really didn't give a shit about anyone else. Oh wait, KKK just said that, and I still don't respect him. The simple story being told to oneself here seems to be that anyone that opposing the nationalization of healthcare is doing so out of callous disregard for the less fortunate.

Seems like it's just effective diplomacy to me. I'm sure that they're aware of the fact that their volte-face on this one will get Tehran's attention, and will be more effective at getting them to the table averting a real war than an infinite succession of firm-yet-ambiguous diplomopablum would be....if they don't sack Kouchner and immediately offer an extravagant litany of apologies and prostrations before the mullahs for his rash statements. We'll see.

"World should brace for possible war over Iran: France PARIS (AFP) — The world should brace for a possible war over the Iranian nuclear crisis but seeking a solution through talks should take priority, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday. "We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," he said in an interview broadcast on French television and radio. "We must negotiate right to the end," with Iran, he said, but underlined that if Tehran possessed an atomic weapon, it would represent "a real danger for the whole world." Calling the nuclear standoff "the greatest crisis" of present times, the minister said: "We will not accept that the bomb is manufactured," and hinted that military plans were on the way. "We are trying to put in place plans which are the privilege of chiefs of staff and that is not for tomorrow," he said but stressed that although any attack on Iran was far from taking place, "It is normal for us to plan" for any eventuality. In Washington, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates took a more muted approach on Sunday. "I will tell you that I think the administration believes at this point that continuing to try and deal with the Iranian threat ... through diplomatic and economic means is by far the preferable approach," he said. Kouchner meanwhile said France wanted the European Union to prepare sanctions against Iran, outside the ambit of the UN Security Council, to force Tehran to forsake its nuclear ambitions. "We have decided that while negotiations are continuing ... to prepare eventual sanctions outside the ambit of UN sanctions. Our good friends, the Germans, suggested that," he said. The foreign minister also said leading French companies such as Total and Gaz de France had been urged not to undertake new work or contracts in Iran..." http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iN4GM3DfrF7M_a2ASOwVHkePq58g

sounds like she is making that choice - not to get the money for this surgery. Yeah, she is "choosing" to suffer a life of disability rather than trot on down to the magic money tree and pick a few $10k bills off the low-hanging branches. Tell me more about the fairytale land you live in! During my last stint in Washington I got catastrophic coverage with a $2500 deductible for ~40 a month when I wasn't covered by an employer sponsored plan. Worth looking into if you don't want to roll the dice.

Anyone got a breakdown of how much the uninsured make, how long they stay uninsured on average, etc? I've seen this data before, somewhere.

Silly response - yes. Silly question - no. Why not eliminate the private market for food and place it in the hands of the government? The arguments used to justify nationalizing healthcare apply equally well to food. If you want the government to be responsible for paying for, administering, and distributing all goods and services in the healthcare market on the grounds that the private sector is incapable of doing so efficiently, how is it that the same government could not execute the same tasks just as well when it comes to producing and distributing food? Seriously.

Well, I recently read health care costs will go up 78% in 6 years, if that actually happens, it may very well precipitate a quick change. Back to my point above, imagine that this limited "pilot" program exists, and it is an option on the benefits package for those of us insured through our employers. Right now I have two choices: a PPO plan with "more choice" and a POS plan with a restricted set of doctors/clinics I can use. Imagine the third (gov't) program is an option as well, and I can change coverage say once a year. Right now, I don't think the PPO is worth the extra cost and am fine with it. I might give a government program a shot under this type of scheme. I could actually SEE the cost, and make a personal decision on my coverage, which I could change, say, each year, if I am not happy about it through experience in that system. This is far superior than having all these things decided FOR ME by government as the result of a specific candidate's platform and (tyranny of the) majority rule. Excellent points/ideas.

Related question: can anyone arguing in favor of nationalizing health care make a credible argument against nationalizing the production, distribution, and provision of food?

Transferring the tax advantages that currently go to employers to individuals, compulsory coverage with subsidies where appropriate, coupled with tax-free HSA's and a nationwide market for health insurance plus existing medicare/medicaid programs for children/the-elderly/the-disabled/etc would result in universal coverage, greater affordability, and foster price transparency and price competition in the medical marketplace, which would help contain total expenditures. What [positive outcomes] would nationalizing healthcare accomplish that the above reforms would not?

Providing services in a sector in which the price mechanism coordinates supply and demand, sets prices, allocates capital for new therapies and technology, etc is a much different task than attempting to manage the entire market via a centralized administrative mechanism. Thankfully - I imagine that Hillary is actually proposing something along the lines of making insurance compulsory, and using a combination of tax-credits and subsidies for working adults who would not otherwise be able to afford the premiums, which is something quite different. Guess I'll have to read the article.

That a person can simultaneously believe that the government is corrupt, power-hungry leviathan hell-bent on trampling the rights and freedoms encoded in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on one hand, while simultaneously fantasizing about a state of affairs in which the same government literally has your life in its hands as the sole custodian of all of your most sensitive personal information, the sole provider of healthcare, and the serves as the sole paymaster - and thereby the sole arbiter - responsible for all healthcare decisions is quite astonishing. The coercive powers of any government in any society increase in direct proportion to the extent that the government controls the economy, so a socialist sounding the alarm-bells about the dangers of excessive government power is about as convincing as a prostitute preaching the virtues of chastity.

Could you expand on the oil/1st-world-population link in a bit more depth?

Quite a bit more to the energy-consumption/global-warming/CO2 emissions puzzle than petroleum consumption by passenger vehicles.

I don't personally think that a fleet-wide fuel economy standard is necessarily the best way to promote fuel efficiency, since automakers base their production on what they think that consumers want to buy, and if consumers don't want to buy fuel efficient vehicles, the auto manufacturers shouldn't be penalized for that. As fuel gets more expensive, consumer preferences will change accordingly - but progressively higher fuel costs aren't necessarily guaranteed, and hit the poor - especially the rural poor the hardest, not only at the pump, but via higher shipping costs, etc - all of which materialize in higher prices for the consumer staples, etc that they spend most of their money on. Not to mention the increased costs of heating their home, etc. If I had to dream up a legislative method for promoting fuel efficiency that doesn't hose the poor - I'd favor fees that you paid at tab-time that used some kind of AGI ajdusted formula that multiplied either gross vehicle weight or EPA fuel-economy stats by miles driven per year. The AGI component could be used to lessen the impact on low-income people, and using this mechanism rather than a global tax on all fuels would prevent higher fuel costs from translating into higher prices for food, transport, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Thinking carefully is the operative phrase. what Jim spewed out is just another knee-jerk liberal mantra. The euros do it, we must do it too, just like them! If oil reserves are drying up, then we need to set goals that get us off of oil period - before we are forced to. that might involve higher CAFE standards, but those could be more or less than what the Euros do. And as you pointed out, the metrics may be apples-and-oranges as it is due to their higher use of diesel, which uses more crude to produce in the first place. I never ceased to be amazed by the typical liberal response of a feel-good gesture which may more may not actually achieve a goal. These are the people who supposedly are "pro-science", and yet never do the real science and number crunching to determine if something actually needs to be done, and to what extent. The important thing is "feeling good" and doing "something". Exhibit A: Any discussion of nuclear power. IMO higher fuel prices brought on by a genuine scarcity relative to demand would be the the most significant driver of reduced CO2 emissions per-unit output (conservation), adoption of alternative energy-sources, etc - and would dwarf the effects of any regulatory regime any legislature would dare impose.

Reducing CO2 emissions and limiting the extent to which we enrich unsavory regimes of various stripes by buying their oil are both worthy goals, but there are better and worse ways of doing so. One of the worst ideas - the entire corn-ethanol econo-enviro megacluster seems to have gained the most traction so far, so the importance of thinking carefully about the means used to achieve these ends seems worthwhile.

Euros tend to run way more diesel due to the higher energy content and the fact that diesel fuel enjoys tax breaks in Euroland that gasoline does not. The UCS makes a good point when comparing the total emissions from oil-well to tailpipe. "DIESEL PERFORMANCE — EXTRA POWER, HIGHER EFFICIENCY, BUT ... If you or your parents owned a diesel car 20 years ago, you may have some bad memories of the experience. American drivers have steered clear of diesel since the early 1980s because many of the cars were unreliable, noisy, and polluting. Though today's diesel cars have overcome most of their past performance problems, they account for only a few percent of new automobile and truck sales in the US. In Europe, on the other hand, about 40% of new cars sold are diesel, amounting to more than five million vehicles each year. The demand for diesel in Europe is fueled by the high cost of gasoline. (Unequal taxation of the two fuels results in diesel costing about one dollar less per gallon in most European countries.) Over the past few years, diesel's popularity as an automotive fuel has grown significantly. Thanks to its higher energy content and its efficient combustion process, diesel performance enables cars to travel at least 30% farther on a gallon of fuel than comparable gasoline models. The improved efficiency of diesel engines can also help reduce oil consumption. It should be noted, however, that it takes about 25% more oil to make a gallon of diesel fuel than a gallon of gasoline, so we should really look at how a vehicle does on fuel efficiency in terms of "oil equivalents." Thus, we need to adjust the mileage claims for diesel vehicles downward by about 20% when comparing them to gasoline-powered vehicles."

On the whole, it seems to me that skilled tradesmen tend to do pretty well. I don't have the stats handy, but I'd guess that their annual take-home is comparable to that of most engineers in non-management roles, if a bit more variable from one year to the next. Once you subtract the value of at least four years of lost wages plus the cost of student-loans plus interest, I'd imagine that things get even closer to parity. Add more flexibility, the ability to work pretty much anywhere, and the fact that it's essentially outsource proof and a career in one of the trades looks even better. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but not a bad gig, and has to have one of the better R.O.I.'s of any modern profession.

Man that suuuuuucks. I've fallen while reaching for the top at the end of a problem just to the right of Coach's Crack that we called "Four Rock Classic." I was lucky enough to walk away no worse for wear, but it did seem as though that the gravel on that side was just a bit shallower than elsewhere. I can vaguely recall pushing a bit more gravel into my anticipated landing zones on that aspect of the rock after that. Anyhow - very sorry to hear about the accident, and hope that you get great care and recover fully, as quickly as possible.

Not agreeing presumes understanding the subject matter. Ergo the average poster in this forum has a fair amount of work to do if they wish to increase their cognitive status to "imbecile" when discussing these issues.

Another Krugman essay that people who post frequently on economic matters should read, and attempt to understand, but won't. "rICARDO'S DIFFICULT IDEA SYNOPSIS: The trendy idea of rejecting Comparative Advantage is rejecting a tried and true idea that has lifted millions out of poverty. The title of this paper is a play on that of an admirable recent book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995). Dennett's book is an examination of the reasons why so many intellectuals remain hostile to the idea of evolution through natural selection -- an idea that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it, but about which intelligent people somehow manage to get confused time and time again. The idea of comparative advantage -- with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both -- is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of international trade beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed. I am not talking here about the problem of communicating the case for free trade to crudely anti-intellectual opponents, people who simply dislike the idea of ideas. The persistence of that sort of opposition, like the persistence of creationism, is a different sort of question, and requires a different sort of discussion. What I am concerned with here are the views of intellectuals, people who do value ideas, but somehow find this particular idea impossible to grasp. My objective in this essay is to try to explain why intellectuals who are interested in economic issues so consistently balk at the concept of comparative advantage. Why do journalists who have a reputation as deep thinkers about world affairs begin squirming in their seats if you try to explain how trade can lead to mutually beneficial specialization? Why is it virtually impossible to get a discussion of comparative advantage, not only onto newspaper op-ed pages, but even into magazines that cheerfully publish long discussions of the work of Jacques Derrida? Why do policy wonks who will happily watch hundreds of hours of talking heads droning on about the global economy refuse to sit still for the ten minutes or so it takes to explain Ricardo? In this essay, I will try to offer answers to these questions. The first thing I need to do is to make clear how few people really do understand Ricardo's difficult idea -- since the response of many intellectuals, challenged on this point, is to insist that of course they understand the concept, but they regard it as oversimplified or invalid in the modern world. Once this point has been established, I will try to defend the following hypothesis: (i) At the shallowest level, some intellectuals reject comparative advantage simply out of a desire to be intellectually fashionable. Free trade, they are aware, has some sort of iconic status among economists; so, in a culture that always prizes the avant-garde, attacking that icon is seen as a way to seem daring and unconventional. (ii) At a deeper level, comparative advantage is a harder concept than it seems, because like any scientific concept it is actually part of a dense web of linked ideas. A trained economist looks at the simple Ricardian model and sees a story that can be told in a few minutes; but in fact to tell that story so quickly one must presume that one's audience understands a number of other stories involving how competitive markets work, what determines wages, how the balance of payments adds up, and so on. (iii) At the deepest level, opposition to comparative advantage -- like opposition to the theory of evolution -- reflects the aversion of many intellectuals to an essentially mathematical way of understanding the world. Both comparative advantage and natural selection are ideas grounded, at base, in mathematical models -- simple models that can be stated without actually writing down any equations, but mathematical models all the same. The hostility that both evolutionary theorists and economists encounter from humanists arises from the fact that both fields lie on the front line of the war between C.P. Snow's two cultures: territory that humanists feel is rightfully theirs, but which has been invaded by aliens armed with equations and computers...." The rest of the essay is here: http://www.pkarchive.org/trade/ricardo.html

We all created Walmart. China is able to deliver lower cost goods because it doesn't have the same costs we do. It doesn't spend as much to protect the environment and to ensure worker safety. It doesn't spend money on consumer protection. I'm all for free trade, but let's insist that our trading partners uphold decent standards. At least the goods they export should meet standards, if not they way they treat their workers. Perhaps there should be tariffs that reflect the amount of money they save by not protecting their workers and their environment. We could create a charity with the tariff money for Chinese workers. Maybe that would shame the Chinese into doing better. From that noted NeoCon, Paul Krugman: "In Praise of Cheap Labor Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all. By Paul Krugman For many years a huge Manila garbage dump known as Smokey Mountain was a favorite media symbol of Third World poverty. Several thousand men, women, and children lived on that dump--enduring the stench, the flies, and the toxic waste in order to make a living combing the garbage for scrap metal and other recyclables. And they lived there voluntarily, because the $10 or so a squatter family could clear in a day was better than the alternatives. The squatters are gone now, forcibly removed by Philippine police last year as a cosmetic move in advance of a Pacific Rim summit. But I found myself thinking about Smokey Mountain recently, after reading my latest batch of hate mail. The occasion was an op-ed piece I had written for the New York Times, in which I had pointed out that while wages and working conditions in the new export industries of the Third World are appalling, they are a big improvement over the "previous, less visible rural poverty." I guess I should have expected that this comment would generate letters along the lines of, "Well, if you lose your comfortable position as an American professor you can always find another job--as long as you are 12 years old and willing to work for 40 cents an hour." Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization--of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers. After all, global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations. Let's turn the clock back to the Third World as it was only two decades ago (and still is, in many countries). In those days, although the rapid economic growth of a handful of small Asian nations had started to attract attention, developing countries like Indonesia or Bangladesh were still mainly what they had always been: exporters of raw materials, importers of manufactures. Inefficient manufacturing sectors served their domestic markets, sheltered behind import quotas, but generated few jobs. Meanwhile, population pressure pushed desperate peasants into cultivating ever more marginal land or seeking a livelihood in any way possible--such as homesteading on a mountain of garbage. Given this lack of other opportunities, you could hire workers in Jakarta or Manila for a pittance. But in the mid-'70s, cheap labor was not enough to allow a developing country to compete in world markets for manufactured goods. The entrenched advantages of advanced nations--their infrastructure and technical know-how, the vastly larger size of their markets and their proximity to suppliers of key components, their political stability and the subtle-but-crucial social adaptations that are necessary to operate an efficient economy--seemed to outweigh even a tenfold or twentyfold disparity in wage rates. And then something changed. Some combination of factors that we still don't fully understand--lower tariff barriers, improved telecommunications, cheaper air transport--reduced the disadvantages of producing in developing countries. (Other things being the same, it is still better to produce in the First World--stories of companies that moved production to Mexico or East Asia, then moved back after experiencing the disadvantages of the Third World environment, are common.) In a substantial number of industries, low wages allowed developing countries to break into world markets. And so countries that had previously made a living selling jute or coffee started producing shirts and sneakers instead. Workers in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably, paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say "inevitably" because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers') health; they pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And these are still extremely poor countries, where living on a garbage heap is attractive compared with the alternatives. And yet, wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people. Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move. More importantly, however, the growth of manufacturing--and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector creates--has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise. Where the process has gone on long enough--say, in South Korea or Taiwan--average wages start to approach what an American teen-ager can earn at McDonald's. And eventually people are no longer eager to live on garbage dumps. (Smokey Mountain persisted because the Philippines, until recently, did not share in the export-led growth of its neighbors. Jobs that pay better than scavenging are still few and far between.) The benefits of export-led economic growth to the mass of people in the newly industrializing economies are not a matter of conjecture. A country like Indonesia is still so poor that progress can be measured in terms of how much the average person gets to eat; since 1970, per capita intake has risen from less than 2,100 to more than 2,800 calories a day. A shocking one-third of young children are still malnourished--but in 1975, the fraction was more than half. Similar improvements can be seen throughout the Pacific Rim, and even in places like Bangladesh. These improvements have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done anything to help--foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better. Why, then, the outrage of my correspondents? Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land--or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap? The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit--and this makes us feel unclean. And so there are self-righteous demands for international labor standards: We should not, the opponents of globalization insist, be willing to buy those sneakers and shirts unless the people who make them receive decent wages and work under decent conditions. This sounds only fair--but is it? Let's think through the consequences. First of all, even if we could assure the workers in Third World export industries of higher wages and better working conditions, this would do nothing for the peasants, day laborers, scavengers, and so on who make up the bulk of these countries' populations. At best, forcing developing countries to adhere to our labor standards would create a privileged labor aristocracy, leaving the poor majority no better off. And it might not even do that. The advantages of established First World industries are still formidable. The only reason developing countries have been able to compete with those industries is their ability to offer employers cheap labor. Deny them that ability, and you might well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth, even reverse the growth that has been achieved. And since export-oriented growth, for all its injustice, has been a huge boon for the workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests. A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favor to its alleged beneficiaries. You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe--although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn't the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course--but they won't, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard--that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items. In short, my correspondents are not entitled to their self-righteousness. They have not thought the matter through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty. "

Some excerpts: "People of America: the world is following your news in regards to your invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of the tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they agree to spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and the war there, which has led to the vast majority of you being afflicted with disappointment... In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was necessary and crucial war, and during it, Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop the unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation. And so Kennedy was killed, and al Qaeda wasn't present at that time, but rather, those corporations were the primary beneficiary from his killing... This war was entirely unnecessary, as testified by your own reports. And among the most capable of those from your own side who speaks to you on this topic and on the manufacturing of public opinion is Noam Chomsky, who spoke sober words of advice prior to the war, but the leader of Texas doesn't like those who give advice.... The entire world came out in unprecedented demonstrations to warn against waging the war and describe its true nature in eloquent terms like "no spilling red blood for black oil," yet he paid them no heed.... So in answer to the question about the causes of the Democrats' failure to stop the war, I say: they are the same reasons which led to the failure of former president Kennedy to stop the Vietnam war. Those with real power and influence are those with the most capital. And since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional, there shouldn't be any cause for astonishment -- and there isn't any -- in the Democrats' failure to stop the war. And you're the ones who have the saying which goes, "money talks." And I tell you: after the failure of your representatives in the Democratic Party to implement your desire to stop the war, you can still carry anti-war placards and spread out in the streets of major cities, then go back to your homes, but that will be on no use and will lead to the prolonging of the war.... In fact, the life of all mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories and of the major corporations, yet despite that the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord, with the knowledge that the statics speaks of the death and displacement of the millions of human beings because of that, especially in Africa. This greatest of plagues and most dangerous of threats to the lives of humans is taking place in an accelerating fashion as the world is being dominated by the democratic system, which confirms its massive failure to protect humans and their interests from the greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives.... The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of "globallization" in order to protect democracy.... And if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing of your war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer in this regard...."

One of the best parts about shopping at Walmart, while in New Hampshire, is simultaneously pissing off economically illiterate retards on the left, putting another nail in the coffin of unions that expect the public to pay higher prices to fill the gap between what their skillsets are actually worth and what they'd like to be paid, and depriving the state of Massachusetts and it's bloated, corrupt, and massively inefficient public sector of as much revenue as possible. It's like Christmas every time I walk through the door.