Schooling Liberals

I've been wanting to link to this article for a couple days. Arnold Kling at TCS has a pretty good lecture on economics that liberals should read, focusing on the foolishness of Maryland's new law trying to force Wal-Mart to pay more of the health care costs for their workers. Some great snippets appear here...

Although the motivation of the liberals was to raise the well-being of Wal-Mart workers, it is far from clear that this will be the consequence. Low-skilled workers cannot receive more in compensation than the value of their labor. If Wal-Mart is forced to increase the share of compensation that comes in the form of health benefits, then it will have to decrease take-home pay. If it cannot decrease take-home pay, then it will have to reduce its reliance on low-skilled labor or cut back on operations altogether.

The Wal-Mart law injects politics into the process of setting benefits for Wal-Mart workers. Once the Wal-Mart law takes hold, various suppliers of health care services will have an incentive to apply pressure. Dentists and optometrists will lobby for laws that force Wal-Mart to pay for its workers’ dental care and eyeglasses.

The biggest beneficiaries of the Wal-Mart law are likely to be people who are better off than Wal-Mart workers. For example, owners of other businesses will be able to charge higher prices and earn higher profits.

In the liberal morality tale, Wal-Mart is a villain, and its workers are victims. However, Wal-Mart workers themselves feel lucky to be able to work there. What low-skilled workers need are more Wal-Marts. More Wal-Marts would increase employment for low-skilled workers, and ultimately this could drive up wages for such workers.

Maryland liberals believe that there is something wrong with free markets if Wal-Mart workers do not have enough health insurance. However, if Wal-Mart workers want health insurance badly enough, eventually the market will find a way to provide it.

...Liberals see the market as an arena in which evil corporations inflict their greed on innocent victims. I wish you would see that motives matter less than consequences. I wish you could see that greed is at work when laws are passed that regulate markets, because regulations always produce winners and losers. I wish you could see that those winners and losers are often not who you think they are. I wish you could see that competitive behavior and free choice are forces that operate in the market as a check against greed. Finally, I wish you could see that greed is most difficult to restrain when it is exercised through the medium of government.

(hat tip: Instapundit, as well as The Lord of Truth). That last paragraph should be required reading for every legislator. Of course, making them read it won't make them believe it, but there's only so much that can be done.