But there is more. It is a strange definition of ‘competition’ which would hold that Wal-Mart’s business practices, which consist of squeezing suppliers by means of the leverage of market share, positioning, and distribution, and squeezing the economy as a whole by reliance upon inexpensive imported goods, often of questionable quality and provenance, constitutes a ‘competitive’ environment. What, percisely, is competitive in utilizing the coercive power of market share and the like to compel suppliers to provide goods and services at rates which do not enable said suppliers to prosper?- a practice at which Wal-Mart excels. The notion of competition more naturally suggests, not such practices, redolent as they are of certain of the aspects of monopoly, but a state of affairs in which businesses appeal to the customer on the basis of the ostensible excellence of products and services. The notion of competition suggests, not employments of economies of scale that, by their very operation, subvert the fundamentals of the economy of the nation they are ostensibly intended to benefit, as do the outsourcing/offshoring practices which are hollowing out the American economy, but endeavour within a defined system or context: the Wal-Mart business model, convenient as a trope for the dominant contemporary American business model, is rather analogous to an alteration of the rules midway through a sporting event, to the distinct advantage of one of the teams.

More generally, however, the notion that Wal-Mart is ‘competitive’ in some normative sense that we must respect, and that to question the full legitimacy of the business model of which Wal-Mart is at once the most visible and successful exemplification is to indulge in un-American, unconservative, even leftist posturing, merely begs the question, not of whether we should maintain a system of free enterprise, but of the nature and structuring of that very system. There is nothing in the tradition of free enterprise or free markets which necessitates the desirability, virtue, or sacrosanct status of great agglomerations of capital and corporate power - for, contrary to what most seem to comprehend in all of this, power is what we are concerned with. If nothing else, cognizance of the emergence of markets in medieval Europe, an age in which real property was more widely diffused than presently, ought to chasten us in our altogether anachronistic assumption that free markets and private property rights entail only those limits upon acquisition that might be imposed by the operations of markets themselves. We should be discussing what manner of free markets we wish to preserve, for no one proposes the abolition of markets; in this regard, all too many conservatives presuppose that any wavering of faith in the legitimacy of present economic organization constitutes an inclination towards some or other form of collectivism. However, we are not discussing real socialism - does anyone still propose the nationalization of the means of production? - or even social democracy, but mere laws for the regulation of a market system, laws that may be wise or foolish, prudent or rash, but which yet presuppose a common framework of free enterprise and markets. I suspect, though, that even among conservatives, we may have in this issue a conflict of incommensurable theories, not merely of political economy, but of the status of economics within a broader political philosophy.

Whatever might be said in favour of, for example, the futures markets which mitigate some of the uncertainties to which agricultural production is subject, I suspect that we are referring to distinct sense of ‘independence’. In an economic order in which real, income-generating property, be it land, small businesses, or whatever, is more widely distributed, the property owner has at least the independence that such property bestows upon him. Whereas in the present economic order, the ordinary person lacks that independence, but finds his conditions of existence more dependent upon the decisions, machinations, and fortunes of larger conglomerates and forces which he is altogether powerless to influence. I rather seriously doubt whether the increased prevalence of such things as 401Ks, stock ownership, and home ownership fundamentally alters this reality. The small investor, and even many larger investors not only exercise no real control over the enterprises in which they are invested, but cannot exercise such control, and are, in consequence, at the mercy of the directors and executive who do exercise real control - the managerial class, that is - rendering ‘investment’ more an act of trust, or even an instance of high-class gambling. Moreover, the widespread phenomenon of investment, of the emergence of the investor class, has arguably exacerbated, in corporate management, that lamentable but ineliminable human tendency to concentrate upon shorter-term returns and prospects, often at the expense of the longer-term health of both the enterprise and the nation of which the enterprise is but one expression. The entire set of phenomena falling under the headings of offshoring and outsourcing are, I think, dispositive on this account. Yes, they enhance short-term profitability, but they assume far too much, and ignore much else, where the future is concerned. Yes, the percentage of GDP captured by manufacturing has been declining, but the ’solution’ of the service economy is a week reed upon which to base the prosperity of the nation.

Reassertion of control over our borders, and over the broader immigration and visa system, which wants only for sheer will for realization, will only accomplish so much. Persumably, lower-ladder service positions could become slightly better remunerated in the absence of teeming masses of immigrants willing to fill those positions for less than an American will accept, but those positions will hardly suffice as a basis of national prosperity. Food service and meat processing cannot secure the prosperity, or even some relative degree of economic security, of great numbers of middle-class Americans. Neither will an increase in the compensation afforded those in the construction industry suffice; the industry is subject to too many cycles, and, in any event, the success of the economy cannot be predicated upon building over more and more open spaces. The problem of a service-based economy is twofold: it requires high value-added contributions on the part of those providing the services, and, in the context of globalization, is highly unstable, requiring almost incessant retraining and retrenchment on the part of those caught in it. And let us speak forthrightly about the first aspect of the problem: high-value-added typically equates to high intelligence, rendering this a strategy perhaps suitable for young cosmopolites and savants, but, shall we say, structurally prohibitive for the average American - for the average person of whatever nationality or citizenship. If anyone is curious as to the underlying causes of the increase in multiple-employment, and of the increase of indebtedness among average Americans, this is one often-overlooked structural factor: average service sector jobs for average people typically provide crappy remuneration, whereas the very machinery of the manufacturing economy added the value that eventually resulted in an increase in standards of living and compensation for average people. As to the matter of instability, this not only engenders a widespread sense of disquiet (why do we think that Americans tend to proffer pessimistic opinions on the prospects of the economy, even while those proffering said opinions may be doing reasonably well when they proffer them?), but militates against a great many things that conservatives regard as essential to the perpetuation of a fourishing society, to the realization of the good life. Eventually, however, people tire of that instability; few people, even among the elites, have the desire to live as Nietzschean supermen of the global economy, forever surfing the chaos of destructive creation in search of that next great wave of ephemeral profitability.

I might note, as I draw this missive towards a conclusion, that the comparison of Wal-Mart with small businesses is gratuitously invidious. Yes, some small businesses jack around their employees, but can the contrary be said of a Wal-Mart which provides an average wage of eight bucks an hour, which often schedules its employees for the maximum number of working hours that will fail to qualify them for benefits, which offers benefits to some, but which benefits consume excessive percentages - necessarily - of the meager wages earned by employees, and which, by means of all of these practices - effectively privatises its profits while socializing many of the costs of sustaining its helots? At least in the case of small businesses, both employees and customers have alternatives; in the case of the Wal-Mart economy, they, increasingly, can take it or leave it. Wither freedom? The freedom that matters is the freedom of communities to preserve themselves - their customs, traditions, habits, patterns of life, and so on. In the Nineteenth Century, the great corporate and moneyed interests supported the tariff, because it was favourable to them, while the cause of the small communities of the nation, and particularly the South, was bound up with free trade. In contemporary America, the inheritors of the legacy of those moneyed interests support globalization and ‘free trade’ - because it enlarges their already engorged substance, while the cause of small communities and established ways must be bound up with opposition to, and the placing of limitations upon, globalization. The irreducible given must be the sanctity of the community, of the American people and their ways of life, and not in any economic nostrums which, whatever their utility in defined circumstances and conditions, are merely tools the value of which is contingent upon particular, and malleable, circumstances.

While I am slightly mystified as to what any of this has to do with an undue sympathy for the analyses of Marx, save as a confirmation of the perspicacity of his insight that finance/corporate capitalism tended to profane everything holy, overturn every fixity, and so on, I should conclude by noting that the fact that Wal-Mart has become a sort of cultural totem among some conservatives and Republicans ought to impress us as a disturbing development, not merely on account of Wal-Mart’s practices, but because that elevation of Wal-Mart to totemic status signifies that conservatives are in thrall to a series of long-dead controversies, and are prone to jousting with ghosts. To oppose Wal-Mart is not to invoke Marx or the specter of social democracy of one sort or another; it is not to propose some sort of collectivist solution. Conservatives, however, seem to be obsessed with the great controversies over socialism, communism, planning, and centralization of the middle years of the Twentieth Century, as though the outcome of the Cold War were somehow equivocal, and as though the neoliberal/globalist economic order were identical with the old free markets that conservatives praise (it isn’t), such that to question it is necessarily to posit collectivism as the solution. They are stuck in a time-warp. The global economic order is generating its own problems and instabilities, and unless conservatives reckon with them, and develop solutions, the middle-term future and beyond will belong once more to the left: people will not endure what has been foisted off on them indefinitely. What is curious, however, is that conservatives defend in economics a process of centralization which they would otherwise repudiate in politics; and yet, the process of economic centralization (increased economic power and scope of multinational corporations) is precisely analogous to the processes of centralization that brought into being the modern nation-state: the war of the distant sovereign against the mediating institutions and authorities, cloaked in the dissimulation which held that the process was undertaken in order to liberate the individual or provide him with some benefit denied to him under the old regime. That conservatives inveigh against concentrations of power in government, yet valorize them in corporations, when the power exercised by such agglomerations is every bit as destructive of communities and stable relations as any power exercised by any non-totalitiarian, but interfering, state, is, I say, a curious lacuna in their thought.

This state of affairs will not endure; conservatism will either confront the realities of the age, or it will continue to prepare the conditions of its own impossibility.

All this stuff about globalism and the Hamiltonian juggernaut is distracting us from something pretty mundane. Wal-Mart is not all about an expression of high culture or core values. It’s a place to buy dog food, Huggies, CD players, BMX bikes etc. And people who shop there can do so cheaply. Far from them all bemoaning Wal-Mart, they love it. They prove it with their dollars. Indeed, they prove it by “hanging out” there in rural parts of America.

There is also a myth that we once had a world of economic independence and now we must live hand to mouth. This is not true. The past was just as volatile and uncertain as today, especially for the small farmer who could be broken by global price trends that did not benefit from robust and regulated futures markets (derided at the time as speculation) as they do today. So the so-called wage slave and the managerial elite today is probably more independent than ever, with a portable 401K and higher rates of home ownership than ever. Whereas the Mom and Pops of yesteryear woudl routinely, as they do today, jack around employees, not pay them properly, do nothing to help them plan for retirement etc. Go work for a small business some time to find out. Corporations, for al their faults, are at least fairly predictable and tend to follow labor laws.

Finally, there is no need to conflate this issue with open trade with China. The whole world is trading with the Chinese because their goods are a fraction of the cost of other manufacturers. At the same time manufacturing is in decline worldwide, just as the numbers needed in agriculture are a fraction of what they were 100 years ago. This will continue. So long as we can build our own aircraft carriers, tanks, etc., it’s not that important what percentage of our economy is devoted to manufacturing. You’re resisting an irresitable trend if you think we can through concerted action and a little bit of tinkering recreate the manufacturing-centered economy of yesteryear. We can, however, through immigration control allow native-born Americans willing to work with their hands earn a living wage in construction and other service industries.

So to me, free trade and open borders far from being expressions of the same principle are actually in very strong tensions. Because if we have free trade there should be far less reason for people to move here other than to depress artificially the lower skill and lower IQ end of the service industry pay scale in an economy where services will soon be 90% or more of the total number of jobs in the economy.

But I do think any kind of “conservatism” that is deaf to the free markets tradition of America is not really conservatism but a kind of abstract philosophizing made up of a pastiche of what one likes, not in one’s own living and received historical tradition, but from what one has read in books about other westerners living in other ages and other countries. This is conservatism? The right-wing equivalent of inventing noble savages and slumming a la Marie Antoninette?

Our country is founded on and has always revered self-reliance, individualism, hard work, minimal economic controls, free movement of labor, free movement of goods, no internal tariffs, no preferences for one sector of the economy over the other, etc. This is the ideal. It’s the banner with which we resisted Soviet Communism. It’s why we’re more powerful and more numerous in many respects than the Europe whence we came. It’s not simply a minor point; free markets are a key American value. As conservatives, shouldn’t we abjure the rhetoric and politics of class warfare and envy–an alien tradition imported from Slavs, Jews, Scandanavians, Germans, Italians and other late 19th Century Immigrants. My Americanism is that of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and the Founders. Not that of one who is too enamored of Bismarck (and Marx too perhaps) as well as other continetnal ideals of government control of the economy.

This is the Wal-Mart model. This is the globalist model. And if it is the unfolded logic of Hamiltonian economics, then that is merely another euphemism for the Servile State. Whether this is an American ideal, I leave to others to debate; but it is neither virtuous nor Christian, I’ll say that much.