Walmart is Evil

If I underestimated my opponent before I will not any longer after that response. My opponent has presented a series of new arguments against Walmart which I will deconstruct herein. I will then conclude with an appeal for capitalism as an inherently moral economic system. The points I wish to deconstruct are: -By paying it's employees a certain wage Walmart is being greedy -Being greedy is evil because it's one of the seven deadly sins In my conclusion below I will thoroughly refute this. See below. -Walmart keeps it's prices low to put their competition out of business Keeping prices low is the whole point of competition. We the consumer benefit when firms compete for our business. We have choices and can get goods and services for reasonable prices. The more competition, the better a deal the consumer can get. If other firms go out of business because one is so efficient they are able to offer the lowest prices, than that is the problem of the firms that go out of business. It is incumbent upon them to offer a competitive product either by lowering prices or selling higher quality products if they must charge more. Primarily the market sets prices. Let's say Walmart charges lower prices than everyone else because they pay their employees less than Firm B, which pays it's employees $20 per hour. Since Firm B pays $20 per hour, it is going to be able to attract better workers who have better customer service skills, etc. Because they have higher quality workers, there may be consumers who choose to go to Firm B instead of Walmart. Some people will be willing to pay a little bit more to shop at a firm that has higher quality staff because the shopping experience is overall better. Still others will prefer to get the lowest price and not care how good and knowledgeable the staff is. They will prefer to shop at Walmart. This is not evil, it's business. -You can tell through Walmart's actions that they are intentionally being evil Saying you can "just tell" something is not using logic or evidence. You must prove your points. Appealing to faith, insight, intuition, or divine revelation is not going to convince anyone of the truth of your statement. You may personally have a deep inner conviction, something you "Just Know" at the core of your being, but in a debate you must prove that conviction true with logic and evidence. A statement like "This is just common sense as corporations like walmart are greedy" proves absolutely nothing and is better left unsaid in this kind of forum. -Minimum wage In your initial argument you said that Walmart pays it's works an average of $11.75 per hour. In Round 2 you contradicted yourself by saying they pay the average worker minimum wage. The national minimum wage was raised to $7.25 per hour on July 24, 2009 by the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, and it is currently at that level. Fourteen states and Washington, DC have higher minimum wages than the federal minimum wage, but the highest of these is $8.55 per hour in Washington state. So which is it? Does Walmart pay the minimum wage, or more than 150% of the minimum wage? If they pay 150% more than the minimum wage, it seems to me that would make them a lot less greedy than a whole bunch of firms that do pay exactly the minimum wage (and there are plenty). Why must Walmart be singled out for demagoguery when they pay significantly more than many other firms? -Employees are discouraged from holding a full time position Citation? -My opponent says his links contain proof. Unfortunately for my opponent, it is incumbent upon him to restate the facts and arguments made in the sources he has linked. He cannot expect someone reading and judging this debate to read all his lengthy sources and make the connections to his assertions on their own. The proper thing to do is to make an assertion, back it up with a restatement of some argument or fact from one of the sources, and then also cite that piece of evidence properly (i. e. with a numerical list of sources and putting the number in parenthesis at the end of the sentence, or by stating the source in-line as I did with my reference to Adam Smith below). It is not fair to the audience, or to me as your debating opponent, to do otherwise. -By selling Michael Moore's DVD Walmart proves it's own evil My opponent seems to be arguing that because Walmart sells an anti-capitalist DVD that proves they are evil because they are so confident in their power that they can make such material available without fear. This is not logical at all. If anything, willingness to allow opposing opinions to be promoted in ones jurisdiction, even when they directly oppose one, is a sign of tolerance and virtue. Walmart, by not restricting their DVD offering to products which are pro-Walmart or pro-capitalism, is promoting an open marketplace of ideas and freedom of speech. My opponent's argument is basically akin to saying that freedom of speech is evil because it allows people to promote communism and other unfree systems. He is arguing that because they are so confident in the superiority of their ideas that they allow dissenting ideas to be heard that they are therefore proving the point of the dissenters. The is ludicrous. Freedom of speech exists because it is the right thing to do, not because it is evil, and the same goes for Walmart's decision to sell Capitalism A Love Story. CONCLUSION My opponent's concluding argument is ridiculous. Selling an anti-capitalist DVD proves that Walmart has a tolerant and open marketplace of ideas in their DVD section. It takes some seriously twisted logic to conclude that doing so shows Walmart is evil. Aside from that contention, my opponents argument essentially comes down to an attack on the system of free market capitalism. He asserts that greed is evil because it is one of the seven deadly sins, and that Walmart's business practices are obviously greedy, therefore they are evil. My opponent seemingly disagrees with my proposed definition of evil, though he has not said so explicitly. He seems to be proposing that the "seven deadly sins" define what is evil. The origin of the seven deadly sins is The Book of Proverbs, but in fact greed was not listed in this or any biblical list (. http://en.wikipedia.org...). As you can see from the cited wikipedia article, the traditional list of sins that includes greed was the work of the 4th century monk Evagrius Ponticus, who listed Avarice (greed) as one of the sins for the first time. My opponent is therefore rejecting my definition of evil in favor of an arbitrary list by a 4th century monk. I reject this and strongly urge my opponent to consider my definition of evil and show how Walmart's behavior is evil under my definition, or alternatively explain why his definition is better than mine. Greed is not always evil. What my opponent calls greed, I call enlightened or rational self-interest. Walmart is a firm operating in a competitive marketplace. In order to compete they must keep their prices as low as possible. That's not greed, it's business. There wouldn't be any reason for Walmart or any other company to do business if they did not have some incentive, specifically the possibility of profit. That means the whole reason Walmart or any other company provides the goods or services they provide is to seek a profit from the endeavor. To quote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests. " While you could define greed to include this type of behavior, you must overlook an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that this behavior is good and virtuous in order to call it evil. The profit motive has produced an age of material prosperity beyond our wildest dream