Quickies: Economic Bigotry And “Progressive” Psychology

Mark Perry of AEI explores an interesting question today:

Evil Walmart makes a lot of money, right? We hear that all the time even though the retail giant’s profit margin was only 3.12% in the most recent quarter. Interestingly, we never seem to hear as much about the much higher profit margin of Apple, the “darling of the progressives.” In the most recent quarter, the computer behemoth with a market capitalization ($725 billion) that exceeds the value of the entire stock markets of Mexico, Thailand and Russia, had awhopping profit margin of 24.2%. No wonder its market cap is so astronomical....

So why is Walmart so reviled by progressives when its profits (and prices) are so low that it might earn a “profit day” every 31 days, and its main corporate objective is to provide low-cost merchandise to America’s low- and middle-income households?

Perry professes ignorance of the answer. In truth, the answer has nothing to do with economics, but with the distribution of “progressives’” reasons for being “progressives:”

Pinnacle: Strategists
Next Layer: Implementation specialists
Next Layer: Emotionally committed “progressives”
Base Layer: The stupid and “low information voters”

In brief, at the top we have the political strategists who direct essentially all left-wing political movements and campaigns. Their sole goal is the increase of their power and influence. Just below them are the specialists in infecting large numbers of people with the core lies of leftism, such as the static character of the economy and the wrongness of “exploitation.” Just below them are the emotional cadre, who are passionate about “progressivism” without being able to explain why. (Many of them simply like the idea of “progress,” but are incapable of articulating the concept in a fashion that will hold water.) The base level is the famous “low information voter,” who basically does what he’s told by his key influences. Most such persons are uninterested in reason or evidence. However, their attachment to the left isn’t emotional either; it’s entirely a matter of having been told by a source of authority that “good people vote this way.”

The rest of the evolution is left as an exercise for you, Gentle Reader.