This is interesting:

I am no fan of Wal-mart.  Among other things, I wish that those who attempt to bring a class action suit against Wal-mart pay discrimination had prevailed in the Supreme Court case of Wal-mart vs Dukes.   Nevertheless, it also concerns me that Los Angeles has had essentially no job growth in two decades, and that urban redevelopment is very difficult to do here.  According to the leading scholar on the economics of Wal-mart, Emek Besker, Wal-mart creates more jobs than it destroys (BTW, I don’t think Emek is a particular fan of Wal-mart either).  It also allows households to buy goods at low prices. On balance, I think the construction of the Wal-mart in Chinatown will be good for that particular neighborhood and the city.

One of the arguments advanced against Wal-mart is that it hurts small business.  I particularly hear this from fellow liberals, who love to extol the virtue of small business.  Yet, according to Kelly Edminston at the KC Fed, job quality is much worse at small business than large firms. The average wage at a small firm (< 100 workers)was $15.69 an hour in 2004; for large firms (>500 workers) it was $27.05. Moreover, small businesses paid 1/4 of their labor force less than $8 per hour; for large businesses it was 3 percent of their labor force.

Meanwhile, no one lobbies harder against the minimum wage than small business trade associations. The National Federation of Independent Business was also the lead plaintiff against the Affordable Care Act.  So to those liberals who extol small business: what’s the deal?

I suspect that the answer to this question is simple: small businesses are smaller. The assumption is that they have fewer employees, less cash, and less influence over politics, just people who keep their heads down and try to innovate. Of course, this view is ignorant of many historical and current differences between the two “types” of businesses, such as that large businesses opened their doors to union organizers in the ’40s and ’50s, while small businesses didn’t (and the latter were among the earliest boosters of the conservative movement, their particular point of view on unions becoming the default in that community). It’s considerably ironic that the most anti-union sector of our capitalist economy is the one that has been able to amass enormous power by banding together to advance their interests, to the point of nearly toppling the Affordable Care Act, and hardly anybody noticed. How many of the Fortune 500 signed onto that lawsuit? Suffice it to say, the general impression of business is counterintuitive.

With Wal-Mart specifically, I think there are a few factors here. I suspect that the company’s fanatical union-busting probably has a lot to do with why liberals dislike the company so much. Admittedly, more upscale liberals (well, more upscale all types of voters) are going to see Wal-Mart as a lower-class signifier, which is unavoidably true since the stores are not-exactly pleasant to shop in, with those overbearing lights and overcrowded aisles. You shop there because you have to, and America is just a wee bit skittish about confronting the realities of class. I suspect another factor is a cultural dislike of “the overdog” and a fear of bigness in general, which transcends politics altogether. Just take a gander at Gallup’s list of trust in public institutions. Nearing the top are small business, the police, and the church, the latter two of which are for most people going to be small and local institutions (unless you’re a Catholic or live near the FBI Academy). Near the bottom are health insurers, big businesses, and banks, all of which are large, powerful, impersonal institutions. Which is exactly what Wal-Mart is. In America, the idea of large, permanent, powerful institutions is still scary to a public that still thinks of power as a community affair in many ways, which is quaint when one considers how beside the point nation states have become in the age of the IMF and the WTO and the European Central Bank dictating sovereign countries’ leaders. But that’s another thing altogether. It’s all gloriously contradictory when one considers that the largest, most permanent, most impersonal and most powerful institution there is, the military, tops the most trusted list.