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Matt Yglesias rewrites history to make Wal-Mart embrace of big government seem surprising
By: Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
06/30/09 5:51 PM EDT
Wal-Mart has announced support for a federal mandate that employers provide some sort of health insurance for workers. Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias brags that his employer, the Center for American Progress, helped bring this about. Yglesias celebrates this as a sign of Obamian Change:
The highly ideological behavior of the business community, and high degree of class solidarity exhibited by the executive class, has been a hugely important element of the story of American politics over the past thirty years or so. The willingness of much of the business community to break with Chamber ideology on Waxman-Markey and now on health care is an important sign of change in the air.
This is, of course, absurd. Wal-Mart's support for this regulation is new, but times have not changed. Wal-Mart, remember, joined labor unions in lobbying for a hike in the minimum wage, and a Wal-Mart executive testified before Congress in favor of cap-and-trade years ago.
And "The highly ideological behavior of the business community"? What in the world is Yglesias talking about? The Chamber of Commerce's endorsement of Obama's stimulus plan? Or the fact that Barney Frank scored higher on the Chamber's score card than did Ron Paul?
What does Yglesias make of Philip Morris's decade-long campaign for tobacco regulation, or Mattel's 2007-08 full-court press for toy-safety rules?
Are GE and Duke Energy's support fo Waxman-Markey "change" from Enron's support for U.S. ratification of Kyoto?
And on health care, did Yglesias miss the fact that the big HMOs supported HillaryCare?
The notion that Big Business has long been reflexively anti-government is a myth, and Yglesias repeats it here in order to pat his boss John Podesta (whose brother lobbies for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and whose sister-in-law lobbies for Boeing, Cigna, and dozens of other megacorps,) and the President (who received more money than anyone else from Wall Street, and frankly every industry but insurance) on the back for "change."
[update: for good explanations of why Wal-Mart supports this government intervention, check Joe Weisenthal at Clusterstock and Peter Suderman at Reason.]
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