Walmart definitely does take customers from local businesses and cause them to close down. But I don’t think it’s Walmart thats destroying small towns in the US. Very few Walmarts fail and close down. It’s globalization in general and the movement of manufacturing plants to cheap labor nations that’s removing the economic and job base of many towns that then begin to lose their populations.
I witnessed this long years ago in rural Wisconsin. Main Street was dying and the explanation was that a Wal-Mart had opened sixty miles away.
One of the problems that we have in the US is that of overregulation, which only compounds the problem making manufacture in the US even more expensive compared to the cheap labor nations
-- now, some regulation might be appropriate, but much of it is illegitimate from a Constitutional perspective. -- Sadly the government has swallowed whole Wickard v. Filburn and this is the result, just as Thomas wrote in his dissent of Gonzales v. Raich: Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything–and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
This is also compounded by corruption, illustrated corporately by things like the Wells Fargo identity theft scandal (where the bank got off with a mere $185 million in fines) or, on the more personal/political side, Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information that would have had any normal/little person
doing hard time (turning big rocks into little ones in Leavenworth, if it was a military person).
Jordan Peterson has an interesting video explaining how play and morality interact -- interestingly the fair play
of rats in a setting requires the dominant rat to allow the non-dominant one to win some of the time (about 30%) in order for the non-dominant to continue to request play. Now, extrapolating to the government as the big rat
we should ask does it allow little rats to win?
— The answer is [increasingly] no
, nowadays. Even to the point where a judge making up some criminal charge faces no penalty (link).
If small business is the economic engine of America
, then these sorts of continual injustices are teaching people that they as persons (and small businesses) simply cannot win… and that means that they are [starting to] refuse to play. [Meaning that continual injustice is literally destroying the engine
.]
You nailed it Will.