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NancyLebovitz comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - LessWrong
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I would have to contest that in this case, the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence. On general principle, lacking special cases with adorable old grandmothers and shiny MIT graduates, what is added to the public good by subsidizing businesses that are literally not efficient enough to keep their own employees alive? How can we claim such a business is adding net value to society?
Note that I'm trying to distinguish between a subsidy and an investment. When a shiny MIT graduate needs money for his start-up, there could easily be a public good of investing in him, but in that case the public deserves shares of stock as compensation -- and will be able to realize gain from those shares as capital gains or dividends when the time comes. With Wal-Mart, the public doesn't even receive a capital stake in the business. It just pays for private actors to get rich on jobs that are, judging by their wage levels, far less efficient and productive than the ones people used to have.
It may be that no one is efficient enough to supply ,low cost low quality goods and services to people who can't (typo corrected) afford better and pay a living wage at the same time. At that point, you can shut down the business and hope that services and goods of better quality will be supplied by the government (when?), technology will improve so that workers in those businesses will be more productive so that it's possible to pay them more, leave the unattractive business in place as it is, or subsidize the business.
I'm not saying subsidizing the business is a great choice (keeping the system even relatively honest might be impossible), but I think it should be considered rather than just saying the business shouldn't exist.
If we condition our reasoning on the proposition that nobody can efficiently provide goods to poor people cheaply, then yes, I would at least claim the Proper Move (which is not necessarily easy from our status quo position) is to have certain things provided as a public service.
On the second hand, if we're already talking about instituting such a thing as a Basic Income Guarantee, then it makes good sense to do so and then remove subsidies for "sub-living efficiency" businesses. After all, with a correctly configured Basic Income, possibly plus even a small income from real business (which will be easier to come by due to the demand/money-velocity boost), even those at the lower end of the income scale should have the purchasing power to start buying, at the very least, frugal goods instead of cheap goods.