Whacking Wal-Mart ; State Should Stay Out of Business Decisions

Summary

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There's one potential bright side to the Maryland law that requires any company with more than 10,000 employees in the state spend at least 8 percent of its payroll on employee health benefits, or "contribute" a similar amount to the state's insurance program for the poor. The only company that fits the description is Wal- Mart. The up-side of the law is that economists will now be able to study how this alarming new intrusion by the state into the private workplace will impact the state's economy.

At least one academician who says he'll be watching closely is Don Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University in Virginia. In a recent letter to the Wall Street Journal, Boudreaux says the law gives academicians "excellent new opportunities for research," by "comparing Maryland to states without such a mandate." While he'll wait to see the impacts, the professor's educated guesses about what will happen are that employment growth in the state will fall, the unemployment rate of unskilled workers will rise, growth of wages and non-health-care benefits will slow, the company will increase its use of private contractors and the access of Marylanders to health care benefits will not improve.

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Whacking Wal-Mart ; State Should Stay Out of Business Decisions

Only time will tell if these predictions pan out. But it doesn't take a trained economist, or a rocket scientist, to recognize that Boudreax will likely be proved right. Will it matter, though?

The anti-Wal-Mart campaign i...

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