Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (the evil Scaife newspaper) is my choice for today’s defender of Wal-Mart:

Wal-Mart’s victims were benevolent mom & pop grocery, hardware and drug store owners who for generations had thought only about the needs and wants of their community, not their own profit margins.

And until the evil giant came and squashed them, these altruistic local monopolists were keeping their prices charitably low and paying their unionized employees $20 an hour (with full health benefits and profit-sharing, of course).

Sure they were.

No one says you have to love Wal-Mart or have to shop there. But don’t buy the populist fairy tales about Wal-Mart’s poor victims, its unhappy wage slaves or its unique corporate evilness.

Costco is smaller, that’s all. And, in its heyday, the A&P grocery chain was proportionately bigger, more dominant and just as “predatory” (i.e., they too killed off their smaller, weaker competition by cutting prices ruthlessly to serve consumers).

Wal-Mart is popular with the shopping masses, but its reputation has been permanently trashed by mainstream media, unions and anti-capitalist opinion elites who, perversely, see its size and success as proof that it hurts society.

Yet in the last 50 years, Wal-Mart’s low-low prices and entry-level jobs have probably done more good for more poor people than all the government’s wasteful social welfare programs.