Lew, I suspect that the way that the Wal-Mart haters will come after Wal-Mart for this latest way to help the poor will be threefold. First, they will declare that this is not enough for Wal-Mart to do to atone for its “sins” of “destroying” the American economy. Yes, there are people out there — like Pat Buchanan on the Right and Jim Wallis on the left — who believe that Wal-Mart is a net negative for us.

Second, they will claim that the reason people cannot afford drugs in the first place is that Wal-Mart does not pay its workers enough, and that it purchases products from overseas, thus “destroying jobs and income” in this country. This is a corollary to the first line of attack, but it also will be used.

Third, they will claim that the production of the low-priced drugs themselves involves low-priced labor and other methods that do not “fairly” compensate laborers. You see, Lew, according to people on the left like Wallis, the only “fair and moral” way to sell products at low prices is to pay high costs for the factors of production, and then have the prices of the final goods subsidized via tax money, with the taxes taken exclusively from higher-income people. Thus, we have “low prices,” “high wages,” and high taxes, and these people believe that only a high-tax regime can fit into the standards of public morality.

Now, we believe this is nonsense, and it truly is nonsense. But these are the kinds of policies that people are demanding today. By the way, if what you think I described above is fraudulent, all you have to do is to see what is happening in the production and use of ethanol to see a major fraud at hand. Not surprisingly, ethanol is a darling of both the right and the left.