Wahlberg and Walmart: It's called economics, not sexism

Mark Wahlberg is one of the most bankable movie stars in America, and so he recently got paid considerably more money for Kevin Spacey-related reshoots of “All the Money in the World” than co-star Michelle Williams.

That’s called economics, not sexism. But since progressivism requires victimhood to survive, like a high priest at an Aztec temple requires human sacrifices, then Adam Smith be damned.

Williams’ supposed plight was bandied about as if she had just left a hotel room with Harvey Weinstein, instead of simply acknowledging she was the talented but still supporting actress to the star of the show.

It’s not complicated. The women’s gymnastics coach doesn’t make the same amount of money as Nick Saban at the University of Alabama — even though her athletes may be every bit as awe-inspiring as his football players — because he makes it rain money at the school and they don’t.

And if you had no special interest in watching a movie about a real-life kidnapping that took place in 1973, you are far more likely to go see it if Wahlberg’s name is attached to it than Williams’.

Which brings me from Wahlberg to Walmart and Sam’s Club, where employees are far more likely to have received a raise and/or a bonus than be laid off as of this week. But the fake news predictably has a different story, focusing on economic “injustice.” Of course.

OMG, you guys, yelped progressive Twitter. We caught the bastards red-handed! The same day Walmart announced that it is raising the starting wage rate for hourly employees to $11 and offering bonuses of up to $1,000 following the $1.5 trillion tax-cut package Congress passed last month, it also closed 63 underperforming stores across the country.

This is clearly the return of the robber barons. Or, if you are sane, it’s just the kind of restructuring one might expect many businesses to engage in after coming out from under one of the most oppressive corporate tax rates in the civilized world.

Furthermore, let me just say that I’m not really partial to listening to laments about closed businesses from the very same people who like to shut down bakeries and floral shops when they don’t bend the knee to the Rainbow Jihad.

Helpful context for rejecting the scare tactics du jour is that while 63 Sam’s Club stores did indeed close, the company will continue to operate about 550 other stores across the United States. So instead of a bloodletting, or anything close to it, we have a pruning.  Yes, thousands of workers will have to find new work, and I sincerely wish them Godspeed in their search, but they are the Michelle Williams of this story.

The headliner, the Mark Wahlberg if you will, is that lower taxes will mean more money for most people from both the taxpayers’ perspective and the private employees of countless American businesses like Walmart. But that story doesn’t work in the “you didn’t build that” economy of Obama. And so it must be neutered, with the help of a willfully deceptive press.

Such is the confusion they have wrought that 66 percent of Americans, in a recent Quinnipiac poll, said they feel the economy is either “Excellent or Good” — the highest such number ever recorded by this poll since it began asking the question in 2001. Yet more than a year into Trump’s presidency, that outcome is credited to Obama more than it is to Trump, by a score of 49 percent to 40 percent.

The truth is this: The market is working more freely now than it has in quite some time, and that is a death knell for at least one leg of the progressive stool. So expect the leftist economic propaganda leading up to the 2018 midterms to focus on breadlines rather than bullishness.

And believe none of it.

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