I don't know how you get, 'Everyone else is turning their backs on the poor and forcing Walmart to take care of them' from 'Walmart should pay their employees a living wage.'
The only other alternative would be to drastically increase social services and tax people - like the Waltons - a LOT more.
It seems like you've completely failed to understand any of my comment. I'm taking issue with the entire construction of the claim you're making. If I buy a guy's used car from him on Craigslist, and he doesn't have a job and that was his only income that year, am I "increasing my own wealth by refusing to pay him enough to live, which then requires everyone else to make up the difference"? No, and your claim makes as little sense as that one does.
My whole point is that I've never heard an argument for loading the purchase of labor with the responsibility for arbitrary parts of the seller's life. The only arguments I've ever heard in support of it (like yours) are just a poor excuse to shrug off the responsibility that society owes to its citizens.
> The only other alternative would be to drastically increase social services and tax people - like the Waltons - a LOT more.
Well _duh_. That's entirely my point. And it makes infinitely more sense to target governmental revenue intentionally (ie through a progressive tax code) than to resort to the current messy workaround and all the distortions of the labor market that it implies.
I honestly cannot see how anyone can consider subsidizing a massively profitable multi billion dollar business is an "ethical approach".
I have never understood this complaint. I'm 100% onboard with the idea that, in a society as affluent as ours, no one should be going hungry, unhoused, etc. But how is that not our collective responsibility, as opposed to the responsibility of an entity who happens to be buying their labor?
The idea that Walmart is "forcing" the government to take care of poorer citizens is frankly idiotic: if you accept that there is a responsibility to take care of the poor (as I do), that responsibility is on all of us, and the government is the canonical expression of our collective will and action. Trying to shirk this responsibility by desperately shoe-horning it into the labor market is just a messy hack (the same is true of the idea that employers should be the de facto providers of health insurance, as opposed to the gov't). I can't help but think that people who think that this is somehow the ethical approach have a status-quo bias as a poor substitute for actual moral reasoning.