CG Hill has an thoughtful post up on Walmart wages and one Donald Ramaker's take on the argument that Walmart is costing the taxpayers because they pick up the slack between what Walmart pays and what it's employers need to live on:

Let’s take the issue of living wages first. One of the great mantras of the Left is that Walmart workers who are single parents typically earn less than the poverty level. It is said that they can’t live on the low wages paid by the evil profiteering Walmart. One has to ask: if you are a single parent, why are you working at Walmart?! Unless you are management, it is a well known fact that you will not make a living wage working in retail, regardless of what store it is. Or are the crusaders on the Left claiming that anyone can be a single parent and make it by working at Target or Kmart, because those companies pay so much more? Retail is a half step above fast food in that anyone working there is typically a student, a part-timer working their second job or full timer working their household’s second job, a retiree, or……..a loser.

Part of me is inclined to not only agree, but to ask those that use this argument if they're sure of the implications. From a market point-of-view, the problem isn't that Walmart is paying so low, it's that the government is helping out at all. Liberals and conservatives may agree that the situation is undesirable, but the common cause ends right there.

That being said, there are some legitimate issues hovering about. Conservatives getting too comfy on their high horse can begin to sound like Eric Cartman screaming at the destitute Costa Ricans to get a job. The thing about these low-wage jobs is that someone has to have them. No matter how many college degrees we give out, we only have so much need for engineers and software programmers in this country.

At the end of the day, someone has got to flip the burgers and bag the groceries. We can call them lazy and stupid all day long if we want, but in many cases they're doing a job that we don't want to do. The conflict America faces is that there must be such people in this country and that working people deserve respect. Heaven help conservatives if we can't agree on that latter point. Market capitalism, wonderful though it may be, leaves gaps that must be covered by someone. Talk of fairness rings hollow when someone is fairly starving to death.

I guess where I part company with the more staunch libertarians and conservatives is that capitalism is, to me, the means to an end. While I do not believe we could have just pumped money into New Orleans's Ninth Ward and it all would have been okay, it is uncumbent upon us as people to put a system in place to try to minimize the span and impact of such places in this country. Capitalism may be a better way to do it than socialism, but it's a way to achieve results, not results in themselves. When and if the system fails to reward work, the system needs to be investigated.

The challenge we face is to harness the power of market-incentives and do what we can to provide the means of those in the lower cusp of things the opportunity to work there way up. The American Scene's Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have been fleshing this out for some time now and it has been most thought-provoking reading, propelling them to join Brothers Judd as the two must-read blogs of the conservative blogosphere (albeit for different reasons).

If I could set up one conversation to occur between liberals and conservatives, it would be over the balance between economic justice, whose face is capitalism, and social justice, whose face is charity. Unfortunately, in many ways we've bogged each other down in debate over personalities and the dogmatic tendency to see things exactly so that they will confirm what we already believe.