Wal-Mart figure out how to save on healthcare

Among the recommendations are hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.

Stephen Greenhouse and Michael Barbaro, Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways to Cut Employee Benefit Costs - New York Times, 26 October 2005

I remind the reader of the Progressive Era assumption that in the age of the large corporation, the State is the only institution powerful enough to protect the individual.

No individual, family, or private institution can protect life, freedom, and property by apprehending criminals, trying them before a court of law, and incarcerating them.

Nor can individuals and institutions, by themselves, enforce contracts, or fight terrorism, or negotiate and sign treaties with foreign governments, and the like.

These are responsibilities to which only the state can attend.

The Founders wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to define precisely government’s limited, specific role in securing individual rights, and how government should carry out that very important role.

Steve Forbes, The Moral Basis of a Free Society, Policy Review, 1997