CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of the Capitalists presents an extensive bannerline at Business and Technology Reinvention. If you're following the Wal-Mart wars, this Scatterbox post might be a useful companion to my entry at the Carnival.

The concluding paragraph suggests there might be two systems of belief about the role of business.

But for all the rhetoric bombs and finger-pointing, Wal-Mart still handles some 140 million customers every week representing more than 80 percent of the American population. It’s reasonable to think that many Americans are oblivious to the whole commotion. And it's almost certain that many more are just plain ambivalent about it.

Why? Because in the real workaday world, these millions of people are consumers, not constituents. And consumers go Wal-Mart to get good prices on things they need – not to support a particular political party or public policy agenda.

First belief system: Civilization progresses by expanding the number of tasks people can do without thinking about them. I think that's Mises, feel free to correct me. Under this belief system, Wal-Mart evolved to make a wider variety of cheap stuff available.

Second belief system: The personal is political. Human interaction is inherently a negotiation over the allocation of resources and power. Although Wal-Mart well might have evolved precisely to make a wider variety of cheap stuff available, left unstated are the reasons why "variety" and "cheap" matter, and that's prior to any discussion about how Wal-Mart goes about achieving those things.

Does it follow that people can shop at Wal-Mart without contemplating politics or policy? Yes. Can Wal-Mart exist independent of politics or policy? No.