Calling all ideologues

By Heraclitus

I'm no admirer of The New York Times, but John Tierney strikes even me as an embarassment for the paper. He recently wrote a column arguing that Wal-Mart should get a Noble Prize for lifting more people out of poverty than the Grameen Foundation. Whether you find this risible or infuriating, you'll enjoy Echidne's shredding of his thesis. The high point of her argument:

[M]icrolending schemes encourage independence and self-determination and put power into the hands of very ordinary village people, most of them women, by the way, who were earlier quite powerless and often even scorned. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, prefers its workers meek and without other options.