Starting Black Friday Sales on Thanksgiving Morally Wrong

Fortune Online has proclaimed it: Macy's, the famous New York City department store, has 'thrown down the Black Friday gauntlet'. The store has announced that it will open at 6 PM Thanksgiving evening for the sake of the Thanksgiving Friday madness. Many other retailers are sure to follow.

This is a prime example of why unfettered capitalism, of why a completely free market, is on this Earth a moral wrong. Forcing, yes, forcing, people to work on holidays, outside of essential services, is an affront to their human dignity. And please don't bother about trying to argue that no one is being forced. Most of Macy's, and Target's, and Toys-R-us, and Sears employees, most likely a significant majority of them anyway, need their jobs. They have little option but to work at such absurd times when the powers that be say they must. Further, don't go on about them just getting other jobs. That ain't so easy, folks. Certainly it isn't so easy as the laissez-faire academics (who live in an idealist, abstract, and therefore unworldly, paradise) want us to believe. The world isn't perfect. Neither then will be the application of the theories of its denizens, no matter how good they look on paper.

Which is why some government regulation of the markets is good and necessary. There would be nothing wrong with a reintroduction of something like the old Blue Laws, used to prohibit nonessential services from being performed on major holidays anyway (or absurdly early on the days following them). People need time off, and the people who demand those folks' time need to reevaluate their needs. This includes more than the big shot business owners. It includes the selfish buyers who want what they want when they want it, and consideration of their fellow man be damned.

The Catholic Church has the right word for it: consumerism. At its extreme, it is a moral evil. People simply do not need everything they think they need. They certainly don't need it at the expense of another citizen's well deserved relaxation, or their time with family and friends. Your new big screen TV can wait until tomorrow, or the next sale, and if you don't get it at all, well, poor baby. Your life must indeed be awful.

If you want to talk responsibility, then let's talk about man's inhumanity to man and go from there, because responsibility doesn't begin with market forces. All too often they merely stomp responsibility and, in fact, our obligation to others. Obligation is not inherent in amassing goods.