Politics from the Palouse to Puget Sound

Thursday, January 26, 2006

This Guy Needs Some New Material

Highly quotable University of Idaho Assistant Professor of Agricultural Economics Stephen Cooke is at it again.

Cooke, if you remember, is the originator of "the only thing worse than having a Walmart is not having one" and "Walmart has a split personality, or as I like to say, it’s the little girl with the little curl. When they’re good they’re very, very good and when they’re bad they’re horrid.”

In an NWPR story today about Northwest communities "battling Wal-Mart (what about "battling for Wal-Mart"? Oh well, this is NPR after all) , Cooke is quoted as saying “I think communities tend to either embrace it and then sort of let Walmart run roughshod over them, or they reject it, and then they don’t get the advantage of having the employment and the low prices.”

Professor Cooke seems to think that there can be a "middle ground" on Wal-Mart, as exhibited recently in a inadvertently hysterical letter to the editor. Unfortunately for Cooke, just as there is no such thing as being a "little bit pregnant", there is no such thing as a "middle ground" with freedom.

1 comment:

April E. Coggins said...

It does seem as though we are paying the high price of lower academic standards.