A few years before she became Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher famously said that socialist governments make a financial mess because they run out of other people's money. This quote has been turned into an aphorism that is particularly popular with fiscal conservatives and disciples of Ayn Rand who feel that social safety nets constitute theft by the undeserving masses of the hard-earned wealth of producers like themselves. These conservatives prefer the unregulated Chicago-school economic model advocated by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, wherein the industrious are supposedly free to maximize their wealth as much as they deserve through their own ingenuity and hard work, unfettered by the iron hand of Keynesian government interference.

The problem with unfettered laissez-faire Friedmanism, however, is that eventually the rich run out of poor people's money. And major advocates of the model are beginning to feel the pinch. Case in point? Wal-Mart, which is in the midst of a sales slump during which it has experienced eight consecutive quarters of falling sales at U.S. stores that have been open for at least a year. This is an often-used model because it measures a company's sustained profitability without the distorted effect of sales from new store openings. The reason? Poor people just don't have the money they used to. As Numerian at Agonist writes:

The core of the problem rests with Wal-Mart’s customer base – middle class and poor Americans. This is a huge and growing segment of the American population, since wealth in the US is increasingly being concentrated in a small segment of the population which certainly doesn’t shop at Wal-Mart. Furthermore, within Wal-Mart’s customer base, there has been a shrinkage of the middle class and an expansion of the poor class since the depression hit in 2008. Depression is the right word to use for Wal-Mart’s customers, over one-third of whom are on food stamps. Mike Duke, the CEO of Wal-Mart, describes his customers as “broke” at the end of every month, when they cease to shop at his stores even for essentials until their next government support check comes in. These are “average” Americans, which means they have $10,000 or less in savings to their name, they clearly live paycheck to paycheck, they are burdened with debt, they have absorbed the bulk of the enormous job losses that have occurred in this depression, and if they have a job they haven’t see a real pay increase in over a decade.

With Wal-Mart's sales at existing stores already declining, what will happen if we simply cut entitlement spending like the teabag crowd is advocating? What will happen if we cut social security benefits? What will happen if we reduce unemployment benefits and magically expect the newly deprived to find jobs that will apparently spring up from thin air? What will happen if we cut the food assistance and WIC programs that so many working poor and young mothers rely on?

The answer is probably a simple one for Mike Duke: developing-world sales have become Wal-Mart's key growth driver. Maybe it'll just be time to leave its impoverished American customer behind in the quest for profits overseas. After all, the shareholders would expect nothing less.