Can a populist shop at Wal-Mart?

That's the title of a great post by Prof. Russell Arben Fox, over at his populist communitarian blog. "Freedom means shaping your own choices, not merely being able to make choices, however many options there may be out there," says Prof. Fox, agreeing with Caleb Stegall, who thinks that freedom defined narrowly as consumer freedom is false. But he doesn't share Caleb's hostility to Wal-Mart:

In a world where comparative advantage and global trade and urbanization and specialization have done their work, a world where the ability to live a wholly self-sufficient life has been rendered often incompatible with the demands of information-based economies, a world where farms are shrinking and unions are on the run and guilds are almost wholly a thing of the past, something like a Wal-Mart is probably necessary if we are not to condemn a good portion of any given population (such as those outside of metropolitan centers or who lack sufficient incomes, or both) to deprivation. So sure, you can shop at Wal-Mart (in truth, it's not like Kroger operates on manifestly different principles either). But our responsibility at the present moment--besides our obvious and primary one to doing what's best for our families and communities--is to figure out ways to limit the Wal-Marts of the world, discipline them and fit them into a new "order" wherein citizens can find themselves to be more than consumers.