
Amazon Is Thriving Thanks to Taxpayer Dollars - jriot
https://newrepublic.com/article/146540/amazon-thriving-thanks-taxpayer-dollars
======
danjoc
I've always wondered what it's like. Wake up in the morning, look in the
mirror, and say to myself, "I personally have enough money to end world hunger
for three years." And then not do it. Instead, just go off to work, a little
spring in my step, knowing the US government would foot the bill for food
stamps for my employees instead. While 600,000 children starve to death
worldwide in the new year. I wonder how that would feel? Would I be conflicted
about it?

~~~
whb07
Then what happens after those 3 years? Nevermind what would happen if Bezos
liquidated 100% of his stock.

There are side effects of him creating such wealth. Maybe you can’t see them
directly but they are there. Advances made in tech allow for people everywhere
in the world to benefit. Look at smart phone penetration which allows people
knowledge, greater communication, etc.

None of this comes about by what you’re commenting on. Take a look at the
Gates foundation and how many tens of billions which are pledged by the world
richest.

It’s very easy to judge and comment from the stands. I’d love to see what your
daily activities are to help the world’s poorest. I’d dare say what they want
is a job that comes from foreign investment rather than a sack of UN grains
for the month’s rations.

~~~
danjoc
It seems you guys missed the point of the comment. It's not a generic rant
about Bezos being rich. That would be against HN posting guidelines.

Bezos has enough money to feed the world BUT doesn't even pay his own
employees enough to feed themselves. "Evil corporations" like AT&T and Comcast
have taken their Trump tax windfall to pay bonuses to all hands. Amazon takes
the money and pockets it... while their employees are food insecure.

------
dr1337
Welcome to Feudalism 2.0 - your new overlords are no longer the Duke of
Aquitaine, Lorraine or Normandy but Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.

~~~
p2t2p
Nobody forces anybody to buy or use for free anything from those companies.
Try not paying tax to your duke though...

~~~
ulrichstic
I'm not anti-Amazon or anything, but I do think that characterization is
inaccurate, and the article is raising legitimate concerns. It's not the way
these problems work.

No, no one is forced to buy from these companies, but that's not how the
coercion works. How it works is that there is a coercion in making an offer
too good to refuse, where the costs to others of that offer are hidden in some
way or another. Then because those other people are getting hurt, they have
less, which forces others to take a cut to stay viable, which hurts them, and
so forth and so on.

It's a kind of runaway process, and how monopolies often come to be. They
don't come and threaten you if you don't use their services, they make an
offer that is too good to be true, because it is, except that the costs of
that fraud are borne in production, not the product, or in the long-term.

The fraud comes in the form of avoiding financial obligations by hiding them.
It's how a lot of these financial inequities develop: Corporation X hides the
costs, especially where those costs are long-term, fuzzy, or loosely monitored
(ecologically, in public health, in welfare), and then profits by passing
those costs on to society more broadly. It's like someone saying they can
build a house for you cheaply, then hiding all the short-cuts they use to do
so, and then disappearing when you're left to foot the bill 10 years later for
their irresponsibility and lies.

With the financial crisis underpinning the Great Recession, it happened by
firms passing on the risk costs to the public through bailouts. Various
manufacturing and energy-sector companies get out of the real ecological costs
of their activities by plausible deniability in lawsuits, etc.

Here, Amazon is hiding the costs of that free shipping, etc. by not providing
their workers fair conditions and by passing those costs on to the public. So
their employees get injured every day, and they shouldn't pay that?

The reason people become irate when a certain level of financial success is
reached is because so often, the greater the inequity, the higher the
likelihood that inequity was obtained through unfair means. It's not
guaranteed, but the probability increases rapidly, and society is full of
these extreme forms of inequity. Corruption isn't driven toward
impoverishment, and human attributes are usually bell-shaped, not grotesquely
skewed.

These companies become so bloated and their monopolies so extreme that often
it is understandable that government give into their demands. So we end up
with companies "too big to fail"\--really, isn't that a euphemism for "too big
to stand up to"?--and rationalizing the bullying and unfairness by telling
ourselves these companies are really making a better place, as if it's only
these companies, no one else, that no one else would have done these things if
they could compete fairly, that we're buying from _this_ company in particular
because we preferred that company, and not because the choice was really to
buy or go without, and that it's justified that the profits should be unevenly
distributed throughout the company.

Isn't, after all, Amazon's success due to Bezos? Isn't he the one doing all
the work?

~~~
p2t2p
I fail to see how offer can be too good to refuse. I don’t use google
services, because it’s evil. Period. No matter what’s the offer.

And could you elaborate on hidden cost to others? All I see right now is
thousands if not millions workplaces created thanks to Amazon, hundreds
businesses having a relatively cheap marketplace to sell their goods, which in
turn creates workplaces, millions of kids in their third world countries
having their chance to leave the farm and go and try to build a skill, billion
of people went out of poverty in last 30 years, all of it just because Bezos
and others like him managed to make that offer “too good to refuse”.

This line with Bezos didn’t do all of the job himself is really a slippery
slope, blink of an eye and you’re sending kulaks to Siberia with their
families. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/)

I also fail to see why it’s Bezos’s problem that nobody wants to hire those
people for bigger salaries. At least he’s giving them something. Would they be
better off without Amazon existence? Or are they better off because it’s
existence?

------
inspector14
this article is highly misleading and is clearly shoehorning particular
statistics in to paint a rather manipulative and damning portrait of a greedy
jeff bezos and the soulless company he's running. that's okay, i assume anyone
here would have the mental wherewithal to discern this sort of trickery and
not allow such drivel to influence their opinions too much.

the reality is that the few people in the first world (let's face it, if
you're reading hackernews, you're probably in the first world) aren't
benefiting directly from amazon in someway, whether it be directly or
indirectly.

it's frustrating to see this generalized hatred towards anyone who surpasses a
certain level of success, as if what he's doing to make the world a better
place isn't quite enough and he should be off in africa spoonfeeding starving
children. it's such a cartoonish and unrealistic notion that anyone with that
amount of money would be able to solve the most complex issues that we face as
a species simply because he has a high net worth.

i'd take facebook, google and amazon as my technocratic overlords over just
facebook and google any year of the millenium.

------
lurr
They will get more once they figure out which city they can use to extort
seattle. Then more again when they use Seattle to extort tax breaks from their
new HQ.

~~~
MollyR
I hate the fact that's probably exactly what will happen. We need better ways
from keeping corporations from taking advantage of the tax payer unfairly.

~~~
Spivak
What else can you do when cities want/need large corporations more than more
than the corporation needs them? I mean one of the wealthiest areas in my
metro area is sustained mostly by a single fortune 500. If they threatened to
leave you better believe they'll grovel at the font of wealth that allows
their entire community to exist.

~~~
lurr
and if the next city tells them to get fucked how many times can they manage
to move around before they get the message?

Amazon is going to uproot huge amounts of engineers? Doubt it. I wouldn't move
just to help jeff make a bit more.

~~~
hkmurakami
Stop growth in that city and increase headcount exclusively elsewhere. Growth
rate for headcount is something like 10-20% a year.

