This is an incredibly stupid headline. Trump didn’t criticize Amazon because it was a monopoly, he criticized it because he thinks that Amazon owns the Washington Post and he’s mad at the Washington Post.
It might not be just because of the Washington Post, although that is certainly a contributing factor.
There is also reason to believe that Trump wants to go after Amazon because Amazon is hurting brick and mortar retail, which also hurts commercial real estate, which also hurts him financially. Also Jeff Bezos is very wealthy, and Trump might view him as a rival.
I am not a Trump supporter, however it may be true that Amazon is in fact underpaying taxes. What's repugnant is that I don't believe his motivation is about making sure everyone pays their fair share into the system. It's more just transparent resentment, as well as a tactic to go after rivals.
It is concerning the way Amazon does business. However I'm not sure what kind of case the Justice Department would have against it as a Monopoly. What segment of the market do they control as much as AT&T did, or Microsoft?
And anti-trumpers don't defend Amazon because they don't believe it's a monopoly, they defend it because Trump criticizes it.
The point is that the motivation doesn't matter too much if the end result is the same. Amazon IS too big and we need to do something about it. We can all have differing motivations but still want the same thing.
If I say “the claim that Amazon costs the USPS money has no basis in fact”- or point out any of the other factual innacuracies in the president’s months-long tantrum about Amazon and the Washington Post- that isn’t defending Amazon. If there’s a case to be made against Amazon then it should be made without making things up.
Why does Amazon use USPS so heavily? It's because they charge them much lower rates than their competitors. USPS should (and not discussing regulations could) charge Amazon more.
I think it's pretty tasteless that Amazon takes advantage of regulations and the dismal financials of USPS to get cheap delivery. In the long term who wins and loses here? Amazon wins and makes some more billions and the postal workers lose as all their pensions get gutted.
You’ve moved the goalposts from “the USPS is losing money” to “the USPS is not making as much money as possible”- and still not actually provided any real numbers or facts.
Wouldn’t a better solution to the problem you claim exists be to try to change the postal rate? Instead, Trump (and, apparently, you) attacks Amazon for being so “tasteless” as to... pay the bill for services rendered.
Trump famously doesn’t pay his bills so maybe he just doesn’t understand how this kind of thing works?
Elsewhere in this thread you argue that the ends justify the means because Amazon needs to be regulated. This ignores the possibility that if Trump is lying about his motivation, then he's also lying about the "ends" he's after: If he's trying to hit Amazon as a way to hurt the Washington Post, then you have to factor that in to your calculations. It's no longer "Amazon is too big", it's "Amazon's too big and the Free Press is too free".
I actually didn't move a single goal post. I never stated that I believe that the USPS is "losing money" in the strictest sense on each of the transactions. You're projecting Trumps tweets onto me personally.
I don't care if Trump famously doesnt pay his bills because that has nothing to do with how I view Amazon. If you ask me directly I'd say it's tasteless how Trump treats his contractors and fucks them around when he can definitely afford to pay them.
And maybe he is lying about the ends he's after, that's the risk with allying with people who do have different motivations than you. However that's a risk you have to take in a society that's trying to organize many different people with many different opinions. It's almost like we need to debate and come as close to a solution as possible that meets each person's expectations/motivations without crossing the lines in the sand we each draw for acceptable behavior.
So let's discuss all the issues so you can maybe have a real discussion with me and not just argue with me because you think I'm some Trump shill.
Trump
1.) He treats women like garbage
2.) He plays games with subcontractors and employees to fuck them out of as much money as possible or not pay them at all.
3.) He plays all the tax loopholes to pay the minimum possible tax that he can.
etc etc.
Amazon
1.) Utilizes the USPS's precarious financial situation and their massive buying power to get lower rates that screw over the USPS in the long term.
2.) They don't care about the fact that when they have drones doing deliveries and drop USPS that all of the USPS workers who need their pensions paid will be SOL.
Free Press
1.) I don't think that the press is too free when it's basically all sock puppeting for rich people whether that be Fox News or Washington Post. At the same time I would definitely oppose any kind of legislation that curtails the ability of the free press to be.. free. I don't have to support gutting the Washington Post to talk about putting some regulations on Amazon.
- "He estimated at the time that Amazon pays the USPS $2 per package, which is about half what it would pay United Parcel Service (UPS, +1.95%) and Fedex" [1]
- "The Postal Service reported a net loss of $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2017, and has $15 billion in outstanding debt. The service has lost $62 billion over the last decade." [1]
- "USPS’s chief financial officer, Joseph Corbett, wrote in a post for PostalReporter.com in August that the service is required by law to charge retailers at least enough to cover its delivery costs. ... He said Congress should pass provisions of legislation introduced last year by former Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, that would allow the postal service to raise some rates and discontinue direct delivery to business customers’ doors." [1]
- "The Postal Service, writes Shapiro, “can borrow from the U.S. Treasury through the Federal Financing Bank, at highly-subsidized interest rates.” It currently borrows the legal limit of $15.2 billion at a rate of 1.2%. Without this access, it would be paying somewhere between $415 million and $490 million per year more in interest." [2]
- "The worst of it came in 2012, when the USPS lost a whopping $15.9 billion dollars, followed by $4.8 billion and $5.3 billion in 2013 and 2014, respectively." [2]
- "From 2012 through 2016, the agency failed to deliver nearly $34 billion toward its pool for retirees’ health care." [3]
- "“Given that the Postal Service is now unable to pay money it owes to the federal retirement system and to the retiree health care system,” Cummings said, “it is more urgent than ever that Congress take action to ensure that the Postal Service continues to be able to serve the American people.”" [3]
Ends doesn’t justify the means and motivation really does matter. If this really is done to hit The Washington Post, is that not a bit disturbing? It’s got a few parallels with the Gawker situation but a load worse imho.
I think it kind of depends on what the ends and means are. Also, why does motivation matter in this case specifically. I believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend can apply in certain situations. I don't need someone's motivation to strictly align with mine. Sometimes a unified goal is enough.
Completely agree that it depends on the ends and means.
In pretty much any issue we're always going to have to work with people who have differing motivations than ours, and motivations that we don't agree with. I think you've got the right question in asking why the motivation here disqualifies the end goal.
The story itself is reasonable but the headline added by OP substantially misrepresents the content.
The story title itself is "Donald Trump steps up attacks on Amazon." OP headline for HN is "Trump is not entirely wrong. Is Amazon too big?" That is not an accurate description of the story at all.
The article title is "Donald Trump steps up attacks on Amazon" and the article offers no evidence for the current post's title of "Trump is not entirely wrong. Is Amazon too big?".
In fact the article states that USPS profits off of Amazon, exactly the opposite of the accusation.
In keeping with tradition here, the answer to the post's question is "no".
I forgot that I have the http://maketrumptweetseightagain.com/ extension installed, which apparently works on embedded tweets as well. Just open up the page and there's the tweet in crayon in the middle of the article...
Yes, that is a much better article for the current title of the post. It still doesn't actually argue anything about Amazon's size but it does at least go deeper into the financials of the situation.
The problem is straight forward: Amazon is clearly not too big today. Their retail sales are a bit over a third that of Walmart (and that's only if we count the marketplace sellers in Amazon's retail total). They have plenty of competition in cloud services, Azure and Google will likely gradually continue to take market share there.
It will be too big in retail, tomorrow - maybe. Given all that can go wrong, that's a big maybe. Pre-emptively punishing them for what they may or may not become ten years from now, is an obnoxious perversion of justice. It's a massively positive for consumers today that Amazon exists, that they have the scale that they do, and that they're as friendly toward consumers as they are.
It'll still take another ten years of torrid growth just for Amazon to catch up to Walmart's retail scale.
It's a great reference point because we're dealing with things as they actually are, not a theorized ideal scenario. Walmart made it through the era of peak Walmart-fear, they're not going to get broken up at this point. There is no scenario where that happens now.
Answer: no. Amazon benefits the vast majority of people, and acting as if a company can get "too big" is a bit silly. It's hysteria like this that ended in the Bell split, something that undeniably harmed everyone involved.
I suspect at some point t we might see Amazon regulated like a utility. For example in Australia/UK phone networks must give reasonably priced access for virtual phone network companies to use their infrastructure and compete.
I'd love to see something like this with companies like Walmart. Imagine that got broken up into 6,000 invividual stores. It would be a jobs boom with every store now needing an accountant, marketing help etc. Then we have 6,000 stores all looking back into each others markets wondering if the can open a competing store and how they can improve. I really think breaking g up large companies will be a boom for economies.
> I'd love to see something like this with companies like Walmart.
I think there would be some serious unintended consequences here. Think about Walmart's negotiating position and logistics network going up in smoke overnight. Costs go up and selection vanishes. This hurts doubly in small to medium sized towns where Walmart already crushed the competition.
We had that decentralized system. It was terrible for everyone. That's why Walmart stomped them.
It was bad for consumers - selection would implode, individual stores can't handle inventory as well or bargain properly, their pricing power is low. It was bad for employees - very poor wages, zero benefits, no dependability that the business would be there tomorrow. It was bad for competition - stores constantly went under.
Walmart benefits from a national system of standards, of training, inventory, pricing & buying, shipping, storage, quality control, etc and so on for dozens of other major issues.
Walmart also benefits from being able to offset weaker stores with stronger stores. You can yield a small profit over here, and make up for it with a better profit over there. Without that, the store simply goes under given the hyper thin margins, when things slip (inevitable).
I dont think it would be as bad as you feel. Things like pricing can be overcome as we have better information flow these days so the opportunity to order from a variety of suppliers is much easier than ever to create competition. And wages...well I dont think the centralised system is showing much benefit there to debate the counter point.
The key is seeing the problem as a flow rather than 2 options. Yes large centralised systems are more efficient. So over time stores would re-centralise with the benefit being 'as they centralise'. When you break up a large player you now have many opportunities for improvement/innovation rather than someone entrenched who can win via their scale alone. The best stores will grow and spread, become entrenched and then we rinse and repeat.
I feel people forget a core component of governments role in healthy capitalism is ensuring a level playing field. This allows competition and innovation. I agree that centralisation has benefits for business but these seem to entrench and stagnate the business while they hold out competition through their scale rather than theses qualities. Some business you can legislate for this level playing field, others it best to break-up and let the market sort itself.
