"Matt Kilcoyne, of the free market think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, disagrees.
"Quite frankly Bezos's greatest act of philanthropy is Amazon itself," he argues.
"Lower prices, more choice and competition have delivered billions for Bezos and billions worth for the hundreds of millions of customers he serves."
"
I do think feel strong about Bezos plans, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim Amazon is a public good.
Pretty sure all the people who worked in book shops don't think so.
Way more people benefited from Amazon. It's cheaper. It set a new standard in delivery times and customer support. Its existence improved life of millions of people by significant margin. That old industry got killed is natural when progress happens.
The customer's don't see the horrible conditions behind the scenes, all they see are cheap products.
If you're a delivery driver, your job options are extremely limited. You can deliver fast food, or deliver for companies like Amazon. It's either that, or starve.
Not really something you can "just do", when you're living paycheck to paycheck and can barely even pay rent, even after moving to more affordable accommodation, while also keeping your ~15 year old car running, because it's your lifeline to even having a job in the first place.
I never understand why people say things like this. It's not even remotely true. For instance we can quantify the salary comment. A quick search for fulfillment center work showed salaries starting at $12-$14/hour. The median pay for retail work, by contrast, is $11.24 [1], which means 50% of workers earn less than that.
It's not possible to similarly conveniently quantify concern about counterfeit, but if you think they genuinely do not care about it then I don't even know what to say. Even from a purely greed centered point of view, counterfeits hurt mid to longterm revenue.
I base my impression of their working conditions on a friend of mine, who's worked both the warehouses and as a delivery driver. The managers are slave drivers, and if you're just a minute or two behind on a schedules delivery, you get dinged, a black mark on your employment record and a severe talking-down. Even if the delay is of no fault of your own (bad traffic, weather, etc.), it's seen as a personal failure on your part.
No level of pay can make up for being treated like shit.
Regarding the counterfeits, Amazon loves to say how they're dealing with the issue, but the examples just keep piling up. And of course their childish behavior around Chromecast and Youtube.
I'm not sure I'd allow the delivery times and customer support to be attributed as a real thing to Amazon.
Both were meant as audience capturing tactics and were basically unattainable by most all other competitors due to costs -- Amazon only avoided it riding on a large wave of money and eating costs for years until it was the only game in town.
Now you can't have a thread about Amazon without constant complaints about the 2-Day shipping never really being 2-Day shipping, the constant fakes that plague the Amazon inventory (with a seemingly blind-eye from Amazon itself on it), and so on.
These weren't really public goods introduced by Amazon, as plenty of stores handle the customer service side just fine in most cases, and the delivery stuff was mostly just investors subsidizing the costs for a time, which appears to no longer be a major focal point.
Except that you can still just as easily buy things from normal retailers. They're not dead. People choose not to because the value of obtaining things from Amazon remains higher to them.
Perhaps it’s selection bias. People who are happy with Amazon may not see the need to comment about it in every thread.
But to counter this trend: I am very, very happy that Amazon exists. It’s allowed me to discover and buy plenty of books that I otherwise would never read or sample. Not to mention dozens of everyday items I buy from them. Nail clippers, socks, alarm clock, router, resistance bands, headphones and many more I’m forgetting about.
It’s all under one roof, delivery is usually very fast (sometimes it’s just one day on two-day delivery; when there are some delays and it takes an extra day they always notify me by e-mail).
Amazon is great and I’m a more-than-satisfied consumer.
It's not only about costs. It's really about hard work to deliver the best for customers.
Many online retailers simply do not make efforts to deliver, quite apart from any cost consideration, and then they moan about Amazon.
In addition, it's also about creating trust. Buying something online requires more trust than buying from a store so convincing people that it's safe and that there won't be any issues with returns and refunds is a big part of getting people to place and order and to come back.
> I'm not sure I'd allow the delivery times and customer support to be attributed as a real thing to Amazon.
Amazon has "Amazon Lockers", which let me accept deliveries at a time convenient to me, with no human interaction. This is a real improvement over previous methods, and AFAIK no other retailer in my country has anything similar.
>Amazon has "Amazon Lockers", which let me accept deliveries at a time convenient to me, with no human interaction.
So, just like a post office box?
Not to mention that the raise of companies like Amazon and the "on demand" mentality is the one that forces people to not have more regular hours "convenient to them".
Post office boxes are expensive, require filling in an application form, and require human interaction to access the contents. Amazon Lockers are included in the normal "free" delivery, require no paperwork, and are completely automated.
That people benefited from internet shopping and delivery is not a defense of a company treating it's workers badly or evading paying taxes. Let's not pretend amazon is the only company that might have delivered those efficiencies, they were just the most successful, the most ruthless.
You can't expect companies to fight for greater good and sacrifice their interests for the overall good. In fact it's against the law for them to do that. Amazon hires a lot of people and in many countries pay reasonably well. With taxes it does what the law allows.
If you want to change those things start with changing the law, ending policies hurting the working class (limiting low skill migration would be the first step) and getting rid of ridiculous taxes like corporate income tax you claim Amazon dodged (while in fact it pays what the law requires it to pay).
Blaming the player for playing the game well while taking care of what they are legally obliged to do (shareholder value) is neither smart nor constructive.
> In fact it's against the law for them to do that.
No, it’s not. The corporation’s interests must align with the shareholders, but there’s no law that says short-term profit is the only legal goal. Companies can and have sacrificed in order to build the community.
Public trading often leads to that however with activist investors.
Anyone who sees them acting suboptomally for the short term can buy in, pressure for more short term interests and lobby to get their way then jump off before it collapses with their gains. Even without that scheming continuous gains are demanded generally.
I completely agree. One legal change that needs to happen to preserve the free market: company with a habit of employees using social assistance should not get tax breaks (or any other help) from the government. The taxpayer should not be subsidizing the paycheck of Amazon employees. The burden is on Amazon to pay their employees a competitive wage, it's their problem not mine.
Otherwise they have no incentive to pay their employees a competitive wage.
Without competitive wages you have no free market, you just have a corporate welfare state, where the cost of paying workers is taken from the workers themselves thru taxation.
That's basically what some UBI shills want. They want state taxation and welfare to replace the onus of corporations to pay competitive wages to employees.
>I completely agree. One legal change that needs to happen to preserve the free market: company with a habit of employees using social assistance should not get tax breaks (or any other help) from the government.
No enterprise-size company should get any tax break, period. Only small companies or enterprises that can show they had a bad run (and e.g. might otherwise need to close).
Add to that a rule that if they then just go and take their offices/factories abroad (where they get a big tax break) they get hit with the equivalent savings in import tax is they want to sell in the domestic market.
Combine that with tiny or no tax for individuals (like it has been before the 20th century and is still in several places).
>You can't expect companies to fight for greater good and sacrifice their interests for the overall good.
You can if the society and law demands that. E.g. throw them a few huge fines for using bad labor practices (e.g. workers not allowed to go to the toilet when they need to, firing pregnant women, other kinds of discrimination) and let's see what happens.
Shortening the delivery times from 3 to 2 days incurs a >40% increase in fuel costs. You claim the slight convenience of having stuff on your doorstep on Wednesday rather than Thursday not only outweighs that massive inefficiency and all its externalities, but is in fact a "significant improvement of the lives of millions of people".
>Way more people benefited from Amazon. It's cheaper. It set a new standard in delivery times and customer support. Its existence improved life of millions of people by significant margin.
Have you counted the lives and communities it destroyed (e.g. closing local alternatives and smaller chains)? The environmental cost from such large scale delivery of every possible BS? The externalities (including accumulated power to single person who contracts for the military industrial complex and runs newspapers)?
I'm sure the people that manufactured buggy whips didn't think cars or mass transit was a public good either. Sadly, stuff like this happens as the world advances.
I have a lot of sympathy for people in this situation and think they should be re-trained, but I wouldn't hold back progress.
I dont quite understand this reoccurring sentiment about the poor book shops.
Here in Germany the bookshops mainly feature fear mongering books and are mostly in German. Then there is a tiny section of english books (which often happen to be better then the German books displayed).
Maybe this dos not apply to all German book shops but I feel like they haven't gotten with the times yet.
This might just be my perception since I spent a lot of time in college towns in the US, but book shops are kind of like coffee houses in that many people seem to get the idea that they'd be successful in running one, and often enough you see a bookshop pop-up for a few months then just vanish after it fails to gain traction and sustain.
Bookshops in the US, however, tend to be way different than you're describing and instead are pretty much just a repository for dumping books. Most (unsurprisingly) double up on the dream and also become coffee houses, and they also try to act as an arts hub for the community, doing like talks, workshops, etc.
So that's mostly what people are commenting on I would assume.
Here in the UK most of the bookshops that just sold books have gone. Now most bookshops are essentially cafes that also sell books.
There are a few exceptions - in London there are some niche booksellers, and most university cities have a bookshop that stocks textbooks, but it's generally true.
"Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly."
Which is an interesting assumption, but certainly not a correct one. They have lost a lot of my business in recent years due to frequent poor quality control and customer service issues.
Perhaps not a universally correct one, but most probably a sufficiently accurate one, given Amazon's continued revenue growth.
This is similar to the chronological vs. algorithmic timeline debates in social media: it's annoying to many users, but the overall result must be positive, otherwise they probably wouldn't be doing it, in face of the backlash.
If the trends continue over a period of several years, that may prove to be true.
Anecdotally, I am far from alone among my friends and family in perceiving that Amazon's quality, reliability and customer service have degraded sharply in recent years. It's not just the counterfeits issue. Their basic product organisation is terrible these days, and it's often difficult to figure out if I'm ordering the correct edition of something. They've also failed to deliver Christmas shopping by the guaranteed dates. They've sent many items out that were packaged in obviously absurd ways and arrived predictably damaged, and then had basic problems with their returns procedures causing customers a lot of hassle.
Perhaps more dangerous for Amazon, though, is that they are not always competitive on pricing with my local book and general stores any more. I can buy a new movie from Amazon and have it arrive tomorrow with perhaps a 5-10% chance that it's a bad copy and won't play. If I can buy the same movie for the same or less from my local store when I do my grocery shopping, and be guaranteed a proper UK product that I can see looks undamaged when I pick it off the shelf, which I can then enjoy watching this evening, what am I going to do? It's a similar story for buying books from a good local bookshop, and rumours of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.
> Anecdotally, I am far from alone among my friends and family in perceiving that Amazon's quality, reliability and customer service have degraded sharply in recent years.
You can add me to that list. I've had an Amazon account since 1998, and I'm at a point where I use it only as a measure of a last resort.
Nevertheless, Amazon revenue from retail business [1] over the past few years is way up, suggesting that our position seems to be a minority one.
Isn't everything you describe rather demonstrating the point though?
A business that is large enough to generally not care any more. To not care about the fakes, the deliberately poor search that promotes crap every single time, the increasingly hostile policies, the increasingly hostile way things are offered. The promotion of horrible ideas like "global store" that will hold some indeterminate amount in anticipation of customs fees and intl delivery, but not let you exclude it from all search and choose local products only.
No business that felt customer reactions actually mattered would do the things you describe intentionally with the possible exception of pricing (and Amazon should be able to be cheapest most of the time).
These are all styles of doing business prior to a major readjustment. Tesco before the recession and before they lost a chunk of customers to Lidl and Aldi - half of whom will never go back as they discovered that Aldi are better than Tesco as well as cheaper.
Personally I already reached a point where Amazon are way down the list of choices to shop from.
Amazon's time will come, but right now they, or perhaps just Bezos - who knows, don't believe it will.
Don't you think that the reason may be much more related to why mail-order went down before ? In other words: Amazon exploited a tax-loophole that could not be easily closed : the interstate commerce tax clause.
But create a trillion dollar companies by "stealing" taxes (as Jeff Bezos did), and states notice, and there's one thing that unites Republicans and Democrats, Obamas Bushes and Trumps, and it's green. To put it another way, people managed to untangle all the knots and ... it happened. Lots of laws got changed, but the real breakthrough was here:
Bezos essentially gave Americans a tax loophole for goods ordering and made it work, and took ~18% of what he gave them for his company (and about 4% for himself). He now has a trillion dollars. Americans have lots of stuff delivered to them.
But now, Amazon has the same problem mail-order has had for a very long time: it's just not cheap anymore, and so they cheat, underdeliver and overcharge, just like mail order has to do. It's trying to fix this, but the truth is that home delivery is just a lot more expensive than stores, and there is no fix.
And surprise ! Walmart suddenly stopped losing against Amazon. Weird, no ? Well, no, not that weird at all.
Of course Amazon is constantly criticized for being an example of what's wrong with capitalism. Reality: government created Amazon through tax law. I'm not saying that's all there is to it, but it's close.
But yeah this is a silicon valley forum, and the idea that the founders of the US, and a good lawyer and a supreme court decision from 1992 were the real power behind one of the great silicon valley tech companies is just not going to be a great explanation in many people's opinions. Amazon just isn't a great technical accomplishment. It's an incredible financial engineering accomplishment.
Of course, this makes it very ironic that people like Bernie Sanders criticize Amazon, as Mr. Sanders is part of the institution that made it possible in the first place. If Bezos didn't build Amazon, someone else would have figured it out and built it (it took Bezos >6 years). However, if the Federal government would have taxed Amazon the way it taxes everything else, there would have been no Amazon. Any other companies that were created would never have been anywhere near the size Amazon grew to.
Note that the rise of China, the gearbest, jd, banggood ... rise is the result of a similar tax fuckup, this time at the united nations postal union. Or: China only works because they get to offload the cost of shipping on the taxpayers. And now Trump is
However, I strongly disagree with Trump's approach. I would prefer to see the opposite happen: that US companies get brought on a level playing field with China. If you can ship from Delaware to New York for 1.6$/kg, what would happen ? It'd be then end of Chinese exports to America, but without Americans having to give up what they gained in the past 10 years. I think there should be a lesson for our government in here. Namely, that financing the post office was one of the best decisions ever made in government, and that we should look into having 50% or so of the cost of shipping paid by the (ideally Federal) taxpayer, not just when shipping from China. Why ? Look what it's done to the economy !
Amazon's time will come, but right now they, or perhaps just Bezos - who knows, don't believe it will.
Yes, I think that sums it up nicely. History is full of big businesses that were invulnerable and could get away with anything, until they weren't and couldn't. History is also full of big businesses whose senior management seemed to be the last people in the world to realise when one situation was slowly but steadily turning into the other, often because they were focussed on short term plans and quarterly reports and somehow failed to see the wood for the trees.
Boss: Look, revenues are way up! Q4 last year was huge! Best. Christmas. Season. Ever.
Consultant: That's true, and congratulations. But be careful, the majority of your recent growth looks like it comes from segments outside your core online store business.
Boss: I know. Isn't that great? Our retail marketplace services are making twice what they brought in just a couple of years ago!
Consultant: That's also true, but it does seem the customer experience of your online store has been adversely affected because the marketplace aspect is confusing them and causing problems with poor quality control and fake products, and that online store still brings in the largest part of your revenues.
Boss: Experience, exshmerience! Look at our quarterly numbers. Our main online store is still growing.
Consultant: Well, yes, the main online store is still growing. However, it's been close to saturation in a lot of markets for a while. Part of that revenue growth is because you've been relying less on undercutting the competition and started pushing prices up. But that leaves you more vulnerable to competition again.
Boss: Well, it looks like our customers love us and they'll keep coming back anyway.
Consultant: Perhaps, but consumer shopping habits often change slowly. Brand loyalty is slow to build, and that goes for your competitors too. But it's built by good customer experiences, and sometimes lost all too quickly after bad ones.
Boss: As I said, experience, exshmerience. Look, revenues are way up! Q4 last year was huge!
The issue of counterfeit branded goods is gathering momentum. Already I know people who refuse to buy anything for their kids from Amazon as the risk is too high. I think twice about it now myself. Such an easy problem to solve, just don’t commingle in the warehouse stuff that is sold by them vs sold by third party via them.
> it's a bit of a stretch to claim Amazon is a public good
Well, it's either good or it's bad. It seems you think it's the latter and I think you're wrong. All the merchants whose businesses have been transformed for the better would disagree. Those merchants' customers would disagree as well.
"it's a bit of a stretch to claim Amazon is a public good"
No, it is an outrageous claim. Let's be clear - these ASI guys are useful idiots.
Compare Jeff Bezos to Linus Torvalds. I am still waiting when ASI will call Linus "a greatest philantropist". He would absolutely deserve that. Instead, he gets called "asshole" by some people. C*suckery of these people is just insane.
For many products on Amazon, there are several sellers, each competing for the "buy box". Third party sellers are not an unalloyed good, but on balance are good for Amazon shoppers, IMO.
Outside of Amazon, Amazon has helped to set new standards for online commerce (free shipping, fast shipping, no/few questions customer service). When you see Zappos (now Amazon), Jet, Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, and Ebay all mimicking aspects of the Amazon shopping experience, you're also seeing increased competition. It also has effects on brick and mortar commerce that are beneficial for consumers. Some stores match Amazon prices in the walk-in stores.
It has absolutely taken margin out of the retail industry, making it harder on retailers, but so long as they don't fail in droves, margin leaving the industry is money that's being returned to consumers, at least in part.
There is competition between small sellers until Amazon decides to compete with them, and that's it...remember Amazon refusing to sell Chromecast? Or using dumping against competitors? Not to mention that all the sellers have to pay Amazon a fee so there is no competition with Amazon.
This meshes with the 'hipster antitrust' argument, that the consumer surplus measure is not the whole story. If low prices are so great for us, why is it that small communities are objectively so down-and-out even in the midst of unprecedentedly cheap stuff.
the one thing i've read about amazon's impact that made a lasting, positive impression on me was by a black woman who noted that when she shopped on amazon, no one followed her around the store. there was also some commentary on underserved communities where traditional retailers were reluctant to set up shop.
of course, this is really an argument for ubiquitous online retail rather than amazon in particular, but it was a good point in their favour. (sadly, it seems to be being built by exploiting workers, which is why i cannot take any claims of philanthropy seriously.)
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't thought about before. At the same time though, it is certain that her every move while on the site was being monitored, recorded and analyzed – just like everyone else's.
It seems you can't be charitable without someone telling you you should have given more or given to someone else. It's not a great way of encouraging charity.
If it is not doing harm and making some lives better, the correct response is 'thank you for making the world a better place'. Even if you think it is self serving, we should encourage such self serving behavior.
If it is not doing harm and making some lives better, the correct response is 'thank you for making the world a better place'.
The argument people tend to make here is that the net change he's creating in the world is not for the better. If 1,000 people have to suffer misery because of his company in order to enable 10 people to get the benefit of his personal charity, that doesn't look like "making the world a better place" to many of us.
Yes. And we do exactly that through taxation. A portion of Jeff Bezos' fortune is derived from Amazon's ability to increase it's profits by (legal, and arguably justifiable) tax avoidance. That's part of global business these days, but it's not unreasonable for people in regions where Amazon minimizes it's tax costs to say Bezos is doing something bad for them.
> Very curious about these justification arguments. How on earth is tax-avoidance defensible in a thread about philanthropy?
One topic (tax avoidance) is by one entity (AMZN) who has obligations and responsibilities towards shareholders (including most employees), where the other is by a different entity (Jeff Bezos) using his own wealth (that resulted from AMZN).
Jeff Bezos can't use AMZN assets as he sees fit, otherwise the SEC will investigate him, but he can do so with his own assets.
If you want the behaviour of companies to change, you need to have your politicians use their powers to do the right things ...
Capitalism isn't there to fix broken democracy, democracy is supposed to limit capitalism ...
> Capitalism isn't there to fix broken democracy, democracy is supposed to limit capitalism
I completely agree in terms of how to practically go about fixing the problems, but we're not discussing that here.
You're right that broken democracy fails to limit capitalism; this allows people without moral limits to exploit, and make large gains from said exploitation. And you're right that fixing that system is what's needed. But lauding those who have exploited that absence of limits, for their apparent morals, is what's being discussed in this thread.
One person should not choose where and to what social services need funding. That's why we have government and not kings and queens.
I think that would be a more compelling argument if our governments had a stronger democratic mandate and our political systems offered the people genuine choices in how money was being spent on their behalf. Looking at what's been happening in places like the US and UK recently, I'm not sure it's the best time to be arguing for big government and redistribution of wealth as a vehicle for social responsibility.
The primary purpose of criticising the charitable work of the very rich over, say, similarly wealthy people who aren't philanthropic, is that it is a form of PR.
As other commenters mention, Bezo's overall contributions to the world are a net negative, but it's not just the his philanthropy doesn't make up for his other negative activities, it's that it also acts as a way of soliciting public forgiveness for the other indescretions, which shouldn't be accepted.
Unless you believe that commerce is a goal in itself, and that building a successful business contributes positively to the world by default (I'm sure many people do believe this so just getting it out of the way), then you have to look at the outputs. For Amazon that's largely:
- extremely poor pay and conditions for Amazon's workers
- dominance driving smaller less-efficient enterprises out of business; this isn't just sentimental: efficiency is about driving cost down, including labour costs. SMEs employ more in aggregate than the large businesses replacing them, so typically Amazon is unlikely to be a net job-creator.
- Amazon pays very little corporate tax, both by running low-profit/high-cashflow, through other methods particularly for it's operations in Europe, and they used to evade sales tax almost completely in the US. Tax = vital public and social services for citizens, so that's a big net negative.
- Jeff Bezos' personal tax story is not dissimilar.
etc. etc.
This isn't a criticism of Bezos or Amazon, but of large multinational corporate entities and their contributions to "charitable" causes in general. CSR is always an a attempt to offset something.
I'm curious, did any company ever contributed overall to a society in your opinion?
"extremely poor pay and conditions for Amazon's workers" Where should Amazon magically create this money from? It can only come at the expense of customers.
"so typically Amazon is unlikely to be a net job-creator."
That's a net positive. Less work, the same job done. Making more work is easy, just let people throw rocks from one pile to the other and back again.
"Tax = vital public and social services for citizens, so that's a big net negative."
They may not contribute by not paying taxes, but 0 contribution is not negative contribution.
> I'm curious, did any company ever contributed overall to a society in your opinion?
Yes. The issues I'm raising are largely to do with some extremely large companies.
> Where should Amazon magically create this money from? It can only come at the expense of customers.
Are you saying that no company pays their employees enough? Or that employees in general shouldn't be paid a living wage? Or even that Amazon, a company headed by the actual richest person in the world, really makes zero profit and must absolutely hurt customers in order to make ends meet?
> That's a net positive. Less work, the same job done.
Less jobs is a positive* only if those without jobs have a living income. UBI is a proposed solution: it hasn't been introduced anywhere as far as I'm aware.
> Making more work is easy, just let people throw rocks from one pile to the other and back again.
And who pays these rock throwers? Do their wages come from the taxes Bezos doesn't pay?
* EDIT: To be clear, on the less jobs question, I am generally not in favour of having a less efficient system just to create jobs (it may sound that way above). I'm just a realist, acknowledging that we have a system that requires job-creation as a means to supply members of society with the means to sustain themselves. If we did not require job-creation to do that, I would completely agree that "less work, the same job done" would be a positive thing.
> Are you saying that no company pays their employees enough?
Companies pay enough to get the quality and quantity of employees that they need. Those who are coming up short on either side are the companies who are (presumably) not paying their employees enough.
> Or that employees in general shouldn't be paid a living wage?
In general, my answer is "null" here, as the definition of living wage is continually (and it seems to me, intentionally) slippery/non-specific. Make some definitions that are stable over a long period of time and that labor advocates agree to, and only then can we have a conversation.
> Or even that Amazon, a company headed by the actual richest person in the world, really makes zero profit and must absolutely hurt customers in order to make ends meet?
Amazon does not hurt customers overall. I suspect you either meant to say employees, or perhaps have introduced a new argument that I'm not following.
With respect to profit, Amazon is now profitable on a GAAP, EBITDA, and cash flow from operations basis. I believe that was always the plan and it's coming together now.
Whether or not a company is profitable and whether or not the founder is the richest man in the world does not feedback into an employee pay issue in my opinion. A profitable company can afford to pay its employees for longer, but has no obligation (legally or ethically) to pay them more, IMO.
> the definition of living wage is continually (and it seems to me, intentionally) slippery/non-specific
That's a funny excuse not to engage with the point. Of course it's variable: different regions have different costs of living, and different social supports. Some countries or areas do have a specifically defined value for a living wage, my own definition for the purpose of this discussion is quite obviously: "enough money to meet your basic needs". This is distinct from subsistence, which is what a lot of employees do.
Plenty of people have defined and even calculated living wage, MIT even have a nice online one. Neither is necessary to engage with a discussion about the general idea of worker subsistence.
> Amazon does not hurt customers overall. I suspect you either meant to say employees, or perhaps have introduced a new argument that I'm not following.
You said "at the expense of customers", sorry the wording in my reply was slightly different.
> A profitable company can afford to pay its employees for longer, but has no obligation (legally or ethically) to pay them more, IMO.
As in this context we've defined more as barely enough to meet their basic needs, I'll have to disagree with you on the ethical obligation.
Companies pay enough to get the quality and quantity of employees that they need.
This is an assertion not presently supported by evidence. With any other resource they need, companies typically respect the law of supply and demand: when there's low supply or high demand (or both), they pay more to get the resource. But when -- and seemingly only when -- that resource is labor, paying a higher price is practically unthinkable. That's why we've seen decades now in the US with little or no (inflation-adjusted) wage growth, despite higher average productivity and periods of low unemployment (either of which ought, in a rational market, to produce higher wages).
You are criticizing capitalism and globalization as a system for producing social progress, not Amazon.
Your points seem very weak to me. People perceive value from Amazon's tax "evasion" (efficiency) in buying goods at a cheaper cost. I'm sure you agree that not every dollar that goes to taxes is better spent than if it wasn't.
I highly doubt that net global employment in headcount dropped because of Amazon. For every store clerk that got fired in a US brick and mortar shop, probably 10 sweatshop workers in China were hired to make gizmos at a fraction of the cost.
If you are going to argue that the world would be better off without Amazon when hundreds of millions use and love their services every day, you need to at least make an attempt to quantify the value the company provides. You can't just point at 3 isolated data points. I'm not even saying you're wrong in your conclusions, but they're hardly unquestionable.
It seems you can't be charitable without someone telling you you should have given more or given to someone else.
Spending money on good causes is great. That's to be definitely something to be encouraged. Putting all of the decision making about which causes are 'good' in the hands of one individual, or a small group of very similar individuals, is very, very bad. That's how entire segments of society get ignored.
US federal budget for 2018 is ~4 trillion. Bezos has just donated 2 million. If that’s really your concern then you should try to keep things in perspective.
> US federal budget for 2018 is ~4 trillion. Bezos has just donated 2 million. If that’s really your concern then you should try to keep things in perspective.
To me it seems like philanthropists generally do a much better job spending money well than our government does. They don't tend to use it to bomb other countries, they often consider the lives of foreigners as important as the lives of Americans, and being able to ignore pork barrel considerations makes their projects more efficient.
The money spent by philanthropists is small compared to the US budget so they aren't in any way a replacement for the welfare state. But what money they do spend seems to go a long way.
I suspect that, at least partly, that's because philanthropists can choose their battles. They don't spend money unless they can see there'll be a good outcome. They can leave the high risk problems and "lost causes" to the government. Consequently governments will always look worse even if they actually do a good job elsewhere.
That's certainly true to some extent. But sometimes the right thing to do is to not get involved. In the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis[1] Medecins Sans Frontieres and other private aid groups pulled out when they realized that their money was going to buy guns for Rwandan Génocidaires. But the UN thought they had a mandate to help refugees no matter what and in the end we had the Congolese Civil Wars which were much, much worse than the refugee crisis could possibly have gotten on its own. You can say that they weren't foreseeable and I'd agree but it's easy to imagine the Hutu forces managing to retake Rwanda and finish their genocide, for example.
> Even if you think it is self serving, we should encourage such self serving behavior.
Exactly, if philanthropy is self-serving then what does that make the act of dissuading such behavior?
People seem to get involved with the argument rather than outcomes nowadays. A frequent argument is that "Bezos should pay his taxes because I do." While I do feel as though it's unfair that I loose more of my "living money" to taxes, I don't forget for one second what those taxes are doing: waging wars over fossil fuels and progressing climate change. Who cares if the cause is personal glory; if the effect is a better world?
I'd rather have the unfairness of ego-charitable billionaire tax avoidance than the two-term shortsightedness of politician power mongering.
Well, even though he made more than 1000x than most people, Bezos is probably not 10x smarter by any reasonable metric, and certainly doesn't work 10x more than the rest of us. It's clearly a choice we all made as a society that allows him to have all this money. The question is: would we have an Amazon without people who are driven by money? Of course we can never know, but if we look at the past, where a large amount of technological progress was driven by monks, it seems the answer is affirmative. Also the amount of work done in OSS by volunteers points in this direction. So the "charade" is something that we created, ultimately. The conclusion is that perhaps we could scale down a little on the capitalism, and let society take care of causes that currently need the help of philanthropists.
It's a cowardly way of saying "I want that guy's money, but am too weak to take it myself".
The fundamental problem with such redistribution schemes is: Who gets to decide who's weak and who's the villain?
Certainly each individual knows for themselves; typically a variation on "I'm weak; give me". But coming up with stable, fair valuations for social contribution is a hard problem. For example, we already know that centralized, committee-driven solutions are deadly in the long run.
And you just explained why, while it sounds great to me otherwise, I can never get behind socialism. The evils of capitolism are essentially still present, but now controlled by committee.
I once dreampt the answer was a new meta-currency, where there is subjective emotional value traded against a objective value currency. The interactions you had during the day gave value to others life and you shared in that, and you gave back to those that brightened yours. My dream imagined people being their best, for both selfish and social reasons. But upon waking and reflection, I found a Black Mirror-esque dance of everyone emotionally blackmailing each other, and facade-laden interaction approaching desperation.
I don't know the answer, but careful application seems key. The world is made of edge cases.
Mass income inequality will eventually produce violent solutions. A society where the bottom portion has enough that they are not willing to risk it all is a stable solution.
Limits placed on capitalism, through regulation, might be an example of letting society (the system) sort itself out.
If limits aren't introduced, the gap between rich and poor becomes too vast. It become futile for those who have little to even try to adjust their situation.
I do believe in capitalism, but left to its own devices, it becomes obscene.
Regulation should ensure a fair and level playing field for all. It's not anti-capitalist, it just stops the big guys from ruining things for everyone else.
Left to its own devices and somewhat bizarrely, capitalism evolves strategies that include "social stability". Long-term prosperity becomes a part of the equation, with despotic wealth gaps an obstacle to that.
Nobody likes their head inside a guillotine! Or a world where their children couldn't live.
In other words, no central committees are needed when the actors align voluntarily. "Bread and games", it was called in Rome. It would take some fairly corrupt governments and very stupid businessmen to forget these lessons.
The printing press made monks copying manuscripts obsolete. Software created by volunteers is rarely better in performance and features than software created with commercial support, and the Open Source aspect is mostly a red herring here. I'm not sure your examples are making your case very well.
Unrestricted capitalism will never be a force for good. Left running without any regulation, the gap between rich and poor will increase adinfinitum.
This kind of philanthropy acts as a last ditch attempt to correct the negative affects the system produces .. but in my opinion, it's not an effective or elegant way of doing so. It's main purpose is an exercise in smoke and mirrors .. by trying to influence our perception and shape the conversation surrounding whether these excess profits are acceptable in modern society.
Unrestricted capitalism will never be a force for good.
Unrestricted capitalism, sadly, doesn't even exist. But capitalism in its various forms is already a potent force for good - perhaps the most powerful such force the world has ever known. No other system has done more to create wealth, raise standards of living, and improve the world.
Attacking capitalism because it's slightly less than perfect at delivering the ideal end result for everybody, is a horrible kind of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".
There used to be time when one was scorned if they donated stuff to needy out of compassion instead of what justice demanded, i.e. fair living wages. There was also time when one had to maintain a facade of normalcy but was encouraged donating to charity in secret so that nobody knew about it. There was also time when charity meant unconditional help to those who needed it most instead of a way to reshape world and its culture into one's own image while evading taxes.
Lots of comments attacking Amazon for lowering wages but ignoring the fact that warehouse work in general is on borrowed time and going the way of horse and buggies (https://youtu.be/RFV8IkY52iY)
At some point in the near future, these jobs won’t exist. Are the commentators suggesting they not be automated? Likewise long truck driver driving is going to eventually collapse.
Any attempt to make Amazon pay a vastly higher salary for packers will just accelerate the drive to full automation.
>Any attempt to make Amazon pay a vastly higher salary for packers will just accelerate the drive to full automation.
No one is asking that Amazon pay a vastly higher salary to their low tier employees, only that they consider the cost of living for those employees and pay accordingly within a particular market.
The means to afford food and housing should not be out of reach of a full time employee, even if their position is likely to be automated in the future. That shouldn't be considered a luxury only available to the well-to-do. If the likelihood of automation is a valid rationale for lowering wages then just about everyone should be living on borrowed time and $12.00/hr.
And Amazon is pushing for full automation at maximum speed regardless, so employee wages are likely not a factor in that timeline.
> No one is asking that Amazon pay a vastly higher salary to their low tier employees, only that they consider the cost of living for those employees and pay accordingly within a particular market.
If Amazon is paying too little compared to that "particular market", surely they wouldn't get enough applicants?
I guess you mean something else than "market" here ...
> The means to afford food and housing should not be out of reach of a full time employee, even if their position is likely to be automated in the future.
Then the government should set a (higher) minimum wage (and benefits), they way most other governments in the first (and third) world do.
A company's primary obligation is to their shareholders. A government's primary obligation should be to their constituents/voters/residents/citizens. Which one is failing their primary stakeholder the most here?
It's pretty stupid to expect a corporation to pay people more "because they should."
This is what government/laws/unions should help with. I just don't get the idealism of the 21st century. "Jobs should pay more or we will shame you", say the people.
"Get fucked", says the company. And now we are here...
> "The man of wealth thus becoming the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren," he wrote, "bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer - doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves."
How does wisdom about running a business translate into wisdom how other people should live their life?
> "If you want to wade into public policy, you have a moral responsibility not to put a Band-Aid on cancer," he says, adding that Mr Bezos could work to influence policy instead.
Noone interviewed for the article talks about what policies Bezos might lobby for in order to make a real difference...
Amazon shares have a lot of value, and Bezos is sitting on a pile of them. What should Bezos do with that currency -- hoard it? spend it?
This supermoney represents Bezos' capacity to incentivize his fellow humans to act in concert toward a goal that he can influence. If he hoards it, then it does nothing for society. Bezos doesn't need it for his personal enjoyment either. After he leases a couple jets, buys a few homes, and pays for his staff, I doubt that costs more than tens of millions per year. Not billions.
If he spends it, then he needs to find undertakings that can efficiently absorb billions of dollars in value and still advance a meaningful goal. Space exploration is one of those undertakings. Bezos said he has been spending I think a billion per year on space travel / rocket engineering. There are few other areas that could so easily use this kind of capital. I would think that homelessness is another difficult problem that can absorb large amounts of value.
Maybe this arrangement of accumulation and philanthropy is sub-optimal, and we should instead tax capital to allocate the surplus democratically rather than allow the person who accumulated it to make the decision. Well, we already do that to some degree, with mixed results. Perhaps a little of both is called for.
In any event, I for one am pleased to see this money going to address homelessness. I don't care who is making the endowment, as long as the funds are used well. This is a serious, difficult problem, and this charity seems meaningful to me, not a purchased indulgence like sponsoring a new museum wing for example.
There are better methods to define who need that help rather than the super rich opinion. The Gates Foundation model goes in that direction, approaching urgent things first: child mortality, education access, vacine distribution, etc... Those topics are more urgent than space travel according to the general consensus. A good way to define those problems is to check which social programs are being supported for the countries in a specific region. In Latin America for example, poverty is one of those social problems, rather than internet access, for instance.
The counter-argument is that, if these super-wealthy individuals didn't feel the need to extract the maximum wealth from the community (the notion that it's their fiduciary duty to pay the least in wages or find loopholes to minimise tax exposure is a myth), then communities in the round would be better off.
Regardless of if you agree with his actions or not, it's pretty tone-deaf from a PR perspective - pretty much anyone could have seen the backlash coming. He doesn't seem to give a monkey's butt about public perception, but there's very little he can do positively for the community whilst there's still the notion he's trying to destroy it with his business interests. The money and help he's trying to provide will just work better and be more effective and efficient if there's active support for it from all sides. Everything that happens with that money now will be caveated and judged by his actions.
I'd argue he should wait until he retires from Amazon (a la Bill Gates) if he does want any efforts to resonate with people. Then again, for good or bad, I don't think he really cares. I just hope the money can be deployed effectively whilst attached to him, even if it should have been in the pockets of the community all along.
By that reasoning, people are no better off today, in an economic sense, than they were 200 years ago. In fact, they would be worse off because there are more of us and the same (if not fewer) resources to go around.
True, but its distribution, scale and movement isn't linear either. Like conservation of energy, Bezos and Amazon are a part of "the economy", he technically hasn't extracted anything from it (just storing it). Doesn't mean that money hasn't been extracted from the rest of the community.
I'm not arguing from a philosophical standpoint, merely pointing out that from a public perception standpoint, a backlash on the apparent hypocrisy of him giving a damn about the community by trying to tackle homelessness whilst potentially damaging it in a tangential way through his ways of working is justified.
Each dollar that you hold and don't spend represents one potential vote for what the economy should do next. If you vote wisely, your votes usually get returned to you. If you vote poorly, they usually don't come back.
Rich people are a form of representative election. Some people give their proxies to others that they think will make wise economic choices. If you choose your proxy well, you also get rewarded with more votes.
That system has led to a situation where a viable equilibrium exists wherein those with unspent money can tend to make choices that benefit mostly themselves rather than the whole economy.
Each spent dollar is a production order. Investment is planning; spending is executing. If you don't spend enough money to execute on the plan, it will fail from a lack of material support. If the plan is good, and the work gets done, everyone benefits. That's not zero-sum. You can get out more than you put in. That's the whole point of having a specialized, productive economy.
But the investment portion of the economy is zero-sum. You can't order more than 100% of the productive economy that exists at any given moment. Every day, one pie the size of the productive economy gets auctioned off in tiny pieces. You can order the productive economy to grow its own capacity a bit, to make bigger pies tomorrow and into the future, but after it does, you will still have to re-vote to use it. Once the investment economy started gambling with itself on which of the candidate economic plans had the best prospects, it turned itself into a realm where someone else has to lose in order for anyone else to win. People stopped voting on bigger pies, and started voting strategically, to get more votes in the future. "Don't make more pie; make more votes!" They forgot that making and eating the daily pie was the important part of the voting process.
As for philanthropy, that might be an attempt to create a standing vote for "let's plan to spend some economic resources on being good to one another, regardless of anything else we might vote on".
> If you vote wisely, your votes usually get returned to you. If you vote poorly, they usually don't come back.
Depends on what you want to do. If you are rich want to fund cancer research you might to do it right away and never see your money back, or invest it in a successful business, earn twice as much ... but die of cancer because you didn't use your votes soon enough.
Economics has a somewhat different definition of wisdom than human philosophers and ethicists.
Economically, investing in cancer cures research is wise when selling a cure would be profitable. Even if you had a death oracle that could tell you exactly what a person would die of, and when, it might be wiser (economically) to invest in a cure for the disease that will kill Bill Gates in N years than the one that will kill you in N+M years.
Because the money you spend on curing Gates's disease in N years might return enough to allow you to finance a cure for your own in less than M years, whereas the original amount might cure yours in N+M+C years. It's all hypothetical. You make the best decisions you can with the information you have at the time, but luck and skill are always factors.
But keeping price high and salaries low when you are so rich that you can give away 2 billion is a zero sum game. Every dollar you pull out of customer's pocket and put in yours instead of your employee's makes them poorer nominally by exactly the same it makes you richer. And relatively ... They get way more poorer than you get richer ...
Taking money from people and keeping it is only ok if you have good idea what to do with it.
I'm not saying Bezos is wrong there. Taxing customers and employees to help the homeless is perfectly fine in my book.
Only if he's helping the homeless to the same degree he's taking the money from employees and customers. But let's face it, he is not and he wont.
Instead of relying on one out of 50 billionaires to spend a small fraction of their wealth to "give back" how about we pass something like Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act?
This is factually false because it assumes that the money Bezos takes are taken from other people. But the economy is not a zero sum game, otherwise we would still have the same world wide wealth as cavemen did. What Bezos made, his employees cumulatively made many times over and all that money goes through multiple transactions that can be taxed. Simply spreading out 100b$ to every American would give you a negligible amount of money to each one and then cause the loss of many jobs( you can't expect to spread the money a.k.a. not have rich people but at the same time have the enterprises they create).
The problem is in how undemocratic this kind of philanthropy is. Most everyone can agree that homelessness needs to be addressed. But why does one man get to decide how that is done? We as a society should be using our collective resources to help give everyone a good chance, we shouldn't have to rely on the benevolence of certain massively powerful individuals for any good to be done for those in need. It shouldn't be possible for only one person to dictate the terms for which that aid is dispensed either, which could just be another way of helping themselves.
The way this should work is that Bezos should be taxed far more than he currently is and a good government run by and for the people should be redistributing that wealth created by Bezos (but mostly created by all the workers at Amazon, and through the use of society's existing infrastructure) to improve things for everyone.
There is a good discussion of the issues with such kinds of billionaire philanthropy in this podcast [1] and its sequel, where they focus on how Bill Gates has built an image of doing good for the world's most needy, while also using that same power to threaten democracies and worker's rights and build more power for himself.
> "Jeff Bezos can tout himself as a great philanthropist, yet it will not absolve him of responsibility if Amazon workers continue to be afraid to take toilet breaks and days off sick because they fear disciplinary action at work."
In capitalism/free markets, it is the company's responsibility to generate as much value for shareholders as possible. If paying workers more will not result in more value for shareholders, doing so could be seen in a negative light by shareholders.
Bezos is free to do with his own money as he sees fit, but not with his shareholders (which includes almost all employees BTW.) money.
However, governments are there to ensure that capitalist-motivated behaviour doesn't negatively affect the community, and should use its power to regulate the companies by such means as minimum wage, minimum benefits etc.
I really wonder how the "journalists" here fail to see where the problem lies ... but of course most Americans would say they don't want limits on how little time off they can get and how poor they choose to be ...
However, governments are there to ensure that capitalist-motivated behaviour doesn't negatively affect the community,
Where do people come up with this stuff? All evidence suggests that government is mainly there to act as a hammer to force people to adhere to behavioral standards that other people dream up, to protect the interests of the rich, entrenched, elitists who run the government, to enforce regulatory capture, to violate our civil liberties, and to steal our money.
Wealth is created with labour and Amazon depends on it, Amazon and Bezos wont be where they are without the labour of millions of others. The policies of the last 30 years have left labour in a weak position compared to capital which has allowed people like Bezos to build wealth for themselves without proper equity to labour. This is not about 'taking' or redistribution but ensuring the proper share for labour in the first place for their part in the process.
Of course if you intention is to privilege capital over labour this is exactly the results intended but for the rest of society wages are static for 40 years and ultimately someone has to pay, either Bezos, Wallmart and others via equitable and fair wages or taxpayers and us via subsidies.
So as a tech worker for instance there is already a huge portion of your income going to asset inflation and supporting the renteers and the financial class, now you also have to subsidize poorly paid workers by billionaires like Bezos, the Walton family and others. You may get low prices but someone has to pay for the labour, housing, education and medicare and since lobbying works so well for the wealthy its you who is going to be stranded with the bill.
Again thanks to globalization, 'convenient' tax havens, lobbying and wealth friendly policies that privilege capital, and sell-out economists businesses and the wealthy can dodge taxes, access cheaper labour globally, put labour against each other and get policies for lower taxes. Labour simply does not have this level of mobility or 'choice' so contrary to conventional narratives there is 'coercion' since working is not a choice, and if there are not enough choices you have to accept whatever is available. If your grand plan is feudalism and a new class of serfs this is exactly how you would go about creating it.
Big "philanthropy" isn't a new concept. It's more than a 100 years old and was created by the "robber barons" of the gilded age to shelter their money from taxes and keep the wealth under family control for generations. An added benefit of these family charities is great PR. The most famous beneficiary of the charity PR is john d rockefeller whose reputation improved immensely after setting up his family charities. Rockefeller revolutionized the modern use of a PR team to burnish one's image through radio, tv, etc. A more recent example of this is bill gates who used charity and pr teams to shift public perception of him from a greedy tech monopolistic to a charitable philanthropist. Bezos is just following in a long line of extremely wealthy people.
Whether it is good for society to immense wealth controlled by family trusts/chariities or whether the wealth should be taxed and used for public purposes is something people can debate for an eternity.
501c3 tax deductibility is a massive scam to SHIFT TAX BURDENS ONTO WORKING INCOME EARNERS.
taxes should be paid on property , on increases in the value of property, on PASSIVELY earned money from property, on the purchase of property, on the sale of property.
the more durable the property in temporal sense, the more it should be taxes.
INCOME itself is not where the tax should be. you rare taxing labor. it is a crime to tax 'income' , IT IS INDENTURED SERVITUDE TO YOUR GOVERNMENT.
tax property, licenses, food ( a form of property ).
why should there be 'income' to tax? and why should anyone not have to pay taxes if they give money to a 'church' or 'school' . total nonsense.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] thread"Quite frankly Bezos's greatest act of philanthropy is Amazon itself," he argues.
"Lower prices, more choice and competition have delivered billions for Bezos and billions worth for the hundreds of millions of customers he serves." "
I do think feel strong about Bezos plans, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim Amazon is a public good.
Pretty sure all the people who worked in book shops don't think so.
Employees also have a choice - Amazon is not a monopoly.
Plenty of shitty companies are successful. They just need to. be more convenient than their competitors.
> Employees also have a choice - Amazon is not a monopoly.
Not yet.
If you're a delivery driver, your job options are extremely limited. You can deliver fast food, or deliver for companies like Amazon. It's either that, or starve.
It's not possible to similarly conveniently quantify concern about counterfeit, but if you think they genuinely do not care about it then I don't even know what to say. Even from a purely greed centered point of view, counterfeits hurt mid to longterm revenue.
[1] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/retail-sales-workers.htm
No level of pay can make up for being treated like shit.
Regarding the counterfeits, Amazon loves to say how they're dealing with the issue, but the examples just keep piling up. And of course their childish behavior around Chromecast and Youtube.
Both were meant as audience capturing tactics and were basically unattainable by most all other competitors due to costs -- Amazon only avoided it riding on a large wave of money and eating costs for years until it was the only game in town.
Now you can't have a thread about Amazon without constant complaints about the 2-Day shipping never really being 2-Day shipping, the constant fakes that plague the Amazon inventory (with a seemingly blind-eye from Amazon itself on it), and so on.
These weren't really public goods introduced by Amazon, as plenty of stores handle the customer service side just fine in most cases, and the delivery stuff was mostly just investors subsidizing the costs for a time, which appears to no longer be a major focal point.
But to counter this trend: I am very, very happy that Amazon exists. It’s allowed me to discover and buy plenty of books that I otherwise would never read or sample. Not to mention dozens of everyday items I buy from them. Nail clippers, socks, alarm clock, router, resistance bands, headphones and many more I’m forgetting about.
It’s all under one roof, delivery is usually very fast (sometimes it’s just one day on two-day delivery; when there are some delays and it takes an extra day they always notify me by e-mail).
Amazon is great and I’m a more-than-satisfied consumer.
Many online retailers simply do not make efforts to deliver, quite apart from any cost consideration, and then they moan about Amazon.
In addition, it's also about creating trust. Buying something online requires more trust than buying from a store so convincing people that it's safe and that there won't be any issues with returns and refunds is a big part of getting people to place and order and to come back.
Amazon has "Amazon Lockers", which let me accept deliveries at a time convenient to me, with no human interaction. This is a real improvement over previous methods, and AFAIK no other retailer in my country has anything similar.
So, just like a post office box?
Not to mention that the raise of companies like Amazon and the "on demand" mentality is the one that forces people to not have more regular hours "convenient to them".
If you want to change those things start with changing the law, ending policies hurting the working class (limiting low skill migration would be the first step) and getting rid of ridiculous taxes like corporate income tax you claim Amazon dodged (while in fact it pays what the law requires it to pay).
Blaming the player for playing the game well while taking care of what they are legally obliged to do (shareholder value) is neither smart nor constructive.
"Why dont we get rid of the foxes, we have the power to do that"
No, no, that seems like a silly idea, status quo is the best.
No, it’s not. The corporation’s interests must align with the shareholders, but there’s no law that says short-term profit is the only legal goal. Companies can and have sacrificed in order to build the community.
Anyone who sees them acting suboptomally for the short term can buy in, pressure for more short term interests and lobby to get their way then jump off before it collapses with their gains. Even without that scheming continuous gains are demanded generally.
Otherwise they have no incentive to pay their employees a competitive wage.
Without competitive wages you have no free market, you just have a corporate welfare state, where the cost of paying workers is taken from the workers themselves thru taxation. That's basically what some UBI shills want. They want state taxation and welfare to replace the onus of corporations to pay competitive wages to employees.
No enterprise-size company should get any tax break, period. Only small companies or enterprises that can show they had a bad run (and e.g. might otherwise need to close).
Add to that a rule that if they then just go and take their offices/factories abroad (where they get a big tax break) they get hit with the equivalent savings in import tax is they want to sell in the domestic market.
Combine that with tiny or no tax for individuals (like it has been before the 20th century and is still in several places).
You can if the society and law demands that. E.g. throw them a few huge fines for using bad labor practices (e.g. workers not allowed to go to the toilet when they need to, firing pregnant women, other kinds of discrimination) and let's see what happens.
No it isn't.
Have you counted the lives and communities it destroyed (e.g. closing local alternatives and smaller chains)? The environmental cost from such large scale delivery of every possible BS? The externalities (including accumulated power to single person who contracts for the military industrial complex and runs newspapers)?
I have a lot of sympathy for people in this situation and think they should be re-trained, but I wouldn't hold back progress.
Here in Germany the bookshops mainly feature fear mongering books and are mostly in German. Then there is a tiny section of english books (which often happen to be better then the German books displayed).
Maybe this dos not apply to all German book shops but I feel like they haven't gotten with the times yet.
Bookshops in the US, however, tend to be way different than you're describing and instead are pretty much just a repository for dumping books. Most (unsurprisingly) double up on the dream and also become coffee houses, and they also try to act as an arts hub for the community, doing like talks, workshops, etc.
So that's mostly what people are commenting on I would assume.
There are a few exceptions - in London there are some niche booksellers, and most university cities have a bookshop that stocks textbooks, but it's generally true.
Totally.
Yes, in the past Amazon has as some point contributed to the lowering of prices, by challenging the dominant players in retail markets.
But now, Amazon is the dominant player in the retail market, and Amazon seems to exploit this to the greatest extent possible.
Here's an excellent quote from recent thread [1] about one of Amazon's practices:
"Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17959085
Which is an interesting assumption, but certainly not a correct one. They have lost a lot of my business in recent years due to frequent poor quality control and customer service issues.
This is similar to the chronological vs. algorithmic timeline debates in social media: it's annoying to many users, but the overall result must be positive, otherwise they probably wouldn't be doing it, in face of the backlash.
Anecdotally, I am far from alone among my friends and family in perceiving that Amazon's quality, reliability and customer service have degraded sharply in recent years. It's not just the counterfeits issue. Their basic product organisation is terrible these days, and it's often difficult to figure out if I'm ordering the correct edition of something. They've also failed to deliver Christmas shopping by the guaranteed dates. They've sent many items out that were packaged in obviously absurd ways and arrived predictably damaged, and then had basic problems with their returns procedures causing customers a lot of hassle.
Perhaps more dangerous for Amazon, though, is that they are not always competitive on pricing with my local book and general stores any more. I can buy a new movie from Amazon and have it arrive tomorrow with perhaps a 5-10% chance that it's a bad copy and won't play. If I can buy the same movie for the same or less from my local store when I do my grocery shopping, and be guaranteed a proper UK product that I can see looks undamaged when I pick it off the shelf, which I can then enjoy watching this evening, what am I going to do? It's a similar story for buying books from a good local bookshop, and rumours of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.
You can add me to that list. I've had an Amazon account since 1998, and I'm at a point where I use it only as a measure of a last resort.
Nevertheless, Amazon revenue from retail business [1] over the past few years is way up, suggesting that our position seems to be a minority one.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/672747/amazons-consolida...
A business that is large enough to generally not care any more. To not care about the fakes, the deliberately poor search that promotes crap every single time, the increasingly hostile policies, the increasingly hostile way things are offered. The promotion of horrible ideas like "global store" that will hold some indeterminate amount in anticipation of customs fees and intl delivery, but not let you exclude it from all search and choose local products only.
No business that felt customer reactions actually mattered would do the things you describe intentionally with the possible exception of pricing (and Amazon should be able to be cheapest most of the time).
These are all styles of doing business prior to a major readjustment. Tesco before the recession and before they lost a chunk of customers to Lidl and Aldi - half of whom will never go back as they discovered that Aldi are better than Tesco as well as cheaper.
Personally I already reached a point where Amazon are way down the list of choices to shop from.
Amazon's time will come, but right now they, or perhaps just Bezos - who knows, don't believe it will.
But create a trillion dollar companies by "stealing" taxes (as Jeff Bezos did), and states notice, and there's one thing that unites Republicans and Democrats, Obamas Bushes and Trumps, and it's green. To put it another way, people managed to untangle all the knots and ... it happened. Lots of laws got changed, but the real breakthrough was here:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/states-will-be-able-to-cha...
Bezos essentially gave Americans a tax loophole for goods ordering and made it work, and took ~18% of what he gave them for his company (and about 4% for himself). He now has a trillion dollars. Americans have lots of stuff delivered to them.
But now, Amazon has the same problem mail-order has had for a very long time: it's just not cheap anymore, and so they cheat, underdeliver and overcharge, just like mail order has to do. It's trying to fix this, but the truth is that home delivery is just a lot more expensive than stores, and there is no fix.
And surprise ! Walmart suddenly stopped losing against Amazon. Weird, no ? Well, no, not that weird at all.
Of course Amazon is constantly criticized for being an example of what's wrong with capitalism. Reality: government created Amazon through tax law. I'm not saying that's all there is to it, but it's close.
But yeah this is a silicon valley forum, and the idea that the founders of the US, and a good lawyer and a supreme court decision from 1992 were the real power behind one of the great silicon valley tech companies is just not going to be a great explanation in many people's opinions. Amazon just isn't a great technical accomplishment. It's an incredible financial engineering accomplishment.
Of course, this makes it very ironic that people like Bernie Sanders criticize Amazon, as Mr. Sanders is part of the institution that made it possible in the first place. If Bezos didn't build Amazon, someone else would have figured it out and built it (it took Bezos >6 years). However, if the Federal government would have taxed Amazon the way it taxes everything else, there would have been no Amazon. Any other companies that were created would never have been anywhere near the size Amazon grew to.
Note that the rise of China, the gearbest, jd, banggood ... rise is the result of a similar tax fuckup, this time at the united nations postal union. Or: China only works because they get to offload the cost of shipping on the taxpayers. And now Trump is
However, I strongly disagree with Trump's approach. I would prefer to see the opposite happen: that US companies get brought on a level playing field with China. If you can ship from Delaware to New York for 1.6$/kg, what would happen ? It'd be then end of Chinese exports to America, but without Americans having to give up what they gained in the past 10 years. I think there should be a lesson for our government in here. Namely, that financing the post office was one of the best decisions ever made in government, and that we should look into having 50% or so of the cost of shipping paid by the (ideally Federal) taxpayer, not just when shipping from China. Why ? Look what it's done to the economy !
Yes, I think that sums it up nicely. History is full of big businesses that were invulnerable and could get away with anything, until they weren't and couldn't. History is also full of big businesses whose senior management seemed to be the last people in the world to realise when one situation was slowly but steadily turning into the other, often because they were focussed on short term plans and quarterly reports and somehow failed to see the wood for the trees.
Boss: Look, revenues are way up! Q4 last year was huge! Best. Christmas. Season. Ever.
Consultant: That's true, and congratulations. But be careful, the majority of your recent growth looks like it comes from segments outside your core online store business.
Boss: I know. Isn't that great? Our retail marketplace services are making twice what they brought in just a couple of years ago!
Consultant: That's also true, but it does seem the customer experience of your online store has been adversely affected because the marketplace aspect is confusing them and causing problems with poor quality control and fake products, and that online store still brings in the largest part of your revenues.
Boss: Experience, exshmerience! Look at our quarterly numbers. Our main online store is still growing.
Consultant: Well, yes, the main online store is still growing. However, it's been close to saturation in a lot of markets for a while. Part of that revenue growth is because you've been relying less on undercutting the competition and started pushing prices up. But that leaves you more vulnerable to competition again.
Boss: Well, it looks like our customers love us and they'll keep coming back anyway.
Consultant: Perhaps, but consumer shopping habits often change slowly. Brand loyalty is slow to build, and that goes for your competitors too. But it's built by good customer experiences, and sometimes lost all too quickly after bad ones.
Boss: As I said, experience, exshmerience. Look, revenues are way up! Q4 last year was huge!
Well, it's either good or it's bad. It seems you think it's the latter and I think you're wrong. All the merchants whose businesses have been transformed for the better would disagree. Those merchants' customers would disagree as well.
No, it is an outrageous claim. Let's be clear - these ASI guys are useful idiots.
Compare Jeff Bezos to Linus Torvalds. I am still waiting when ASI will call Linus "a greatest philantropist". He would absolutely deserve that. Instead, he gets called "asshole" by some people. C*suckery of these people is just insane.
What competition?
Outside of Amazon, Amazon has helped to set new standards for online commerce (free shipping, fast shipping, no/few questions customer service). When you see Zappos (now Amazon), Jet, Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, and Ebay all mimicking aspects of the Amazon shopping experience, you're also seeing increased competition. It also has effects on brick and mortar commerce that are beneficial for consumers. Some stores match Amazon prices in the walk-in stores.
It has absolutely taken margin out of the retail industry, making it harder on retailers, but so long as they don't fail in droves, margin leaving the industry is money that's being returned to consumers, at least in part.
This cascades as I then provide value for people that buy my later inventions.
Sure I can use digikey, but it takes 7-9 days to get parts for a reasonable price.
While Amazon has gotten worse in the last few years, they still have crushed the established standards for shipping.
I'm pretty sure independent self-publishing authors do think so.
of course, this is really an argument for ubiquitous online retail rather than amazon in particular, but it was a good point in their favour. (sadly, it seems to be being built by exploiting workers, which is why i cannot take any claims of philanthropy seriously.)
How has Bezos helped society: - By taking risks and innovating. - By paying taxes.
How he could help even more society? - By taking even more risks. - By paying much more taxes. - By improving his employees salary.
If it is not doing harm and making some lives better, the correct response is 'thank you for making the world a better place'. Even if you think it is self serving, we should encourage such self serving behavior.
The argument people tend to make here is that the net change he's creating in the world is not for the better. If 1,000 people have to suffer misery because of his company in order to enable 10 people to get the benefit of his personal charity, that doesn't look like "making the world a better place" to many of us.
And the US is probably the worst example in the western world on how taxation should work.
Case in point is this ridiculous idea that what Bezos is doing here should be applauded and not fixed for being broken.
Very curious about these justification arguments. How on earth is tax-avoidance defensible in a thread about philanthropy?
The defence is more about remaining competitive in a global market than anything to do with how the owners spend their fortunes.
One topic (tax avoidance) is by one entity (AMZN) who has obligations and responsibilities towards shareholders (including most employees), where the other is by a different entity (Jeff Bezos) using his own wealth (that resulted from AMZN).
Jeff Bezos can't use AMZN assets as he sees fit, otherwise the SEC will investigate him, but he can do so with his own assets.
If you want the behaviour of companies to change, you need to have your politicians use their powers to do the right things ...
Capitalism isn't there to fix broken democracy, democracy is supposed to limit capitalism ...
I completely agree in terms of how to practically go about fixing the problems, but we're not discussing that here.
You're right that broken democracy fails to limit capitalism; this allows people without moral limits to exploit, and make large gains from said exploitation. And you're right that fixing that system is what's needed. But lauding those who have exploited that absence of limits, for their apparent morals, is what's being discussed in this thread.
I think that would be a more compelling argument if our governments had a stronger democratic mandate and our political systems offered the people genuine choices in how money was being spent on their behalf. Looking at what's been happening in places like the US and UK recently, I'm not sure it's the best time to be arguing for big government and redistribution of wealth as a vehicle for social responsibility.
The answer to your problem is most definitely not to reduce taxes and Let billionares decide what goes where.
As other commenters mention, Bezo's overall contributions to the world are a net negative, but it's not just the his philanthropy doesn't make up for his other negative activities, it's that it also acts as a way of soliciting public forgiveness for the other indescretions, which shouldn't be accepted.
- extremely poor pay and conditions for Amazon's workers
- dominance driving smaller less-efficient enterprises out of business; this isn't just sentimental: efficiency is about driving cost down, including labour costs. SMEs employ more in aggregate than the large businesses replacing them, so typically Amazon is unlikely to be a net job-creator.
- Amazon pays very little corporate tax, both by running low-profit/high-cashflow, through other methods particularly for it's operations in Europe, and they used to evade sales tax almost completely in the US. Tax = vital public and social services for citizens, so that's a big net negative.
- Jeff Bezos' personal tax story is not dissimilar.
etc. etc.
This isn't a criticism of Bezos or Amazon, but of large multinational corporate entities and their contributions to "charitable" causes in general. CSR is always an a attempt to offset something.
"extremely poor pay and conditions for Amazon's workers" Where should Amazon magically create this money from? It can only come at the expense of customers.
"so typically Amazon is unlikely to be a net job-creator." That's a net positive. Less work, the same job done. Making more work is easy, just let people throw rocks from one pile to the other and back again.
"Tax = vital public and social services for citizens, so that's a big net negative." They may not contribute by not paying taxes, but 0 contribution is not negative contribution.
Yes. The issues I'm raising are largely to do with some extremely large companies.
> Where should Amazon magically create this money from? It can only come at the expense of customers.
Are you saying that no company pays their employees enough? Or that employees in general shouldn't be paid a living wage? Or even that Amazon, a company headed by the actual richest person in the world, really makes zero profit and must absolutely hurt customers in order to make ends meet?
> That's a net positive. Less work, the same job done.
Less jobs is a positive* only if those without jobs have a living income. UBI is a proposed solution: it hasn't been introduced anywhere as far as I'm aware.
> Making more work is easy, just let people throw rocks from one pile to the other and back again.
And who pays these rock throwers? Do their wages come from the taxes Bezos doesn't pay?
* EDIT: To be clear, on the less jobs question, I am generally not in favour of having a less efficient system just to create jobs (it may sound that way above). I'm just a realist, acknowledging that we have a system that requires job-creation as a means to supply members of society with the means to sustain themselves. If we did not require job-creation to do that, I would completely agree that "less work, the same job done" would be a positive thing.
Companies pay enough to get the quality and quantity of employees that they need. Those who are coming up short on either side are the companies who are (presumably) not paying their employees enough.
> Or that employees in general shouldn't be paid a living wage?
In general, my answer is "null" here, as the definition of living wage is continually (and it seems to me, intentionally) slippery/non-specific. Make some definitions that are stable over a long period of time and that labor advocates agree to, and only then can we have a conversation.
> Or even that Amazon, a company headed by the actual richest person in the world, really makes zero profit and must absolutely hurt customers in order to make ends meet?
Amazon does not hurt customers overall. I suspect you either meant to say employees, or perhaps have introduced a new argument that I'm not following.
With respect to profit, Amazon is now profitable on a GAAP, EBITDA, and cash flow from operations basis. I believe that was always the plan and it's coming together now.
Whether or not a company is profitable and whether or not the founder is the richest man in the world does not feedback into an employee pay issue in my opinion. A profitable company can afford to pay its employees for longer, but has no obligation (legally or ethically) to pay them more, IMO.
That's a funny excuse not to engage with the point. Of course it's variable: different regions have different costs of living, and different social supports. Some countries or areas do have a specifically defined value for a living wage, my own definition for the purpose of this discussion is quite obviously: "enough money to meet your basic needs". This is distinct from subsistence, which is what a lot of employees do.
Plenty of people have defined and even calculated living wage, MIT even have a nice online one. Neither is necessary to engage with a discussion about the general idea of worker subsistence.
> Amazon does not hurt customers overall. I suspect you either meant to say employees, or perhaps have introduced a new argument that I'm not following.
You said "at the expense of customers", sorry the wording in my reply was slightly different.
> A profitable company can afford to pay its employees for longer, but has no obligation (legally or ethically) to pay them more, IMO.
As in this context we've defined more as barely enough to meet their basic needs, I'll have to disagree with you on the ethical obligation.
I directly copied text from your post and replied to it. I even tried to make a good faith charitable interpretation of it.
Are you accusing me of misquoting your own words to some end?
This is an assertion not presently supported by evidence. With any other resource they need, companies typically respect the law of supply and demand: when there's low supply or high demand (or both), they pay more to get the resource. But when -- and seemingly only when -- that resource is labor, paying a higher price is practically unthinkable. That's why we've seen decades now in the US with little or no (inflation-adjusted) wage growth, despite higher average productivity and periods of low unemployment (either of which ought, in a rational market, to produce higher wages).
Your points seem very weak to me. People perceive value from Amazon's tax "evasion" (efficiency) in buying goods at a cheaper cost. I'm sure you agree that not every dollar that goes to taxes is better spent than if it wasn't.
I highly doubt that net global employment in headcount dropped because of Amazon. For every store clerk that got fired in a US brick and mortar shop, probably 10 sweatshop workers in China were hired to make gizmos at a fraction of the cost.
If you are going to argue that the world would be better off without Amazon when hundreds of millions use and love their services every day, you need to at least make an attempt to quantify the value the company provides. You can't just point at 3 isolated data points. I'm not even saying you're wrong in your conclusions, but they're hardly unquestionable.
Spending money on good causes is great. That's to be definitely something to be encouraged. Putting all of the decision making about which causes are 'good' in the hands of one individual, or a small group of very similar individuals, is very, very bad. That's how entire segments of society get ignored.
I think you mean 2 billion.
I find myself solving problems with capitalism and simultaneously donating 5-10% of my net-income.
I also dont see life being any worse than 'before' for any classes. 'before' being 15 years ago.
The money spent by philanthropists is small compared to the US budget so they aren't in any way a replacement for the welfare state. But what money they do spend seems to go a long way.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_refugee_crisis
"Extreme taking and extreme giving" is what kings, emperors and other tyrants did (and still do).
A billionaire can give away 99.9% of his/her earnings every month but s/he is acquiring extreme power in exchange.
Being able to control the money tap is power.
> It's not a great way of encouraging charity.
Good. That's what taxation or other forms of redistribution are for.
Contrarily to charity, it does not create patrons/heros/tyrants
Exactly, if philanthropy is self-serving then what does that make the act of dissuading such behavior?
People seem to get involved with the argument rather than outcomes nowadays. A frequent argument is that "Bezos should pay his taxes because I do." While I do feel as though it's unfair that I loose more of my "living money" to taxes, I don't forget for one second what those taxes are doing: waging wars over fossil fuels and progressing climate change. Who cares if the cause is personal glory; if the effect is a better world?
I'd rather have the unfairness of ego-charitable billionaire tax avoidance than the two-term shortsightedness of politician power mongering.
The fundamental problem with such redistribution schemes is: Who gets to decide who's weak and who's the villain?
Certainly each individual knows for themselves; typically a variation on "I'm weak; give me". But coming up with stable, fair valuations for social contribution is a hard problem. For example, we already know that centralized, committee-driven solutions are deadly in the long run.
I once dreampt the answer was a new meta-currency, where there is subjective emotional value traded against a objective value currency. The interactions you had during the day gave value to others life and you shared in that, and you gave back to those that brightened yours. My dream imagined people being their best, for both selfish and social reasons. But upon waking and reflection, I found a Black Mirror-esque dance of everyone emotionally blackmailing each other, and facade-laden interaction approaching desperation.
I don't know the answer, but careful application seems key. The world is made of edge cases.
Mass income inequality will eventually produce violent solutions. A society where the bottom portion has enough that they are not willing to risk it all is a stable solution.
Limits placed on capitalism, through regulation, might be an example of letting society (the system) sort itself out.
If limits aren't introduced, the gap between rich and poor becomes too vast. It become futile for those who have little to even try to adjust their situation.
I do believe in capitalism, but left to its own devices, it becomes obscene.
Regulation should ensure a fair and level playing field for all. It's not anti-capitalist, it just stops the big guys from ruining things for everyone else.
Nobody likes their head inside a guillotine! Or a world where their children couldn't live.
In other words, no central committees are needed when the actors align voluntarily. "Bread and games", it was called in Rome. It would take some fairly corrupt governments and very stupid businessmen to forget these lessons.
This kind of philanthropy acts as a last ditch attempt to correct the negative affects the system produces .. but in my opinion, it's not an effective or elegant way of doing so. It's main purpose is an exercise in smoke and mirrors .. by trying to influence our perception and shape the conversation surrounding whether these excess profits are acceptable in modern society.
Unrestricted capitalism, sadly, doesn't even exist. But capitalism in its various forms is already a potent force for good - perhaps the most powerful such force the world has ever known. No other system has done more to create wealth, raise standards of living, and improve the world.
Attacking capitalism because it's slightly less than perfect at delivering the ideal end result for everybody, is a horrible kind of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".
The current system isn't working for enough people.
At some point in the near future, these jobs won’t exist. Are the commentators suggesting they not be automated? Likewise long truck driver driving is going to eventually collapse.
Any attempt to make Amazon pay a vastly higher salary for packers will just accelerate the drive to full automation.
No one is asking that Amazon pay a vastly higher salary to their low tier employees, only that they consider the cost of living for those employees and pay accordingly within a particular market.
The means to afford food and housing should not be out of reach of a full time employee, even if their position is likely to be automated in the future. That shouldn't be considered a luxury only available to the well-to-do. If the likelihood of automation is a valid rationale for lowering wages then just about everyone should be living on borrowed time and $12.00/hr.
And Amazon is pushing for full automation at maximum speed regardless, so employee wages are likely not a factor in that timeline.
If Amazon is paying too little compared to that "particular market", surely they wouldn't get enough applicants?
I guess you mean something else than "market" here ...
> The means to afford food and housing should not be out of reach of a full time employee, even if their position is likely to be automated in the future.
Then the government should set a (higher) minimum wage (and benefits), they way most other governments in the first (and third) world do.
A company's primary obligation is to their shareholders. A government's primary obligation should be to their constituents/voters/residents/citizens. Which one is failing their primary stakeholder the most here?
This is what government/laws/unions should help with. I just don't get the idealism of the 21st century. "Jobs should pay more or we will shame you", say the people.
"Get fucked", says the company. And now we are here...
> "The man of wealth thus becoming the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren," he wrote, "bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer - doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves."
How does wisdom about running a business translate into wisdom how other people should live their life?
Pretty much anyone with money and power ever.
Noone interviewed for the article talks about what policies Bezos might lobby for in order to make a real difference...
This supermoney represents Bezos' capacity to incentivize his fellow humans to act in concert toward a goal that he can influence. If he hoards it, then it does nothing for society. Bezos doesn't need it for his personal enjoyment either. After he leases a couple jets, buys a few homes, and pays for his staff, I doubt that costs more than tens of millions per year. Not billions.
If he spends it, then he needs to find undertakings that can efficiently absorb billions of dollars in value and still advance a meaningful goal. Space exploration is one of those undertakings. Bezos said he has been spending I think a billion per year on space travel / rocket engineering. There are few other areas that could so easily use this kind of capital. I would think that homelessness is another difficult problem that can absorb large amounts of value.
Maybe this arrangement of accumulation and philanthropy is sub-optimal, and we should instead tax capital to allocate the surplus democratically rather than allow the person who accumulated it to make the decision. Well, we already do that to some degree, with mixed results. Perhaps a little of both is called for.
In any event, I for one am pleased to see this money going to address homelessness. I don't care who is making the endowment, as long as the funds are used well. This is a serious, difficult problem, and this charity seems meaningful to me, not a purchased indulgence like sponsoring a new museum wing for example.
Regardless of if you agree with his actions or not, it's pretty tone-deaf from a PR perspective - pretty much anyone could have seen the backlash coming. He doesn't seem to give a monkey's butt about public perception, but there's very little he can do positively for the community whilst there's still the notion he's trying to destroy it with his business interests. The money and help he's trying to provide will just work better and be more effective and efficient if there's active support for it from all sides. Everything that happens with that money now will be caveated and judged by his actions.
I'd argue he should wait until he retires from Amazon (a la Bill Gates) if he does want any efforts to resonate with people. Then again, for good or bad, I don't think he really cares. I just hope the money can be deployed effectively whilst attached to him, even if it should have been in the pockets of the community all along.
If we can produce as much or more wealth with less ecological footprint then we have positive sum.
I'm not arguing from a philosophical standpoint, merely pointing out that from a public perception standpoint, a backlash on the apparent hypocrisy of him giving a damn about the community by trying to tackle homelessness whilst potentially damaging it in a tangential way through his ways of working is justified.
Rich people are a form of representative election. Some people give their proxies to others that they think will make wise economic choices. If you choose your proxy well, you also get rewarded with more votes.
That system has led to a situation where a viable equilibrium exists wherein those with unspent money can tend to make choices that benefit mostly themselves rather than the whole economy.
Each spent dollar is a production order. Investment is planning; spending is executing. If you don't spend enough money to execute on the plan, it will fail from a lack of material support. If the plan is good, and the work gets done, everyone benefits. That's not zero-sum. You can get out more than you put in. That's the whole point of having a specialized, productive economy.
But the investment portion of the economy is zero-sum. You can't order more than 100% of the productive economy that exists at any given moment. Every day, one pie the size of the productive economy gets auctioned off in tiny pieces. You can order the productive economy to grow its own capacity a bit, to make bigger pies tomorrow and into the future, but after it does, you will still have to re-vote to use it. Once the investment economy started gambling with itself on which of the candidate economic plans had the best prospects, it turned itself into a realm where someone else has to lose in order for anyone else to win. People stopped voting on bigger pies, and started voting strategically, to get more votes in the future. "Don't make more pie; make more votes!" They forgot that making and eating the daily pie was the important part of the voting process.
As for philanthropy, that might be an attempt to create a standing vote for "let's plan to spend some economic resources on being good to one another, regardless of anything else we might vote on".
Depends on what you want to do. If you are rich want to fund cancer research you might to do it right away and never see your money back, or invest it in a successful business, earn twice as much ... but die of cancer because you didn't use your votes soon enough.
Was it wise to get your votes back?
Economically, investing in cancer cures research is wise when selling a cure would be profitable. Even if you had a death oracle that could tell you exactly what a person would die of, and when, it might be wiser (economically) to invest in a cure for the disease that will kill Bill Gates in N years than the one that will kill you in N+M years.
Because the money you spend on curing Gates's disease in N years might return enough to allow you to finance a cure for your own in less than M years, whereas the original amount might cure yours in N+M+C years. It's all hypothetical. You make the best decisions you can with the information you have at the time, but luck and skill are always factors.
Taking money from people and keeping it is only ok if you have good idea what to do with it.
I'm not saying Bezos is wrong there. Taxing customers and employees to help the homeless is perfectly fine in my book.
Instead of relying on one out of 50 billionaires to spend a small fraction of their wealth to "give back" how about we pass something like Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act?
The way this should work is that Bezos should be taxed far more than he currently is and a good government run by and for the people should be redistributing that wealth created by Bezos (but mostly created by all the workers at Amazon, and through the use of society's existing infrastructure) to improve things for everyone.
There is a good discussion of the issues with such kinds of billionaire philanthropy in this podcast [1] and its sequel, where they focus on how Bill Gates has built an image of doing good for the world's most needy, while also using that same power to threaten democracies and worker's rights and build more power for himself.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-45-the-not-so...
But he "wants to help the poor". I call bull on it until he helps his own employees.
In capitalism/free markets, it is the company's responsibility to generate as much value for shareholders as possible. If paying workers more will not result in more value for shareholders, doing so could be seen in a negative light by shareholders.
Bezos is free to do with his own money as he sees fit, but not with his shareholders (which includes almost all employees BTW.) money.
However, governments are there to ensure that capitalist-motivated behaviour doesn't negatively affect the community, and should use its power to regulate the companies by such means as minimum wage, minimum benefits etc.
I really wonder how the "journalists" here fail to see where the problem lies ... but of course most Americans would say they don't want limits on how little time off they can get and how poor they choose to be ...
Where do people come up with this stuff? All evidence suggests that government is mainly there to act as a hammer to force people to adhere to behavioral standards that other people dream up, to protect the interests of the rich, entrenched, elitists who run the government, to enforce regulatory capture, to violate our civil liberties, and to steal our money.
Of course if you intention is to privilege capital over labour this is exactly the results intended but for the rest of society wages are static for 40 years and ultimately someone has to pay, either Bezos, Wallmart and others via equitable and fair wages or taxpayers and us via subsidies.
So as a tech worker for instance there is already a huge portion of your income going to asset inflation and supporting the renteers and the financial class, now you also have to subsidize poorly paid workers by billionaires like Bezos, the Walton family and others. You may get low prices but someone has to pay for the labour, housing, education and medicare and since lobbying works so well for the wealthy its you who is going to be stranded with the bill.
Again thanks to globalization, 'convenient' tax havens, lobbying and wealth friendly policies that privilege capital, and sell-out economists businesses and the wealthy can dodge taxes, access cheaper labour globally, put labour against each other and get policies for lower taxes. Labour simply does not have this level of mobility or 'choice' so contrary to conventional narratives there is 'coercion' since working is not a choice, and if there are not enough choices you have to accept whatever is available. If your grand plan is feudalism and a new class of serfs this is exactly how you would go about creating it.
Whether it is good for society to immense wealth controlled by family trusts/chariities or whether the wealth should be taxed and used for public purposes is something people can debate for an eternity.
taxes should be paid on property , on increases in the value of property, on PASSIVELY earned money from property, on the purchase of property, on the sale of property.
the more durable the property in temporal sense, the more it should be taxes.
INCOME itself is not where the tax should be. you rare taxing labor. it is a crime to tax 'income' , IT IS INDENTURED SERVITUDE TO YOUR GOVERNMENT.
tax property, licenses, food ( a form of property ).
why should there be 'income' to tax? and why should anyone not have to pay taxes if they give money to a 'church' or 'school' . total nonsense.