I do not know how many employees Amazon has. Do you?doodle wrote: ↑Sun Dec 20, 2020 7:06 pmMy only issue is that the fruits of his struggle also come from the collective labor and lives of tens of thousands of individuals. Jeff Bezos had a great idea, a great mind, and put in a lot of hard work to make it reality. After that initial idea he harnessed the intelligence and labor power of thousands of individuals and leveraged capital markets, distribution networks and public road systems, public education systems, public court and legal systems to build his company. There is a symbiotic relationship between the idea man and the collective structure that allows a company like that to grow and flourish. I don't think it's right that he makes 2 billion a week while he has fulltime workers living off food stamps while they put themselves in harm's way to make amazon an enormous profit during the lockdowns. I look at amazon as a collective tribe and I find it distasteful that any company would treat it's members that way.MangoMan wrote: ↑Sun Dec 20, 2020 6:31 pmHmmm. This seems in conflict to Doodle's premise that Bezo's risks and hard work do not entitle him to the fruits of his struggle.yankees60 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 20, 2020 6:17 pmThis is where I always have the problem. Yes, what you say may be true AFTER Amazon reached a certain status. But the success of Amazon was NO given.Maddy wrote: ↑Sun Dec 20, 2020 12:05 pm I can't say I share the concern for everybody being "equal." So long as I have a reasonably accessible path to a happy life, what do I care whether the guy across the road has 160 acres to my 20, or whether he's able to retire early and I'm not? Life's unfair, and fate has its way of picking its own winners and losers. So as long as my pursuits are not being unreasonably interfered with by someone bent upon using his superior position to thwart me, what's to complain about? When the guy I envy for having so many more advantages than I loses his leg in a logging accident, or his kid gets cancer, the scoreboard starts looking a little different.
That said, I absolutely detest the likes of Jeff Bezos et al. As far as I can tell, he and his cronies are precisely the type who can never be satisfied until everybody else in the game has lost their clothes. However, as I've said before, I don't regard his uniquely powerful status to have been acquired or maintained without the constant support and involvement of government.
So it puzzles me why anybody would reflexively conclude that even more government intervention is the answer to the problem. Hasn't it been proven, over and over again, that people like him are never touched by the very regulations designed by do-gooders to spread the wealth? Didn't a left-leaning member of this forum just recently acknowledge that interventions designed to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor inevitably target the middle class rather than the 1 percent?
What might happen if we actually enforced anti-trust laws? What if government bowed out of the business of supporting corporate monopolies? What if we no longer tolerated the revolving door whereby the same people rotate through Congress, intelligence positions, NGOs, and corporate boards?
When Jeff Bezos started Amazon Amazon had NONE of the advantages that you attribute to the government. Actually, it seems like almost everyone here would say he started with all the inherent disadvantages because we have our government the way it is.
Many of us could have started an Amazon at the same time he did.
But he actually did it. He took on tons and tons of risk. He worked incredible hours. Now he is reaping the rewards.
Isn't what I just wrote in the prior paragraph what almost everyone here believes should be the cause and the outcome?
For me Amazon is an incredible business. Thus its owner should be incredibly rewarded. That business is extremely well utilized by me. Spend a lot of money at it and with more and more purchases every year.
Where is the bright line cut off for a business like Amazon when you say enough is enough now some major changes have to be made to it so that it is no longer getting perceived unfair advantages from our government?
I'm an independent politically. I do believe in the free market and capitalist system.
So far I've read two books on Amazon, full of details. They were each far from puff pieces on Amazon. I emerged from reading both of them with nothing but respect for Jeff Bezos.
Rather than being so reviled from seemingly every quarter he should have celebrity status as a capitalist star!
Vinny![]()
I think this article from the financial times raises some other issues regarding the size of Amazon and how it can leverage that to squash competition.
https://www.ft.com/content/7c291a12-b8 ... 61693c3e7
How much do you want to take away from him? If taken away from him and divided up equally among all other employees, how much does each one get? Or, do you have some other proportional way to divide that excess amount?
Who decides what is this excess amount? You? A state committee of people? A Federal committee? Some body has to decide.
What do we do if other people do not agree on what is the excess amount?
Where would all those people now be if a Jeff Bezos had not been born? It is far from a certainty that we'd have anything close to what Amazon is today. Therefore where would all those people be today? Meaning they are each choosing to work for Amazon rather than the alternatives that exist today and which would have been the only choices available to them absent Amazon providing to them the jobs Amazon provides.
Finally, I'm not going to buy that they'd have been able to work at all those places that Amazon has supposedly put out of business. Retail is fairly close to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to work, correct? Lots of minimum wage, part-time jobs?
I spend and buy so much at Amazon because I get outstanding prices and service. Prior to them I did not buy elsewhere a high percentage of what I do buy from them because the value was just not there for me. Too high prices on top of the time I had to expend to make the purchase.
Give me Amazon or give me death!!!!
Vinny