Re:California plan for wealth tax on anyone who spends 60 da...
by tsimionescu on Sunday December 20, 2020 @02:47AM
(#25484672)
You're describing the failed dream of trickle down economics or Ayn Rands objectivism fever dream. Jeff Bezos' money is not working out for anyone else as much as it is for Jeff Bezos. 40-60 years ago, people could support a family off a single factory worker salary. Now, a good 10 or 20 percent of Jeff Bezos's employees can't even support themselves and need food stamps to live. Global warming is making the entire world go to shit faster and faster. And you think people are better off?
Not to mention, at the rate people's productivity has gone up, we should probably be working 3 or 4 day weeks at most, or earning almost double our wages. Instead, all of this extra productivity has been pocketed by Jeff Bezos and his ilk.
> Jeff Bezos is worth more than his warehouse workers because he creates jobs for the workers to survive. if the warehouse workers were worth the same, they would have come up with AMZN.
First of all, I didn't say he wasn't worth more to the company than 1 warehouse worker - of course he is. Is he worth more than all the warehouse and IT and sales workers combined? No. And please don't attribute to personal worth what is mostly a product of good luck - the fact that Jeff Bezos's move from books to everything else happened to be wildly successful doesn't mean it was a guaranteed success or that no one else could have done it. And after it started snowballing, pretty much anyone could have run Amazon and it would have still become a big success - especially anyone who doesn't care about the welfare of their workers, willing to cut corners, willing to extract massive subsidies from the state more or less directly (food stamps, the Amazon HQ bidding), willing to use their position and information to destroy their competitors, and so on.
If Amazon didn't exist, it would have been replaced by a thousand other smaller enterprises that would have hired more people. Centralization and concentration of wealth and power are always a net negative for everyone who isn't very near the top of that concentration.
Not to mention, at the rate people's productivity has gone up, we should probably be working 3 or 4 day weeks at most, or earning almost double our wages. Instead, all of this extra productivity has been pocketed by Jeff Bezos and his ilk.
> Jeff Bezos is worth more than his warehouse workers because he creates jobs for the workers to survive. if the warehouse workers were worth the same, they would have come up with AMZN.
First of all, I didn't say he wasn't worth more to the company than 1 warehouse worker - of course he is. Is he worth more than all the warehouse and IT and sales workers combined? No. And please don't attribute to personal worth what is mostly a product of good luck - the fact that Jeff Bezos's move from books to everything else happened to be wildly successful doesn't mean it was a guaranteed success or that no one else could have done it. And after it started snowballing, pretty much anyone could have run Amazon and it would have still become a big success - especially anyone who doesn't care about the welfare of their workers, willing to cut corners, willing to extract massive subsidies from the state more or less directly (food stamps, the Amazon HQ bidding), willing to use their position and information to destroy their competitors, and so on.
If Amazon didn't exist, it would have been replaced by a thousand other smaller enterprises that would have hired more people. Centralization and concentration of wealth and power are always a net negative for everyone who isn't very near the top of that concentration.