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The major difference is that if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them. Whereas government is a monopoly, so if it runs ba

The major difference is that if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them. Whereas government is a monopoly, so if it runs badly then it doesn't automatically get replaced. Now, democracy is supposed to fix this, by allowing you to vote for a different supplier of government every few years. But because of the voting system in some countries (like the US and the UK) it's actually really hard to do this, because everything gets turned into a black/white struggle between opposing forces, rather than lots of options being available for you make a choice between.

emodendroket 9y ago
A large business has a lot of tools at its disposal to snuff out upstart competitors in a permissive legal environment like we live in today.
izacus 9y ago
Hmm, as I remember the socialist governments were replaced (not easily, but they were). Have we even seen a conglomerate of AMZN size replaced in living memory?
- phreeza 9y ago
  Not quite the size, but on the same order of magnitude when adjusted for inflation: Enron.
  - Applejinx 9y ago
    Amazon's not fake. Enron was basically fake: Uber is a closer match to Enron than Amazon will ever be. Amazon is no hype-supported tech unicorn. They are basically a supply network to the Nth power, run by dedicated maniacs willing to destroy themselves to prevail, and executed by a combination of incredible capital utilization (in the form of physical warehouses, robots, automation, systems design) and human exploitation (what jobs can't be automated yet are handled by that more sophisticated robot, the desperate peak-performance human).
- adventured 9y ago
  Sure, frequently. IBM, Sears (far more dominant in retail in its day than Amazon is today), General Motors (hi Toyota), US Steel (hi foreign steel), Pan-Am (hyper powerful at its peak), Alcoa (anti-trust + foreign competition), and a dozen others that were every bit as powerful as Amazon at their peak. Oh and Walmart is slowly being replaced by Amazon. Walmart is/was the most dominant retailer in world history.
  - djur 9y ago
    The rise and fall of major corporations isn't necessarily the result of the inexorable application of market forces. Alcoa's grasp on the market was broken as much by the aftermath of 'war socialism' as anything else, for example. Companies compete with each other on legal, regulatory, and social planes as well as in the marketplace. I think it's difficult to find any single X that makes "if a company is bad at X, it will be replaced by competitors" a consistently true statement, without X being essentially synonymous with "succeeding".
- jannes 9y ago
  Maybe Sears as a predecessor to Amazon? Kodak Polaroid Blockbuster Research in Motion / Blackberry Motorola Nokia Sun Microsystems Yahoo
- TomSawyer 9y ago
  Not if you were born recently.
aptwebapps 9y ago
Also, it's only the top level of management, loosely speaking, that's easily swappable. Most of the bureaucracy stays in place.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them Is this really true though? Over the past few decades we've seen that if a company is big enough, and it fails, the government will step in and prop it up with a bailout.
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  Sears, K-Mart, Circuit City, Radio Shack. IIRC most of the companies in the S&P 500 didn't exist 30 years ago. I think the DJIA is mostly companies that are younger than I am. The US has an unusually dynamic economy. Bailing out companies is reserved for politically important ones (GM, Ford) or politically and financially important ones.
- travisp 9y ago
  If that's the case, it's not a free-market economy, and you won't get those benefits of the free-market economy.
  - asveikau 9y ago
    It's weird to me to see "if that's the case" followed by an explanation of a possible bad outcome, written as if nobody has said this and it needs an explanation. It's a quite old idea. I have for many years heard the political left decry: we get socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The Wikipedia page on "corporate welfare" says Ralph Nader used the term in 1956 -- which is much older than I thought having only been exposed to it ~20 years ago.
- Danihan 9y ago
  Only for the financial sector though.
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    Chrysler, GM, Ford, United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, and Lockheed have all also been bailed out by the government.
gregw134 9y ago
Which is why we need instant-runoff voting in the US, so we can vote for third party candidates but still choose between the top two candidates if our preferred candidate loses.
- bhauer 9y ago
  There is no doubt that IRV would be superior to what we use today, plurality voting. However, if we achieve the momentum necessary to reform voting in the United States, it would be a shame to squander that momentum to receive IRV rather than an easier and better model such as Score voting or Approval voting. More on the matter: http://electology.org/approval-voting-versus-irv http://electology.org/approval-voting-versus-irv
- quadrangle 9y ago
  instant-runoff is sold on false premises. Advocates suggest that you can honestly vote and not see spoiler effects. But instant-runoff eliminates a candidate in each round, and when your 2nd choice gets eliminated before your 1st choice, your 2nd choice never gets counted. This results in a wide range of messed up results that spoil elections and can fall back to strategic voting. The best answer is Star voting (Score Then Auto-Runoff), which just does one instant runoff between top scoring candidates, thus counting everyone's scores equally. See http://www.equal.vote http://www.equal.vote for details
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    No, STAR is not the best answer; it has the same problem as all scoring (instead of ranking) based methods—there's no clear mapping between actual subjective preferences (which can be consistently reduced to ordinal, but not interval, measures) and ballot markings, with the result that the same preferences by different voters produce different ballot markings. This is especially problematic in multicultural jurisdictions, because score ratings aren't distributed among the space of markings consistent with a set of preferences consistently, but instead show clear cultural differences. (This is a well-documented, though rarely-addressed, problem with star ratings in general; one example of a difference on this axis is that with the same degree of satisfaction measured vy other means, Americans of European ancestry give significantly higher ratings than Asian-Americans on fixed-rate scales. This problem (the inconsistency in general, not the cultural variation though that underlined the problem) makes STAR and other score-based methods utterly unsuitable for most public elections. If you want to fix the problems caused by loser elimination in IRV, just drop loser elimination and accept as winner the candidate who gets past the bare-majority threshold first as you check first all first preference votes, then total of first and second preference votes, and so on.
Applejinx 9y ago
It would be enormously, impossibly wasteful for anything to come around and replace Amazon. It'd be like replacing Google. You're basically talking market chaos and massive supply chain disruption, probably to the point of extensive loss of life: you'd be surprised how much depends on these giant, government-like systems. Personally, I think the poster suggesting that Amazon may start lobbying for basically welfare, is onto something. What if they lobbied for a massive redistribution scheme where half the excess/arbitrageous profits made by the 0.001% are redistributed to the 99.999% in the form of Amazon store credit and only Amazon store credit? Since that is either already, or will inevitably be, the single most efficient distribution network by which you could get goods and resources to the populace in a market system?
- tajen 9y ago
  > It'd be like replacing Google. You're basically talking market chaos and massive supply chain disruption, probably to the point of extensive loss of life What? Granted an overnight transition could cause disruption, but in a few months, what couldn't be replaced? Gmail? GMaps? Android? Youtube? Search+Adwords+GAnalytics? GCE? their CDN could be the worst, maybe? they all already have big competitors, and since Google's quality is minimal, it wouldn't be that hard to switch over. But you need a motivated company, i.e. just a little more effort than OpenStreetMaps or FastMail.

emodendroket 9y ago

A large business has a lot of tools at its disposal to snuff out upstart competitors in a permissive legal environment like we live in today.

izacus 9y ago

Hmm, as I remember the socialist governments were replaced (not easily, but they were). Have we even seen a conglomerate of AMZN size replaced in living memory?

phreeza 9y ago
Not quite the size, but on the same order of magnitude when adjusted for inflation: Enron.
- Applejinx 9y ago
  Amazon's not fake. Enron was basically fake: Uber is a closer match to Enron than Amazon will ever be. Amazon is no hype-supported tech unicorn. They are basically a supply network to the Nth power, run by dedicated maniacs willing to destroy themselves to prevail, and executed by a combination of incredible capital utilization (in the form of physical warehouses, robots, automation, systems design) and human exploitation (what jobs can't be automated yet are handled by that more sophisticated robot, the desperate peak-performance human).
adventured 9y ago
Sure, frequently. IBM, Sears (far more dominant in retail in its day than Amazon is today), General Motors (hi Toyota), US Steel (hi foreign steel), Pan-Am (hyper powerful at its peak), Alcoa (anti-trust + foreign competition), and a dozen others that were every bit as powerful as Amazon at their peak. Oh and Walmart is slowly being replaced by Amazon. Walmart is/was the most dominant retailer in world history.
- djur 9y ago
  The rise and fall of major corporations isn't necessarily the result of the inexorable application of market forces. Alcoa's grasp on the market was broken as much by the aftermath of 'war socialism' as anything else, for example. Companies compete with each other on legal, regulatory, and social planes as well as in the marketplace. I think it's difficult to find any single X that makes "if a company is bad at X, it will be replaced by competitors" a consistently true statement, without X being essentially synonymous with "succeeding".
jannes 9y ago
Maybe Sears as a predecessor to Amazon? Kodak Polaroid Blockbuster Research in Motion / Blackberry Motorola Nokia Sun Microsystems Yahoo
TomSawyer 9y ago
Not if you were born recently.

aptwebapps 9y ago

Also, it's only the top level of management, loosely speaking, that's easily swappable. Most of the bureaucracy stays in place.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago

>if Amazon stop running well then someone else will come along and replace them Is this really true though? Over the past few decades we've seen that if a company is big enough, and it fails, the government will step in and prop it up with a bailout.

barry-cotter 9y ago
Sears, K-Mart, Circuit City, Radio Shack. IIRC most of the companies in the S&P 500 didn't exist 30 years ago. I think the DJIA is mostly companies that are younger than I am. The US has an unusually dynamic economy. Bailing out companies is reserved for politically important ones (GM, Ford) or politically and financially important ones.
travisp 9y ago
If that's the case, it's not a free-market economy, and you won't get those benefits of the free-market economy.
- asveikau 9y ago
  It's weird to me to see "if that's the case" followed by an explanation of a possible bad outcome, written as if nobody has said this and it needs an explanation. It's a quite old idea. I have for many years heard the political left decry: we get socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The Wikipedia page on "corporate welfare" says Ralph Nader used the term in 1956 -- which is much older than I thought having only been exposed to it ~20 years ago.
Danihan 9y ago
Only for the financial sector though.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  Chrysler, GM, Ford, United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, and Lockheed have all also been bailed out by the government.

gregw134 9y ago

Which is why we need instant-runoff voting in the US, so we can vote for third party candidates but still choose between the top two candidates if our preferred candidate loses.

bhauer 9y ago
There is no doubt that IRV would be superior to what we use today, plurality voting. However, if we achieve the momentum necessary to reform voting in the United States, it would be a shame to squander that momentum to receive IRV rather than an easier and better model such as Score voting or Approval voting. More on the matter: http://electology.org/approval-voting-versus-irv http://electology.org/approval-voting-versus-irv
quadrangle 9y ago
instant-runoff is sold on false premises. Advocates suggest that you can honestly vote and not see spoiler effects. But instant-runoff eliminates a candidate in each round, and when your 2nd choice gets eliminated before your 1st choice, your 2nd choice never gets counted. This results in a wide range of messed up results that spoil elections and can fall back to strategic voting. The best answer is Star voting (Score Then Auto-Runoff), which just does one instant runoff between top scoring candidates, thus counting everyone's scores equally. See http://www.equal.vote http://www.equal.vote for details
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  No, STAR is not the best answer; it has the same problem as all scoring (instead of ranking) based methods—there's no clear mapping between actual subjective preferences (which can be consistently reduced to ordinal, but not interval, measures) and ballot markings, with the result that the same preferences by different voters produce different ballot markings. This is especially problematic in multicultural jurisdictions, because score ratings aren't distributed among the space of markings consistent with a set of preferences consistently, but instead show clear cultural differences. (This is a well-documented, though rarely-addressed, problem with star ratings in general; one example of a difference on this axis is that with the same degree of satisfaction measured vy other means, Americans of European ancestry give significantly higher ratings than Asian-Americans on fixed-rate scales. This problem (the inconsistency in general, not the cultural variation though that underlined the problem) makes STAR and other score-based methods utterly unsuitable for most public elections. If you want to fix the problems caused by loser elimination in IRV, just drop loser elimination and accept as winner the candidate who gets past the bare-majority threshold first as you check first all first preference votes, then total of first and second preference votes, and so on.

Applejinx 9y ago

It would be enormously, impossibly wasteful for anything to come around and replace Amazon. It'd be like replacing Google. You're basically talking market chaos and massive supply chain disruption, probably to the point of extensive loss of life: you'd be surprised how much depends on these giant, government-like systems. Personally, I think the poster suggesting that Amazon may start lobbying for basically welfare, is onto something. What if they lobbied for a massive redistribution scheme where half the excess/arbitrageous profits made by the 0.001% are redistributed to the 99.999% in the form of Amazon store credit and only Amazon store credit? Since that is either already, or will inevitably be, the single most efficient distribution network by which you could get goods and resources to the populace in a market system?

tajen 9y ago
> It'd be like replacing Google. You're basically talking market chaos and massive supply chain disruption, probably to the point of extensive loss of life What? Granted an overnight transition could cause disruption, but in a few months, what couldn't be replaced? Gmail? GMaps? Android? Youtube? Search+Adwords+GAnalytics? GCE? their CDN could be the worst, maybe? they all already have big competitors, and since Google's quality is minimal, it wouldn't be that hard to switch over. But you need a motivated company, i.e. just a little more effort than OpenStreetMaps or FastMail.