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Doesn't society determine how wealth is concentrated based on how they use their wallets? The wealth accumulated by founding Amazon is due to millions of people

Doesn't society determine how wealth is concentrated based on how they use their wallets? The wealth accumulated by founding Amazon is due to millions of people's purchases on the retail site. It is further enhanced by the amount of money being spent on AWS cloud services. This is how a free market works, the market dictates where wealth concentrates and disseminates. I don't disagree that in theory we shouldn't have it so lop sided but I don't see how we have a free market without the possibility of a Jeff Bezos rising to the top.

lisper 8y ago
> Doesn't society determine how wealth is concentrated based on how they use their wallets? Only when consumers actually have a choice. That's why monopolies are bad. This is something many people miss about capitalism. The way it is supposed to work is that if Bob starts to make a ton of money, Alice notices this and enters the market herself so that she can capture some of the market currently being served by Bob. The resulting competition drives prices down so that eventually goods and services become available at the lowest possible price. If one person or company is getting fabulously wealthy, that means that the market has failed. Society has a lot of mechanisms for preventing this from happening. Progressive taxation. Anti-trust laws. The laws of physics do not lead inexorably to laissez-faire capitalism.
- davidivadavid 8y ago
  I think that's a very unique definition of market failure you're going by there. It seems hard to argue that Amazon hasn't driven prices down for consumers.
  - lisper 8y ago
    You're making the wrong comparison. There is no question that Amazon has improved the retail experience and driven down prices. I love Amazon. I use them all the time. But what you have to compare is the world we live in and a hypothetical world where Amazon had a real competitor. In that world, prices would be even lower. And there would be other benefits as well. There might be an on-line retailer that was every bit as good as Amazon, but which exercised better oversight of their supply chain so that, say, ordering a name brand from them wasn't a total crap shoot in terms of whether you're getting the real thing or a counterfeit, or which carried items that you can't find on Amazon.
    - notyourwork 8y ago
      > I use them all the time. But what you have to compare is the world we live in and a hypothetical world where Amazon had a real competitor. No you don't have to imagine a world where every successful company has a competitor that is completely equal. That isn't how free markets work, that is how things work in theory but never in practice. There is always someone at the top. > There might be an on-line retailer that was every bit as good as Amazon, but which exercised better oversight of their supply chain so that, say, ordering a name brand from them wasn't a total crap shoot in terms of whether you're getting the real thing or a counterfeit, or which carried items that you can't find on Amazon. You love Amazon but you are shooting craps when you "use them all the time"? It seems you want it both ways and want to just imagine a world where Amazon has more competition because Jeff Bezos is the worlds wealthiest person. I can imagine a world where there is a free market and the most successful become the most wealthy.
      - lisper 8y ago
        > a competitor that is completely equal Who said anything about "completely equal"? Of course every market has a leader. But in a healthy market there is at least one other player of comparable size: Coke & Pepsi. Hertz & Avis. Boeing and Airbus. > You love Amazon but you are shooting craps when you "use them all the time"? No, not quite. I love Amazon, but they are not a panacea. One of the problem with them is that a lot of the things they sell are counterfeits, and when you order something there is no way to insure that you're not going to get a counterfeit. Hence: crap shoot. A retailer with real competition could never get away with that. > want to just imagine a world where Amazon has more competition because Jeff Bezos is the worlds wealthiest person. No. The reason I want Amazon to have competition is not because I want Jeff Bezos to have less money, it's because I want him to have less power. And not so much as a potential buyer, but as a potential seller or potential employee. Amazon is generally pretty good to its customers (unlike, say, Comcast), not so much to its merchants and employees. And I also want to be clear: I am not saying that I would necessarily use government power to change how Amazon does business. But I do think that this is a legitimate thing for a society to do. Even if Amazon is not the worst example of a monopoly run amok, there is no question that monopolies can be harmful, and that society has a legitimate interest in defending itself against them.
cazum 8y ago
>I don't see how we have a free market without the possibility of a Jeff Bezos rising to the top. Abolish the concept of a CEO. If the company is run democratically, as a cooperative, where every worker has a say in how the company is run and how much everyone gets paid, there is nobody to sit at the top of the hill with the whip telling you to break your hands working for $7.50 an hour so they can scrape off and take the 30 dollars an hour of surplus value that your labor generates.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- notyourwork 8y ago
  Interesting idea though I think you are blending two problems into one. Let's entertain a hypothetical Amazon where its democratically run. Majority of employees are low wage fulfillment workers. So they vote to increase their wages because they are majority. Now amazon isn't able to sustain profitability because low wage work is by very definition low wage work. Would Amazon be as successful in this scenario? I doubt it because their prices would be higher to cover larger employee costs. I don't think democracy in a free market works because a business would self consume.
- dang 8y ago
  It looks like your comments for the last six months have all been in political arguments. Regardless of your politics, that's the sort of thing we HN users here not to do. The guidelines say: "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Occasional political comments are fine, as I've explained many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20political%20occasional https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... But using HN primarily for that purpose degrades the main mandate of the site. If you'd please not do that, we'd appreciate it.

lisper 8y ago

> Doesn't society determine how wealth is concentrated based on how they use their wallets? Only when consumers actually have a choice. That's why monopolies are bad. This is something many people miss about capitalism. The way it is supposed to work is that if Bob starts to make a ton of money, Alice notices this and enters the market herself so that she can capture some of the market currently being served by Bob. The resulting competition drives prices down so that eventually goods and services become available at the lowest possible price. If one person or company is getting fabulously wealthy, that means that the market has failed. Society has a lot of mechanisms for preventing this from happening. Progressive taxation. Anti-trust laws. The laws of physics do not lead inexorably to laissez-faire capitalism.

davidivadavid 8y ago
I think that's a very unique definition of market failure you're going by there. It seems hard to argue that Amazon hasn't driven prices down for consumers.
- lisper 8y ago
  You're making the wrong comparison. There is no question that Amazon has improved the retail experience and driven down prices. I love Amazon. I use them all the time. But what you have to compare is the world we live in and a hypothetical world where Amazon had a real competitor. In that world, prices would be even lower. And there would be other benefits as well. There might be an on-line retailer that was every bit as good as Amazon, but which exercised better oversight of their supply chain so that, say, ordering a name brand from them wasn't a total crap shoot in terms of whether you're getting the real thing or a counterfeit, or which carried items that you can't find on Amazon.
  - notyourwork 8y ago
    > I use them all the time. But what you have to compare is the world we live in and a hypothetical world where Amazon had a real competitor. No you don't have to imagine a world where every successful company has a competitor that is completely equal. That isn't how free markets work, that is how things work in theory but never in practice. There is always someone at the top. > There might be an on-line retailer that was every bit as good as Amazon, but which exercised better oversight of their supply chain so that, say, ordering a name brand from them wasn't a total crap shoot in terms of whether you're getting the real thing or a counterfeit, or which carried items that you can't find on Amazon. You love Amazon but you are shooting craps when you "use them all the time"? It seems you want it both ways and want to just imagine a world where Amazon has more competition because Jeff Bezos is the worlds wealthiest person. I can imagine a world where there is a free market and the most successful become the most wealthy.
    - lisper 8y ago
      > a competitor that is completely equal Who said anything about "completely equal"? Of course every market has a leader. But in a healthy market there is at least one other player of comparable size: Coke & Pepsi. Hertz & Avis. Boeing and Airbus. > You love Amazon but you are shooting craps when you "use them all the time"? No, not quite. I love Amazon, but they are not a panacea. One of the problem with them is that a lot of the things they sell are counterfeits, and when you order something there is no way to insure that you're not going to get a counterfeit. Hence: crap shoot. A retailer with real competition could never get away with that. > want to just imagine a world where Amazon has more competition because Jeff Bezos is the worlds wealthiest person. No. The reason I want Amazon to have competition is not because I want Jeff Bezos to have less money, it's because I want him to have less power. And not so much as a potential buyer, but as a potential seller or potential employee. Amazon is generally pretty good to its customers (unlike, say, Comcast), not so much to its merchants and employees. And I also want to be clear: I am not saying that I would necessarily use government power to change how Amazon does business. But I do think that this is a legitimate thing for a society to do. Even if Amazon is not the worst example of a monopoly run amok, there is no question that monopolies can be harmful, and that society has a legitimate interest in defending itself against them.

cazum 8y ago

>I don't see how we have a free market without the possibility of a Jeff Bezos rising to the top. Abolish the concept of a CEO. If the company is run democratically, as a cooperative, where every worker has a say in how the company is run and how much everyone gets paid, there is nobody to sit at the top of the hill with the whip telling you to break your hands working for $7.50 an hour so they can scrape off and take the 30 dollars an hour of surplus value that your labor generates.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
notyourwork 8y ago
Interesting idea though I think you are blending two problems into one. Let's entertain a hypothetical Amazon where its democratically run. Majority of employees are low wage fulfillment workers. So they vote to increase their wages because they are majority. Now amazon isn't able to sustain profitability because low wage work is by very definition low wage work. Would Amazon be as successful in this scenario? I doubt it because their prices would be higher to cover larger employee costs. I don't think democracy in a free market works because a business would self consume.
dang 8y ago
It looks like your comments for the last six months have all been in political arguments. Regardless of your politics, that's the sort of thing we HN users here not to do. The guidelines say: "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Occasional political comments are fine, as I've explained many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20political%20occasional https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... But using HN primarily for that purpose degrades the main mandate of the site. If you'd please not do that, we'd appreciate it.