> What actually happens is Amazon shops around for enormous public subsidies for its HQ, bankrupting local and state govnerments. I'll offer a different take:

> What actually happens is Amazon shops around for enormous public subsidies for its HQ, bankrupting local and state govnerments. I'll offer a different take: taxation (and budgets) are just the price we pay to society for a basket of services. There's some optimum price / optimum basket. This competition allows different societies to lower their price (taxes) or lower their basket of services based on the democratic needs of that society. Some societies will value job creation more than short-run costs to the budget, and others will not. It's not surprising at all that the city that didn't have a whole lot of jobs chose the former (via the democratically elected government), and the city that already had a lot of jobs (NYC) chose the latter, also via a similarly selected government.