6 ms·

Amazon Destroys the Intellectual Justifications for Capitalism

49 points by tehjoker 6y ago

oliv__ 6y ago
This article sort of half-made sense until I read this part: "But corporations all depend on the state and their workers to survive, and thus there are ways to seize it, democratize it, and keep it in public hands where it belongs" MMhh.. excuse me? Says who? Stalin? Lately there seems to be a strong, veiled and (dare I say) coordinated effort to put down capitalism in the US. Has everyone forgotten what built this great country in the first place?
- antisthenes 6y ago
  > Lately there seems to be a strong, veiled and (dare I say) coordinated effort to put down capitalism in the US. Has everyone forgotten what built this great country in the first place? Sure. In rough historic order: Slavery, genocide of the natives and theft of their land, unprecedented consumption of fossil based fuels, invention of consumerism as a culture, untouched industrial capacity after WWII and massive brain drain from developing countries. Which ones were you referring to exactly?
  - fr11 6y ago
    Those are definitely things that helped build this country, but one of them - massive brain drain from developing countries - (and by the way, you missed from Soviet countries) - is based on the fact that there's something appealing about living here. Some folks like to call that freedom, or a set of ideals about how we structure things. I agree with the parent comment that lately people are really down on the US and capitalism, and others are super positive about it in unthinking response. Capitalism has provided a lot of amazing things - avocados are always available! - but also done damage and been destructive. Similarly, America was the experiment and inspiration for modern democratic/republican governance, and a major component in the beginning of more freedom for more people, while also having been built on slavery, the killing of natives, massive environmental devastation, and other terrible things. The world is really complex, and simplifying things to good or evil tends to lose a lot of reality.
alexfromapex 6y ago
It’s the government’s job to prevent this anticompetitive behavior but corporate lobbyists have been interfering and will until lobbying is illegal
- lokar 6y ago
  Our (americans) only hope is the EU.
- dbingham 6y ago
  A system that requires outside manipulation to keep it functioning is not a good system. The fact that capitalism inevitably converges towards monopoly (and therefor the concentration of wealth and power) with out the intervention of the government (which is often very vulnerable to corruption at the hands of concentrated power and wealth) is effectively a fatal flaw. This is why I am an advocate of free market socialism - a market system where companies are democratically run by their workers and the financiers are limited to a regulated return on the form of interest on their loans. Democratic ownership can counter act the tendency to grow and absorb competitors, because each new worker who gets a vote waters down the votes and control of their fellows. Plus the bigger the organization gets, the slower and less responsive it will get. And a democratic organization run by its workers will have a myriad of motivating factors to balance, other than chasing infinite profit or return for the investors. All of these factors will act to keep companies from growing to big and help keep the market in balance. Which benefits the consumers. And in the meantime the fact that the workers call the shots will prevent the kinds of labor abuses that have plagued the capitalist system since its inception.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    How does your system prevent the formation of a monopoly? The employee-run corporation merges with its competitors until there are none left, then charges monopoly prices to customers in order to pay above-market wages to employees. How does that solve the problem?
    - chmod775 6y ago
moocowtruck 6y ago
I've been at usps for 15 years, and I only wish that our amazon overlords would just take over.. the incompetence in govt handling this kind of thing is impossible, and the usps unions...just wow. Grievance because you woke an employee from mid day slumber too abruptly. only tip of ice berg... Amazon is good at what they do we should not punish them, we should be asking competitors why they are so bad
avalys 6y ago
This article is a great example of the straw man fallacy. The article pretends that there is an "intellectual justification" for capitalism that doesn't recognize the need to break up monopolies to preserve the free market. I think that recognition is quite common even among "hardcore libertarians". The article makes good points in favor of a government intervention of some kind against Amazon. But the headline and thesis is overwrought, unsupported clickbait. (For what it's worth, in my opinion, the lack of government action in this area is good evidence that no one in power in the US right now gives two shits about the intellectual justification for capitalism).
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Capitalism has had many justifications over its two to four centuries of existence. The justifications you refer to held currency starting around the time of the trust busters, but that was a new idea then (and apparently not universally held since Reganomics came into fashion when the focus of anti-trust became consumer cost rather than market concentration).
  - reissbaker 6y ago
    I think you would be hard-pressed to find any justification for capitalism that doesn't include: 1. Competition, and 2. Property rights. This article does effectively slam Amazon for violating both of those capitalist tenets. But it doesn't effectively say anything about capitalism; the whole problem with Amazon is that it's violating capitalist tenets by being an anti-competitive monopoly, with enough power that it can steal intellectual property with impunity. If there was meaningful competition, and Amazon was forced to respect intellectual property rights... At least as presented by this article, there wouldn't seem to be a problem. Capitalism isn't anti-government — it relies on governments so that businesses don't have their property stolen. Amazon's business practices do indeed suck though, and seem (to me) to be illegal. The US government should step in forcefully.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      I would argue the article correctly points out that the tendency of capitalism via the prism of Amazon is to concentrate wealth and power and undermine the justifications that it grew out of.
anm89 6y ago
> Amazon is becoming a giant private government with the power to direct the economy. Nope. This is nonsense. Doesn't really even deserve a response. > Amazon Destroys the Intellectual Justifications for Capitalism Uh no. "Current Affairs Magazine Operates Prison's Run By Slave Labor in Third World Countries and has Destroyed Democracy" See how that works. You can just string words together that aren't true with no consequences. The fact that someone has strung those words together doesn't make it true. This is garbage journalism.
- 2fast4you 6y ago
  Can you maybe expand on that? Why aren’t those words true?
  - anm89 6y ago
    Make a set of "The Intellectual Justifications for Capitalism" which is complete(you couldn't argue something has been destroyed which at best you could come up with a partial definition for, how would you know you destroyed all of it?) and that would be able to reach even an absurdly low bar of societal consensus. It doesn't exist. My justifications would be different than many others and there is no official source on the question. The premise is nonsense. Happy to take my downvotes for calling nonsense nonsense. It doesn't require a justification in every case.
reissbaker 6y ago
I feel like this article is capitalizing (lol) on a trendy hatred of capitalism, rather than a serious takedown of "the intellectual justifications for capitalism." Capitalism isn't anti-government libertarianism! Capitalism's whole ethos is based on rule of law — especially property law — and competition; anti-competitive monopolies with near-infinite money that can commit intellectual property theft without meaningful penalty aren't capitalist. I don't know what they are. Broken, certainly.
- SantalBlush 6y ago
  This just isn't true. No firm wants to enter a perfectly competitive market, because the expected long-run profit margin is zero. If a firm loves competition, they are free to increase competition in their market at any time by giving away their patents, copyrights, tech, etc. They don't do these things because they don't want competition. Just because a bunch of people claim to love competition doesn't make it true. Regarding the rule of law, some pretty disgusting things have been done for private investment (i.e. capitalism.) Banana republics come to mind. This "broken capitalism" claim is essentially a no-true-Scotsman fallacy. Real-world capitalism didn't play out like the perfect scenario in our heads, so blame it on "broken capitalism" or "crony capitalism". In truth, the system yields flawed results like everything else.
  - reissbaker 6y ago
    > private investment (i.e. capitalism) I think this definition is the root of our disagreement. Private investment doesn't necessarily equate to capitalism. Even feudal lords spent their own money on their own property, but that doesn't mean they were operating in capitalist economies. It stretches the definition of capitalism to the point of basically irrelevance to use it to refer to literally anything done for personal profit. Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of capitalism: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, a price system, private property and the recognition of property rights, voluntary exchange and wage labor." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism Notably, "competitive markets" and "recognition of property rights" are exactly the issues the article brings up with Amazon: there is little competition, and Amazon has (thus far) been able to steal intellectual property with impunity. This article is not exactly a takedown of capitalism! Its complaint is that Amazon is violating central characteristics of capitalism, and that it would prefer Amazon to not violate them. I think your other point re: firms requiring profit motive and thus competition being impossible, is a little bit of a strawman. No one said perfect competition is something that markets have at a single point in time: just that monopolies without any option for competition are antithetical to a functional capitalist economy, and that capitalist markets are defined by the ability for firms to compete with each other. I think most economists would agree with me on that point.
friendlybus 6y ago
This is the exact problem I have with survelliance capitalism. What stops Microsoft, Google, ect from cornering every market? The last time I posted the question I was told those companies are looking for billion dollar investment opportunities and anything less isn't worth their time... and here we have Amazon cutting the nerdy kid's lunch money like a high school bully.
m0llusk 6y ago
Allow for private property and profit from trade and you have Capitalism. What this is about is the need for eternal vigilance.
xupybd 6y ago
Most dramatic changes in economic systems have resulted in disaster. Yes there are competing ideas and some have merit but it's important to realise that most of the systems we've had have not work as well as capitalism has. That is not to say we have the perfect system but it is not the disaster most of its opponents claim it is. As such we should be very careful to make sudden changes in the hope of a utopia, because getting it wrong has a very high price. A price that will cost lives.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  The reality is there is no purely capitalist society in the world. Each society is somewhere on the spectrum of socialist and capitalist, borrowing different quantities of ideas from both. For instance, America has a socialized postal system, socialized school system, socialized highway network, socialized fire departments, socialized police, and a socialized army. That doesn't make it socialism, but it doesn't make it 100% capitalist either. The question being asked here is more one of redistricting the divisions between the socialized and the private sectors of America.
  - xupybd 6y ago
    This is very true. I don't think there are any examples of pure capitalism. I don't typically speak of pure capitalism when discussing the topic. Most of the time when people say they want to change away from capitalism they are actually talking about the current system. Often when they talk about ending capitalism they are actually talking about slightly increasing the mix of socialism. But there is a strong sentiment that our current system is inherently broken due to the level of capitalism it currently contains. I would argue that it's the best system we've ever had. By that I mean the mix of capitalism and socialism we have in the western world. All the varying mixes that exist have been wild successes compared to any historical systems. Also noting that changing too fast could be dangerous. Much of the language is used inaccurately, something I'm very guilty of, so it is hard to assess what change people are hoping to achieve. I've heard a scary amount of poorly thought out claims that we have a suitable replacement for our current mix of capitalism and socialism. I'm afraid that could lead to similar problems that the Soviets faced. I could be wrong so all I call for is caution.
mimikatz 6y ago
Amazon has been great for the consumer, Amazon's your margin is my opportunity mantra has lowered costs for tons of things and added a ton of value to people's lives. Sure this hurts other businesses, but that's business and eventually someone will come for Amazon. Do I as a consumer care if some drop shipper camera tripod company got eaten by Amazon basic? Hell no I don't.
- Guest42 6y ago
  Over time they have been systemically raising prices. I have noticed this and it has been mentioned on HN by ex-team members.
  - gscho 6y ago
    Doesn't that create an opportunity for competition?
    - nightski 6y ago
      That is the entire point of the article, how Amazon uses it's power and resources to prevent competition.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  The argument posited here is that Amazon has reached "escape velocity" and that the sheer amount of market share and capital and control of infrastructure they have makes it unrealistic that someone will come for Amazon. That's not an argument I've heard made before, but I do find it persuasive. They literally control large portions of the internet with AWS, are moving into air freight, ground freight and I assume sea freight is next. They control the warehouses and they control the customer experience. They have third-party sellers and then once popular they steal their ideas and drive them out of business, because they can afford to. The bigger Amazon gets the harder it gets for someone to overtake them. And while you may not care yet, the natural outcome is that once they are the only game in town, they will simply raise prices. On every purchase you're winning the battle while losing the war.
kevindong 6y ago
> It can simply lift the innovations of others, and because it can undercut their prices, it can put them out of business. I agree that what amounts to dumping (pricing products below the cost of production) should be illegal. Nor should a company be forced out of business by the effort required to prove illegal act(s) by a competitor. But it's not like customers are getting completely screwed by a "competitor" duplicating a product (provided the pricing isn't malicious towards the original manufacturer): they're getting low prices for presumably reasonable quality goods.
bjornsing 6y ago
“But corporations all depend on the state and their workers to survive, and thus there are ways to seize it, democratize it, and keep it in public hands where it belongs.” Sounds like something the villain in an Ayn Rand novel would say...
fr11 6y ago
A lot of folks, including Nathan Robinson, seem to have a weird idea that proponents of capitalism think that it creates freedom. I think a more accurate way of thinking about it is that freedom creates capitalism. Black markets are a sign of the imperfect control of people, for example. But as for what we should do about Amazon, there's a response that is more principled than just breaking up Amazon because they're huge, and that acknowledges the massive failure in history of socialist control of things. (Sorry, socialists - governments don't run things well, with exceptions that are interesting and worth study, but not yet repeatable) We need to ban companies from both creating and distributing if they're at a certain size. This worked really well in a bunch of states for liquor laws, and would prevent the current idiocy with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, and Disney streaming channels that have their own content. Let Netflix and whoever else wants to compete on distribution, and don't let them create their own content unless they offer it for distribution to anyone else who wants to distribute it, for standard terms. Same with Amazon.

49 points by tehjoker 6y ago

This article sort of half-made sense until I read this part: "But corporations all depend on the state and their workers to survive, and thus there are ways to seize it, democratize it, and keep it in public hands where it belongs" MMhh.. excuse me? Says who? Stalin? Lately there seems to be a strong, veiled and (dare I say) coordinated effort to put down capitalism in the US. Has everyone forgotten what built this great country in the first place?

antisthenes 6y ago
> Lately there seems to be a strong, veiled and (dare I say) coordinated effort to put down capitalism in the US. Has everyone forgotten what built this great country in the first place? Sure. In rough historic order: Slavery, genocide of the natives and theft of their land, unprecedented consumption of fossil based fuels, invention of consumerism as a culture, untouched industrial capacity after WWII and massive brain drain from developing countries. Which ones were you referring to exactly?
- fr11 6y ago
  Those are definitely things that helped build this country, but one of them - massive brain drain from developing countries - (and by the way, you missed from Soviet countries) - is based on the fact that there's something appealing about living here. Some folks like to call that freedom, or a set of ideals about how we structure things. I agree with the parent comment that lately people are really down on the US and capitalism, and others are super positive about it in unthinking response. Capitalism has provided a lot of amazing things - avocados are always available! - but also done damage and been destructive. Similarly, America was the experiment and inspiration for modern democratic/republican governance, and a major component in the beginning of more freedom for more people, while also having been built on slavery, the killing of natives, massive environmental devastation, and other terrible things. The world is really complex, and simplifying things to good or evil tends to lose a lot of reality.

alexfromapex 6y ago

It’s the government’s job to prevent this anticompetitive behavior but corporate lobbyists have been interfering and will until lobbying is illegal

lokar 6y ago
Our (americans) only hope is the EU.
dbingham 6y ago
A system that requires outside manipulation to keep it functioning is not a good system. The fact that capitalism inevitably converges towards monopoly (and therefor the concentration of wealth and power) with out the intervention of the government (which is often very vulnerable to corruption at the hands of concentrated power and wealth) is effectively a fatal flaw. This is why I am an advocate of free market socialism - a market system where companies are democratically run by their workers and the financiers are limited to a regulated return on the form of interest on their loans. Democratic ownership can counter act the tendency to grow and absorb competitors, because each new worker who gets a vote waters down the votes and control of their fellows. Plus the bigger the organization gets, the slower and less responsive it will get. And a democratic organization run by its workers will have a myriad of motivating factors to balance, other than chasing infinite profit or return for the investors. All of these factors will act to keep companies from growing to big and help keep the market in balance. Which benefits the consumers. And in the meantime the fact that the workers call the shots will prevent the kinds of labor abuses that have plagued the capitalist system since its inception.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  How does your system prevent the formation of a monopoly? The employee-run corporation merges with its competitors until there are none left, then charges monopoly prices to customers in order to pay above-market wages to employees. How does that solve the problem?
  - chmod775 6y ago

moocowtruck 6y ago

I've been at usps for 15 years, and I only wish that our amazon overlords would just take over.. the incompetence in govt handling this kind of thing is impossible, and the usps unions...just wow. Grievance because you woke an employee from mid day slumber too abruptly. only tip of ice berg... Amazon is good at what they do we should not punish them, we should be asking competitors why they are so bad

avalys 6y ago

This article is a great example of the straw man fallacy. The article pretends that there is an "intellectual justification" for capitalism that doesn't recognize the need to break up monopolies to preserve the free market. I think that recognition is quite common even among "hardcore libertarians". The article makes good points in favor of a government intervention of some kind against Amazon. But the headline and thesis is overwrought, unsupported clickbait. (For what it's worth, in my opinion, the lack of government action in this area is good evidence that no one in power in the US right now gives two shits about the intellectual justification for capitalism).

tehjoker 6y ago
Capitalism has had many justifications over its two to four centuries of existence. The justifications you refer to held currency starting around the time of the trust busters, but that was a new idea then (and apparently not universally held since Reganomics came into fashion when the focus of anti-trust became consumer cost rather than market concentration).
- reissbaker 6y ago
  I think you would be hard-pressed to find any justification for capitalism that doesn't include: 1. Competition, and 2. Property rights. This article does effectively slam Amazon for violating both of those capitalist tenets. But it doesn't effectively say anything about capitalism; the whole problem with Amazon is that it's violating capitalist tenets by being an anti-competitive monopoly, with enough power that it can steal intellectual property with impunity. If there was meaningful competition, and Amazon was forced to respect intellectual property rights... At least as presented by this article, there wouldn't seem to be a problem. Capitalism isn't anti-government — it relies on governments so that businesses don't have their property stolen. Amazon's business practices do indeed suck though, and seem (to me) to be illegal. The US government should step in forcefully.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    I would argue the article correctly points out that the tendency of capitalism via the prism of Amazon is to concentrate wealth and power and undermine the justifications that it grew out of.

anm89 6y ago

> Amazon is becoming a giant private government with the power to direct the economy. Nope. This is nonsense. Doesn't really even deserve a response. > Amazon Destroys the Intellectual Justifications for Capitalism Uh no. "Current Affairs Magazine Operates Prison's Run By Slave Labor in Third World Countries and has Destroyed Democracy" See how that works. You can just string words together that aren't true with no consequences. The fact that someone has strung those words together doesn't make it true. This is garbage journalism.

2fast4you 6y ago
Can you maybe expand on that? Why aren’t those words true?
- anm89 6y ago
  Make a set of "The Intellectual Justifications for Capitalism" which is complete(you couldn't argue something has been destroyed which at best you could come up with a partial definition for, how would you know you destroyed all of it?) and that would be able to reach even an absurdly low bar of societal consensus. It doesn't exist. My justifications would be different than many others and there is no official source on the question. The premise is nonsense. Happy to take my downvotes for calling nonsense nonsense. It doesn't require a justification in every case.

reissbaker 6y ago

I feel like this article is capitalizing (lol) on a trendy hatred of capitalism, rather than a serious takedown of "the intellectual justifications for capitalism." Capitalism isn't anti-government libertarianism! Capitalism's whole ethos is based on rule of law — especially property law — and competition; anti-competitive monopolies with near-infinite money that can commit intellectual property theft without meaningful penalty aren't capitalist. I don't know what they are. Broken, certainly.

SantalBlush 6y ago
This just isn't true. No firm wants to enter a perfectly competitive market, because the expected long-run profit margin is zero. If a firm loves competition, they are free to increase competition in their market at any time by giving away their patents, copyrights, tech, etc. They don't do these things because they don't want competition. Just because a bunch of people claim to love competition doesn't make it true. Regarding the rule of law, some pretty disgusting things have been done for private investment (i.e. capitalism.) Banana republics come to mind. This "broken capitalism" claim is essentially a no-true-Scotsman fallacy. Real-world capitalism didn't play out like the perfect scenario in our heads, so blame it on "broken capitalism" or "crony capitalism". In truth, the system yields flawed results like everything else.
- reissbaker 6y ago
  > private investment (i.e. capitalism) I think this definition is the root of our disagreement. Private investment doesn't necessarily equate to capitalism. Even feudal lords spent their own money on their own property, but that doesn't mean they were operating in capitalist economies. It stretches the definition of capitalism to the point of basically irrelevance to use it to refer to literally anything done for personal profit. Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of capitalism: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, a price system, private property and the recognition of property rights, voluntary exchange and wage labor." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism Notably, "competitive markets" and "recognition of property rights" are exactly the issues the article brings up with Amazon: there is little competition, and Amazon has (thus far) been able to steal intellectual property with impunity. This article is not exactly a takedown of capitalism! Its complaint is that Amazon is violating central characteristics of capitalism, and that it would prefer Amazon to not violate them. I think your other point re: firms requiring profit motive and thus competition being impossible, is a little bit of a strawman. No one said perfect competition is something that markets have at a single point in time: just that monopolies without any option for competition are antithetical to a functional capitalist economy, and that capitalist markets are defined by the ability for firms to compete with each other. I think most economists would agree with me on that point.

friendlybus 6y ago

This is the exact problem I have with survelliance capitalism. What stops Microsoft, Google, ect from cornering every market? The last time I posted the question I was told those companies are looking for billion dollar investment opportunities and anything less isn't worth their time... and here we have Amazon cutting the nerdy kid's lunch money like a high school bully.

m0llusk 6y ago

Allow for private property and profit from trade and you have Capitalism. What this is about is the need for eternal vigilance.

xupybd 6y ago

Most dramatic changes in economic systems have resulted in disaster. Yes there are competing ideas and some have merit but it's important to realise that most of the systems we've had have not work as well as capitalism has. That is not to say we have the perfect system but it is not the disaster most of its opponents claim it is. As such we should be very careful to make sudden changes in the hope of a utopia, because getting it wrong has a very high price. A price that will cost lives.

arcticbull 6y ago
The reality is there is no purely capitalist society in the world. Each society is somewhere on the spectrum of socialist and capitalist, borrowing different quantities of ideas from both. For instance, America has a socialized postal system, socialized school system, socialized highway network, socialized fire departments, socialized police, and a socialized army. That doesn't make it socialism, but it doesn't make it 100% capitalist either. The question being asked here is more one of redistricting the divisions between the socialized and the private sectors of America.
- xupybd 6y ago
  This is very true. I don't think there are any examples of pure capitalism. I don't typically speak of pure capitalism when discussing the topic. Most of the time when people say they want to change away from capitalism they are actually talking about the current system. Often when they talk about ending capitalism they are actually talking about slightly increasing the mix of socialism. But there is a strong sentiment that our current system is inherently broken due to the level of capitalism it currently contains. I would argue that it's the best system we've ever had. By that I mean the mix of capitalism and socialism we have in the western world. All the varying mixes that exist have been wild successes compared to any historical systems. Also noting that changing too fast could be dangerous. Much of the language is used inaccurately, something I'm very guilty of, so it is hard to assess what change people are hoping to achieve. I've heard a scary amount of poorly thought out claims that we have a suitable replacement for our current mix of capitalism and socialism. I'm afraid that could lead to similar problems that the Soviets faced. I could be wrong so all I call for is caution.

mimikatz 6y ago

Amazon has been great for the consumer, Amazon's your margin is my opportunity mantra has lowered costs for tons of things and added a ton of value to people's lives. Sure this hurts other businesses, but that's business and eventually someone will come for Amazon. Do I as a consumer care if some drop shipper camera tripod company got eaten by Amazon basic? Hell no I don't.

Guest42 6y ago
Over time they have been systemically raising prices. I have noticed this and it has been mentioned on HN by ex-team members.
- gscho 6y ago
  Doesn't that create an opportunity for competition?
  - nightski 6y ago
    That is the entire point of the article, how Amazon uses it's power and resources to prevent competition.
arcticbull 6y ago
The argument posited here is that Amazon has reached "escape velocity" and that the sheer amount of market share and capital and control of infrastructure they have makes it unrealistic that someone will come for Amazon. That's not an argument I've heard made before, but I do find it persuasive. They literally control large portions of the internet with AWS, are moving into air freight, ground freight and I assume sea freight is next. They control the warehouses and they control the customer experience. They have third-party sellers and then once popular they steal their ideas and drive them out of business, because they can afford to. The bigger Amazon gets the harder it gets for someone to overtake them. And while you may not care yet, the natural outcome is that once they are the only game in town, they will simply raise prices. On every purchase you're winning the battle while losing the war.

kevindong 6y ago

> It can simply lift the innovations of others, and because it can undercut their prices, it can put them out of business. I agree that what amounts to dumping (pricing products below the cost of production) should be illegal. Nor should a company be forced out of business by the effort required to prove illegal act(s) by a competitor. But it's not like customers are getting completely screwed by a "competitor" duplicating a product (provided the pricing isn't malicious towards the original manufacturer): they're getting low prices for presumably reasonable quality goods.

bjornsing 6y ago

“But corporations all depend on the state and their workers to survive, and thus there are ways to seize it, democratize it, and keep it in public hands where it belongs.” Sounds like something the villain in an Ayn Rand novel would say...

fr11 6y ago

A lot of folks, including Nathan Robinson, seem to have a weird idea that proponents of capitalism think that it creates freedom. I think a more accurate way of thinking about it is that freedom creates capitalism. Black markets are a sign of the imperfect control of people, for example. But as for what we should do about Amazon, there's a response that is more principled than just breaking up Amazon because they're huge, and that acknowledges the massive failure in history of socialist control of things. (Sorry, socialists - governments don't run things well, with exceptions that are interesting and worth study, but not yet repeatable) We need to ban companies from both creating and distributing if they're at a certain size. This worked really well in a bunch of states for liquor laws, and would prevent the current idiocy with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, and Disney streaming channels that have their own content. Let Netflix and whoever else wants to compete on distribution, and don't let them create their own content unless they offer it for distribution to anyone else who wants to distribute it, for standard terms. Same with Amazon.