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No. The problem here isn't that Musk and Bezos are the only people you can buy stuff from, it's that in order to pay the real resource price of all that governm
by makomk 5y ago
No. The problem here isn't that Musk and Bezos are the only people you can buy stuff from, it's that in order to pay the real resource price of all that government spending using their factories and warehouses those factories and warehouses must not exist at all. They can't simply become Walmart warehouses or Toyota or GM factories, they have to go away altogether - along with whatever they're supplying. Which means a lot less clean electric cars and a lot less capacity to buy stuff online.
(The secondary problem is that the big multi-billionaire winners often get that way by figuring out how to satisfy the same consumer demand with less real resources. Which means that if you get rid of those companies, guess what? Everyone is worse off because the overall size of the pie has shrunk, and there's no clever redistribution of slice sizes that'll fix it. For example, without Tesla we'd have to burn more non-renewable oil and use more of our CO2 budget to fill the same transportation demand.)
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoBezos is practically a personal market black hole. His warehouse and delivery workers would certainly not be worse off if he was forced to pay them a decent wage. His customers would not be worse off if he was forced to operate an ethical search system on Amazon and remove scams. If Amazon hadn't been invented, how long do you think it would have taken someone - probably a HN reader - to build a multisite search aggregator and bargain hunter? Apple and Google's customers would not be worse off if all scams were removed from their respective app stores. Web users would not be worse off if Google search and ad tech didn't distort search rankings by promoting clickbait at the expense of high quality content. YouTube's small content creators would not be worse off if the copyright strike system wasn't biased towards big corporate at the expense of small creators. The electric car market would have happened without Musk. It may or may not have happened as well - that's up for debate - but it's clearly not going to not happen. And the fact that we have a small but growing electric car market in 2021 instead of 2001 - when it was really needed - is entirely due to the political distortions caused by the billions generated in Big Fossil profits. I have no problem with smart talented and driven individuals making money by solving real problems. But I do have a problem with attempts to deify and canonise the individuals who are most prominent just because they become very rich. We need more accurate accounting systems that select for benefit without ignoring social, political, and environmental costs. Otherwise we're just rewarding people for being high-functioning narcissists instead of selecting people who can get shit done cheaply and efficiently without ignoring the social and other externalities that are currently ignored.