371–380 of 660 posts
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Oh good! We should all aspire to have our work conditions resemble WWII B-17 crews.
I figgered someone would fixate on that. Well done!
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Because they don't realize it's a zero sum game until they're already playing it, and then their exit options are limited.
People quit Amazon all the time. Nobody is chained to their desk. Zero-sum games are called "theft", "fraud" and/or "wealth redistribution" schemes.
The trouble with restricting owning a company type wealth is what do you do with cases like Google or Facebook where some people build a better bit of software and because people like using it the company becomes valuable? Do you just ban successful ventures? Or confiscate them? When that's been tried under communism it hasn't worked very well.
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Because you can invest it in the riskless asset and have a dollar and some interest tomorrow.
Forgive my naïveté, but if it’s riskless, how are you getting interest from investing in it?
Productive wealth is a good thing. It's what made our current society possible. Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil. I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff Bezos over one which does not. Of course, more strongly than that, I prefer a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative externalities and returns that wealth to the public…
>> Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil How would hoarding of gold, in and of itself, be bad? Say someone goes out and works and makes money, and they take the money and buy gold coins and keep them in a safe, or fill up a swimming pool so they can dive into their hoard of gold like Scrooge McDuck. They are contributing to society, and to the extent they hoar…
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But why? If someone is creating millions of dollars worth of goods or services what moral justification is there for it to be confiscated, particularly at your arbitrary level?
The goal wouldn't be confiscation. It would be to incentivize behavior to avoid confiscation. Charge less rent to mine minerals. Spread equity in business more broadly.
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Bezos' AWS made cloud computing viable, leading to the last two decades of economic growth without per capita energy consumption (due to datacenter energy efficiency). Bezos' Amazon lowers the cost and availability of goods of all kinds drastically, enriching everyone (and especially the poorer among us). The State makes bombs and drops bombs, not Bezos. Bezos deploys capital in ways which have proved to fill market…
AWS would not be possible without the contribution of hundreds of thousands of people and projects from the inception of the internet. It really is just a software on some redundant servers running open source software... it's not that incredible.
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> If they didn't think so, they'd still be choosing to shop at Sears and Kmart Let's be clear: Amazon has been responsible for the shutting down of so many in-person businesses that entire product categories are can only be purchased on Amazon. The choice is a false one.
Come on. You make it sound as if Amazon started a campaign to directly shut these in-person businesses down. The reality however is more mundane and exactly what parent comment mentioned: people voted with their feet and dollars, the in-person businesses that did shut down could not adapt and we are all the better for it.
1) maximum revenue per employee at privately held companies, eg. $1m
2) maximum ownership of a company by a single person or entity of, say, 5%
What this means is that when you hit a good stride with a business and solve the entrepreneurial problem, you have to go public and sell your stake in it.
Everyone gets a rewarding pay day, but there is greater accountability and earlier on and more even distribution of the gains.
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At what point was labor communally owning industry in the Soviet Union or DPRK? Did Stalin or Kim ever ask a laborer for their opinion on how a factory should be run? Or give them a penny of the work they were doing? The Soviet block and DPRK was exactly as close to socialism as it was to democracy: 100% in their propaganda, 0% in reality. Or would you say democracy doesn't work because the Democratic People's Republ…
Exactly this This concept that there is a well defined polar opposite to western “freedom” capitalism is so far from reality in literally any economic history understanding Not only that but the USSR was in no sense Marxist Communist. It was well known that the Lenin-Trotskyist Bolshevism was the core, specifically the command economy part. That regime coopted the philosophy of Marxism well after his death. That’s wh…