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Comment by oconnor663 | Hacker News Reader

Taxes aren't as simple as "take from A, give to B." People respond to incentives, and greedy evil megacorps do too.

Also, categories are complicated. One reason Amazon is the target of discussion here, and not Google for example, is that Amazon operates warehouses, and warehouses hire low wage employees. If Google was running as many warehouses as Amazon, would they pay better? Maybe they would, but how much better? If Google's low wage workers are in factories in East Asia run by third parties we've never heard of, instead of actual employees on their payroll in the US, is that better?

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No society has collapsed due to their sociopaths feeling un-incentivized, but they have when there are huge disparities in income that cause suffering. So I can’t see how dividing the revenue of companies up so that you don’t cause your entire society to collapse and no one has anything should be rocket science is my point. Obviously their leaders should have but they didn’t.

> No society has collapsed due to their sociopaths feeling un-incentivized

I don't want to sound like my side of the argument is "deregulate Amazon or else society will collapse." Especially when the original topic was a single specific bill and not really an entire political worldview. But making those sorts of arguments is certainly a lot of fun so :)

I think the last two hundred years of history and politics should leave us exceptionally worried about how to incentivize people in the extremes. Stable political systems that aren't some kind of hereditary monarchy are relatively rare, not that hereditary monarchies are fantastic places to live either. Of the stable systems we have, a disproportionate number of them seem to be some offshoot of English law. I didn't study history, so any generalizations I want to make after that point are kind of worthless, but my totally biased take on it is that the whole "the poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown" part of the system is a really important part for stability. (Whether that take even ends up having anything to do with the BEZOS Bill is anyone's guess; maybe it doesn't.)

Soviet union pretty much did.

Comparing Google's workforce to Amazon's is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The labor required at each is completely different.

Instead, compare Walmart to Costco: similar operations, same skills required of their workforce. Yet Walmart, which makes much more money than Costco, pays its employees wages that require many of them to rely on government assistance. And Costco provides not only living wages, it also provides benefits even to part-time employees. And it does it with much less money. Why should we be subsidizing Walmart's workforce, when we don't have to do the same for Costco's?

They are comparable at the level of "retail" and maybe even "big box retail", but that is about it. The 10 Walmarts within the same distance of me as the 1 CostCo sort of obviously aren't competing with CostCo.

Still totally reasonable to look at what structural changes could be made to shift costs towards Walmart (away from taxpayers), but the comparison to CostCo isn't really instructive.

And it could just be that Walmart shouldn't be able to run so many stores. But that's going to change the availability of good for many people.

> Comparing Google's workforce to Amazon's is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

I agree, and I think the original headline is making precisely that apples to oranges comparison. If you call out certain companies for paying low wages, there has to be some accounting for how much of that is because of the business they're in ("not their fault") vs how much is because of their CEO's bonus or whatever ("their fault").

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