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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

^ Precisely.

To add to your point: In order for something to be unequal, it had to be obtained via unethical means. This is because the sum of morality of small transactions is transitive. Breaking it down in simple terms: If you voluntarily give your free-earned money to Jeff Bezos, it's an ethical transaction. If millions of people do it, they're all ethical transactions. If Jeff Bezos becomes a go-zillionaire, it's moral and ethical.

Meaning: If you don't want billionaires in this world, you're free to stop giving them your money at any time.

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>If you voluntarily give your free-earned money to Jeff Bezos, it's an ethical transaction.

There has been some work done in economics and distributive justice which casts doubts on whether any and all voluntary transactions count as 'ethical', and philosophers get a look-in here too; see economist Roberto Veneziani or Sen's work.

>If you don't want billionaires in this world, you're free to stop giving them your money at any time.

Economists have also spent a lot of time trying to calculate the rationality of voting vis-a-vis the expected return, and the results don't look good. The inconvenience caused by voting (and I think we could apply this to not buying from Amazon or other corporations owned by billionaires) outweighs the miniscule or 'negligible' (as the economists say in the case of voting) benefit of the owner making less money.

There's a lot of research on the effectiveness and power of boycotts. It's as much an empricical argument as it is a logical one.

What if, after decades of undercutting the competition, you live in a place where your choices are ordering from Amazon or shopping at Walmart? How do I feed myself without giving money to billionaires?

Moreover, just because one side of a transaction is voluntary doesn’t mean that the entire business is ethical. Plenty of people voluntarily gave their money for cotton harvested by slaves. Does that mean slavery is ethical?

> This is because the sum of morality of small transactions is transitive.

You take this as fact, but I’m not sure I agree. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

There are literally zero laws against setting up a competitor to Amazon or Walmart

Who said the barrier to doing that was the law?

You're correct: The barrier to entry involves vision, hard work, education, and willingness to do what other people are simply unmotivated or too lazy to do.

The most important barriers to competing with the named companies would be network effects and economies of scale, not motivation and a good attitude.

> If you voluntarily give your free-earned money to Jeff Bezos, it's an ethical transaction. If millions of people do it, they're all ethical transactions. If Jeff Bezos becomes a go-zillionaire, it's moral and ethical.

Every transaction can be reversed with violence, a much more elegant form of chargeback

Also stop it. Each and every time the same thing. Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon and basically every company in the history of mankind shows that once an organization becomes large enough it doesn't really matter who is at the figurative helm.

Countries could expropriate billionaires and nothing would really change, they don't do for 2 reasons:

1) because a certain mass of people are so deluded that they think that one day they'll become one, so they panic because the 0.0000000001% of chances they had becomes 0%.

2) Other countries would start a race to the bottom so if the US decides to expropriate then Canada could go come here we only take 80%!, Switzerland could say 50%! Bahamas could then scream 10% all the way down.

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