Amazon Must Be Stopped
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
In all seriousness though why don't any of these articles ever address the underlying issue of why this stuff happens. If you have a certain kind of economic system then some things are inevitable. It is the exact analog of traffic on highways. It is just an emergent property of the system.
It seems to me that your statement is in error.
Corporations are amoral, and so conform to local laws only because it is economically efficient to do so, not out of ideological adherence to principles of justice.
Great, so don't write "above the law". Hyperbole is annoying and distracts from real, important discussions about these kinds of things.
Consideration of the fact that multi-national corporations transcend national law-makers is part of "real, important discussion about these kinds of things", as you put it.
When you write things that are false, it does not help a conversation go anywhere useful.
The exemplary area in which corporations are effectively above the law is tax arrangements, where multi-national corporations can take advantage of their multi-national status to pay lower amounts of corporation tax than companies in all the national jurisdictions in which they operate.
The corporations are effectively above the law because they are legally paying lower taxes than those other companies. That is, they get preferential treatment by satisfying the letter of the law, but not the intent, that being evidenced by current international efforts to close these loopholes. Such issues can only be addressed by multi-national or even global agreements, as Omniusaspirer said.
I am glad that we have cleared up the difference between being literally and effectively above the law, but I doubt we'll make any progress towards agreement about what being effectively above the law might mean. As we have already circumvented the HN efforts to avoid debates that aren't going anywhere several times, I guess I'll leave it at that. Have a nice day!
edit: Just to be clear, my above definition would also extend to arbitrary numbers of joint jurisdictions. So if corporation X, doing business in jurisdictions A, B, and C, can engage in behaviours within jurisdiction A that are unavailable to corporation Y, which only does business in jurisdictions A and B, then X would be effectively above the law with respect to Y. This definition seems very natural and clear to me: one group is allowed to do things another group isn't by some special status, ergo, they are effectively above the law.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ba95cff0-4fcd-11e4-a0a4-00144...
Also, in the United States, Amazon has generally not fared well when it came to avoiding collecting local taxes when local authorities decided to put their feet down:
No one can stop them (Google)? Of course they can. It's up to countries to change their tax laws if they think they are not fit for the job.
Two companies doing the same thing brings the benefits of competition, which forces down prices, promotes innovation, and actually increases efficiency as they have to be better than their rival. In addition, no reason why both of them cannot be large enough to benefit from economies of scale (think Samsung vs Apple for smartphones).
The latter is particularly surprising, unless you think 50% of America's budget going on weaponry to fight threats that don't exist is a productive use of capital
That is flatly not true. Where do you get your numbers?
Now you're getting it! Yes, that is exactly what we need to be doing.
This is what happens when wealth accumulates at the top of the pyramid. The video is talking about people, but those people are those behind the companies you mentioned (including Google, Facebook, hedge funds and oil companies). The problem with capitalism in my opinion, is that it's not truly capitalism: i.e. it's not the free competition system they claim it to be, but a system which is "more free" for some.
9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing FactFurthermore, 'true' captalism with a truly free market is quite unrealistic, since it would require all participants to be effectively omniscient and infinitely rational (and even then you would have to compare it to 'true' communism, where no one is ever selfish or lazy)
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequalit... http://danariely.com/2010/09/30/wealth-inequality/ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/03/334156/top-five-... http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/19/news/economy/ceo-pay/index.h...
How reliable these sources are, I'm not sure. If the information is wrong, I wouldn't blame it on Upworthy, it's a distribution channel after all.
I'm saying we shouldn't be supporting the likes of Upworthy under any circumstances.
We normally call that progress. That "trail of destruction" is leaving money in the hands of millions of people who used to be captive to the local brick and mortar retailers.
That would not be different from keeping a job that is not needed anymore alive just for the sake of the job.
If you feel bad about Amazon, donate 10% of what you buy at Amazon to a "hole digger foundation" which pays people who lost their jobs because of Amazon to dig holes.
But there are plenty of indications that's not true, and that minimally higher prices spread across millions of customers that in turn support millions more local jobs may be better for society overall.
Arguing that a job is "not needed anymore" in this case is like arguing "keeping your own field that is not needed anymore" is stupid just because there's some new common grazing ground opened up.
Except higher sticker prices on commodity goods are regressive. If people are worried about the cost of living, raising the cost of essentials is absolutely worse, all things being equal. I would like to see the math behind the way to raise the cost of toilet paper while simultaneously making it universally easier to buy toilet paper.
There's a case to be made that raising prices (or taxes) on non-essentials is a good idea, but pricing rules inevitably become susceptible to lobbying and discourage innovation (why invent a yacht that costs half as much to manufacture?). Introducing "sin" taxes (cigarettes, oil, carbon emissions, corn syrup) might be a good idea if there are affordable alternatives, but you're also introducing morals into your economic system, which has its own problems.
If the concern is that it's hard to earn enough money to live, why not address that problem directly through minimum incomes, earned income tax credits, and the like? I don't see why we have to interfere with pricing to achieve those ends.
I doubt that's actually true. The problem is job losses are easy to attribute to Amazon's influence, whereas job creation is not. But that doesn't make it any less real.
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It's kinda sad to see them go, but that's OK. We no longer see as many of the beautiful locomotives as we used to, even though they where excellently engineered with tremendous history. But that's OK, since they've been replaced by other means of transportation/shipping.
Things change, sometimes that sucks. We all move on and try to make a more awesome world in other ways.
The Luddites were upset because of job loss to automated looms, but in the end everyone was better off.
I particularly liked the part where threatening Hachette's business is threatening democracy. What about shitty journalism? Seems like a much bigger threat to me.
Don't you think the article raises a number of valid points? While Hachette is little better than Amazon, having an effective monopoly on such a large market is definitely not healthy. The fact that they are exploiting their workers doesn't help.
"Meanwhile, both companies have studiously avoided unionization and treat their workers miserably. In one famous incident, Amazon hired paramedics to revive heat-sick employees at a Pennsylvania warehouse rather than buy an air-conditioning unit."
The workers are required to go through security screening at the end of their shifts, to make sure they aren't stealing from Amazon. There are only two check stations for the entire warehouse they work in, and it often takes workers 25 minutes to get through the line and leave.
They are required to clock out BEFORE they get in line, so that's 25 unpaid minutes.
The workers won in the 9th Circuit, and that spawned several class action suits seeking compensation for about 100000 workers who are subject to post-shift security screenings. CVS Pharmacy and Apple are also facing such suits.
The company is arguing that time waiting in line for a security check is similar to commuting time, which companies do not have to pay for. That law is that employers have to pay for things that are "integral and indispensable part of the principal activities" of the job. Several Justices seemed skeptical that this covered security screenings on exit--it's not a principal activity of the job.
The lawyer for the employees argued that an employee is hired to do what he's told to do, and so should be paid for things that the employer requires him to do.
Some Justices did seem receptive to the worker's case. Justice Kagan noted that what makes Amazon special is that they have a better inventory control system than their competitors, and it is very important for them to know where everything is. Merchandise security is a principle activity of Amazon's operations, and so the security checks would be a principle activity of the job.
The Obama administration is siding with Amazon.
Long commute times end up being a regressive drain on the time of employees, and employers bear no responsibility to alleviate the problem though they are complicit in its creation.
None of them want to. That's not an accident. It's because Amazon isn't giving them an opening by abusing either customers or suppliers. Publishers can claim otherwise, but they're not putting their money where their mouths are. They're not walking away from Amazon, nor can they even demonstrate that they're getting clearly better terms from anyone else.
The problem arises when a company abuses its monopoly position or, far more commonly, when an oligopoly engages in implicit collusion. As a general rule, such situations result in the suppression of competition, which leads to higher prices and a poorer product/service for the consumer.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/02/04/fixing-too-...
Economies of scale are good but I think we're entering a world where the negatives are growing too rapidly. If the economy consisted of more small companies, there would be more competition, more employment, and more innovation. And, per Stallman, it can all be rigged with the tax code.
There are plenty of examples of state regulation in the greater interest, pharmaceuticals being an obvious example, road safety another. It is not in the greater interest of society to allow businesses to trample over each other or to do as they wish.
Amazon is acting to the detriment of a large number of industries and ultimately to people in general by stifling competition and by being monopolistic and abusive.
> Oh wait... it was tried 90 years ago and it didn't work out.
Whether the current system is working is up for debate.
I don't have a problem with such "monopolies", because they aren't real monopolies. As long as the market is still open to new participants, then it's not really an issue. For example, if a monopolist starts raising prices and hoarding supplies in order to artificially elevate prices, then new participants can enter the market and make money off the delta between the new prices and the old prices that made sense to the market.
Amazon's prices trend downward, constantly. Amazon is also itself a market facilitator, agnostic to which products sell, so long as they sell. High quality and low prices race to the top of customer ratings. Third parties sell on Amazon as well, providing a global market for local brick and mortar shops. Further, Amazon is by far not the only website selling things on the internet. The internet is pretty great at lowering barriers to entry.
There's tons more I could say on that subject but let me skip ahead to what I think the problem is in the US today in regards to worker wages. I don't think it's a problem of some inherent evil in the free market. Rather I think it's a symptom of excess regulation and taxation (and other costs) and a poor educational system, among other factors. The cost and complexity of living these days is much higher than it used to be. There are so many bills, so many taxes, and so on. The bar for a "reasonable" living is much higher these days, and much harder to obtain, with more pressures from every direction on savings and discretionary income. More so, the increasing costs combined with increasing necessity of higher education has put a lot of young workers in a financial pinch, as did the latest housing crisis. People aren't getting the skills they need to build strong careers and to have greater negotiating power. People are being discouraged away from trade schools and funneled into liberal arts colleges. People are being saddled with huge debts in exchange for skills that don't go far in the marketplace, they're discouraged or prevented from saving, they're discouraged from creating their own work (unless they're in software, which is the rare exception) by starting their own companies. All of those things were on the table for previous generations. Without them we've ended up with a generation of workers who are desperate to find and keep a job, who must rely on working for a big corporation because they need that surety of a paycheck to pay their high costs of living and their debts. We like to imagine that all these regulations and taxes have no negative consequences because they were created with the best of intentions, though that's not the case.
But every element there is amenable to improvement, without resorting to marxist wealth redistribtion. I would posit that the consolidation of wealth we have been seeing is not the cause of the problem but rather the symptom of a larger underlying problem.
If Amazon really did undercut Diapers.com by selling at a loss, that sounds like a perfectly good case for existing antitrust laws, not something that requires executive action. For the rest, I'm happy to reap the benefits of what Amazon gives us.
I think that our 20th century paradigms have failed to understand and shape these institutions, each with their own trappings. Labour unionism, which was deeply rooted in man labour cultures and many countries' political systems was amazingly corrupt. They became their own institutions layering their own dynamics and interests into the already impossible mesh. The results were far from unanimously positive.
Liberal-capitalism nurtured the concept of non natural person, corporate entities. The cultural relationship between individual, employers, consumers and investors and the institutions is grafted onto the idea that the institution is a legal person. At this point, companies are far more than risk sharing and limiting devices. They are institutions of the same gravity as churches, bureaucracies, aristocracies and such. They are entrenched. I don't mean that in a strictly accusatory sense. They are just part of the web of culture, laws, economies and everything else.
First of all, we all need to have the humility to understand how little we know about how these things work. We are designed to operate within social institutions, not to build and destroy them each generation. No one built feudalism or poleis. No one really designed the international system of nation states. No one created Danish national identity. These things just evolved. Those are the kinds of things we're dealing with.
I don't know what is the right way of dealing with Amazon, Google or Walmart as a (global) society. I think I would be more comfortable if the times brought around a period of miniaturization, where these mega institutions gave way to hundreds or thousands of smaller ones.
For Amazon, what's keeping them huge is (a) dispatch & postal delivery is surprisingly hard. (b) The chain between design, manufacture, marketing and delivery is surprisingly cumbersome. Amazon is a company that does what a market would do in a world fewer impediments.
Maybe the next few decades will make global delivery trivial. This would enable products to come directly from suppliers and simplify the chain. Software developers once had to sell software through software stores. The modern incarnations of software store is a relatively thinner layer. Producers are closer to consumers and the intermediaries are really just market makers.
PS: Price controls have a bad track record dating back to Roman times.
I think it is disingenuous to point out the size of institution versus the capability of the mind to analyze and distill what goes on. The law is supposed to be blind. That means to me, the law should be sound on its own ground, without being dependent on rhetorical arguments that paint possibly sneaky incentives over as abstract 'biological cultural sociological imperatives'.
I think for the nature of this argument, understanding the broad picture is complicated and takes time, caution, and care, neither of which can be established through armchair analysis. Implementation is different than theory.
We know some things. We control some things. We can't engineer a human personality. Same goes for human culture. We can't decide to model Iraqi culture on Italian culture. We can copy some institutions, the copying is indirect. The cards will fall where they may, and the honest truth is that we don't know how it works.
Before the fact we have a bunch of angry amadons screaming that xyz will happen if we do xyz. After the fact we have the amadons arguing about what really happened. No knowledge is gained.
This means all those side thoughts you think you ignore. When you choose to listen to analysis over intuition, but you might not consider the effect of ignoring intuition in favor of analysis, or you may even deny the existence of intuition because analysis exists. Intuition can be uniform across a population and can direct the population. I am not trying to be Freudian here, unconscious is just a word for 'thoughts you keep to yourself'.
It's all the thoughts and actions that we take that we don't tell one another about, things we may not even be aware that we are doing (like independent thinking, thinking about what other people are thinking), that can create direction within a social system.
I am not saying "engineer a human personality". I am saying "engineer yourself", and consider what that means across a collection of people when they are all engineering themselves, and happen to mutually, mentally agree on some things, but do not express this directly to one another.
I think it's important to make a distinction between clever emergent processes that people are involved in but aren't in control of and those that people made and are in control in. The distinction is vague, and arguable.
I'm generally pretty down on systems (politics and economics are really burdened by these) which overreach by overstating our understanding of things. Just because a theory is the best we've got, doesn't mean it's good enough to be made operational. When people start getting grandiose with their social and political theories I think of 18th century surgery.
"We have much studied and much perfected the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. Truly speaking it is not the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin.
"Only in right understanding on the part of all classes of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them & making them happy, and by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour can this evil be met." -John Ruskin
What industry does Amazon have monopolized anyway? 41% on new books? cool. their cheaper prices on books benefit all of americans more than it hurts the handful of publishers. Fact is monopolies are defined by if they set higher prices than would-be in a perfect competition industry. As long as prices are low -- it signals they have competition-- so don't come at me talking about how big of a monopoly they are.
The problem is really not about monopoly, but whether the beneficiaries of these business contain a larger population.
The book industry needs to change, I haven't come up against the dark side of Amazon's influence. I did watch for years when Apple and the publishers clearly broke the law and cheered when they got caught as I had seen prices for books I bought just sky rocket.
As for how their employees are treated or their "perceived" treatment, local employment laws cover those. Avoiding unionization is not a crime and should not be held against anyone. Much of retail outside of grocery is not unionized. When the same unions hire no benefit, no union, temps to protest tell me again how they are the good guys?
It can't be that inefficient, since publishers are still in business and Amazon wants more of their money.
If you want to target monopolies in this modern age, go after companies like Comcast that arise out of state induced monoploy as a matter of necessity but go unregulated beyond that. The only thing Amazon is guilty of is decreasing costs of living for millions. It is no more at fault for liss of jobs in bygone industries as Ford was for layoffs in the horse and buggy industry.
The authors's argument essentially amounts to the Corporations Being All Corporationy.
It is strange picking on Amazon, as the barrier for entry into the online shopping industry is relatively low, and their monopoly is far less stable and enduring than what Microsoft and Google achieved.
I was under the impression that online retail is extremely capital-intensive. Especially in the initial years, where companies use capital to undercut competitors.
Hatchette and any other publisher could stop selling their books to Amazon tomorrow. You could still buy them in paper from loads of physical stores, and you could still buy their ebooks from dozens of places, including little-known and difficult-to-find resellers like Apple and Google. But if they lost, say, 40% of sales, would we call Amazon a monopoly?
I don't know. My inclination is to be pretty conservative in applying heavy-handed regulatory remedies. That's a big hammer, and it's one I'd rather not use on a whim, and right now, I think it's still far too easy to compete with Amazon on its core business for this to be an option I'm ready for. But I'm not sure how hard it would be to convince me otherwise in the future.