| HN Mirror

I'm not anti-Amazon or anything, but I do think that characterization is inaccurate, and the article is raising legitimate concerns. It's not the way these problems work.

No, no one is forced to buy from these companies, but that's not how the coercion works. How it works is that there is a coercion in making an offer too good to refuse, where the costs to others of that offer are hidden in some way or another. Then because those other people are getting hurt, they have less, which forces others to take a cut to stay viable, which hurts them, and so forth and so on.

It's a kind of runaway process, and how monopolies often come to be. They don't come and threaten you if you don't use their services, they make an offer that is too good to be true, because it is, except that the costs of that fraud are borne in production, not the product, or in the long-term.

The fraud comes in the form of avoiding financial obligations by hiding them. It's how a lot of these financial inequities develop: Corporation X hides the costs, especially where those costs are long-term, fuzzy, or loosely monitored (ecologically, in public health, in welfare), and then profits by passing those costs on to society more broadly. It's like someone saying they can build a house for you cheaply, then hiding all the short-cuts they use to do so, and then disappearing when you're left to foot the bill 10 years later for their irresponsibility and lies.

With the financial crisis underpinning the Great Recession, it happened by firms passing on the risk costs to the public through bailouts. Various manufacturing and energy-sector companies get out of the real ecological costs of their activities by plausible deniability in lawsuits, etc.

Here, Amazon is hiding the costs of that free shipping, etc. by not providing their workers fair conditions and by passing those costs on to the public. So their employees get injured every day, and they shouldn't pay that?

The reason people become irate when a certain level of financial success is reached is because so often, the greater the inequity, the higher the likelihood that inequity was obtained through unfair means. It's not guaranteed, but the probability increases rapidly, and society is full of these extreme forms of inequity. Corruption isn't driven toward impoverishment, and human attributes are usually bell-shaped, not grotesquely skewed.

These companies become so bloated and their monopolies so extreme that often it is understandable that government give into their demands. So we end up with companies "too big to fail"--really, isn't that a euphemism for "too big to stand up to"?--and rationalizing the bullying and unfairness by telling ourselves these companies are really making a better place, as if it's only these companies, no one else, that no one else would have done these things if they could compete fairly, that we're buying from this company in particular because we preferred that company, and not because the choice was really to buy or go without, and that it's justified that the profits should be unevenly distributed throughout the company.

Isn't, after all, Amazon's success due to Bezos? Isn't he the one doing all the work?