[mrwww]

People in the USA somehow think that having a huge amount of loosers in society will turn out ok.

Enjoy your ever growing prison population, crime, unemployment and inequality.

But hey! You can become the next Bezos! Isn't that grand? Freedom baby!

[imgabe]

You don't help losers by knocking down the winners. Cutting off Usain Bolt's legs isn't going to make you run any faster.

[mdorazio]

1) Framing it as "winners" and "losers" is entirely the problem. It's a pretty poor mindset when you equate getting rich with "winning" while ignoring everything else, including factors that lead to people getting rich in the first place.

2) A footrace (and sports in general) is a really poor metaphor for economics & tax policy. A better metaphor is pruning trees in a forest so that smaller ones actually get enough light to grow instead of withering away on the floor.

[imgabe]

The forest metaphor implies that people with wealth get it by taking it away from someone else. That isn't the case. Bezos' wealth, for example, comes from the fact that he owns ~13% of Amazon, the company he founded. He didn't steal those shares from someone else. They were created out of nothing when he started the company. They only became valuable because it turned out that the company did things that many people found very useful.

You aren't going to "prune away" shares from Bezos and have more wealth magically filter onto the masses from the heavens. Wealth doesn't stream in from some outside source and some greedy people just grab more of it than others. People make it themselves. Making it harder for people to do so is going to result in less wealth, not more.

[failuser]

It comes from killing the offline retail (this is technological shift, so it might not be a good idea to stop it) and being both a marketplace and a player in that marketplace. Coupling with a highly profitable AWS so they can undercut the remains of competition does not help. Decline of American retail produced orders of magnitude more “losers” than switch from coal to natural gas which grabbed so much attention.

[mdorazio]

You realize that Amazon stole market share from all kinds of other retailers, right?

Also, you're completely misinterpreting the metaphor to suit your own goals. Wealth redistribution demonstrably benefits society as a whole when said society has as many fundamental issues as the US does when it comes to basic standard of living (healthcare, education, living wage, etc.). You're making the exact same argument as people who think income tax shouldn't exist because taking some portion of income away from high earners magically makes them want to earn less. This is, of course, also demonstrably false and completely irrational.

[imgabe]

It stole it? The market share was the legal property of those retailers? How? Where can I purchase some market share?

A company like Sears was well positioned to compete with and crush a fledgling Amazon if they had had the foresight and wherewithal to do it. They didn't, so they lumbered on doing the same thing they always did as the world changed around them and they eventually became irrelevant.

Other companies like Wal-Mart and Best Buy adapted and have remained competitive. It has nothing to do with sneaky Amazon burgling market share that is somehow the rightful property of someone else. That's not how that works. Amazon won the market share by doing a better job of serving the market.

[lenkite]

Are you truly defending Amazon, one of the leading stars of anti-competitive practices - in-fact the textbook definition ? I am utterly flabbergasted and also a bit scared that someone on HN thinks that what they do just fine and dandy.

Where to start ? Shall we talk about the way they changed their algorithm to put their products first after claiming with a straight face they were only a neutral market place ? This while exercising 40% (and rising) of all e-commerce in the US ? https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-changed-search-algorithm...

The company that blocks sellers from using Fedex ? That flexes its control - illegally - on logistics ?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-blocks-sellers-from-usin...

This is just the tip of the ice-berg. We can go talk about the corruption behind Amazon's Choice program, their environment sustainability "joke", the Amazon "real worker ambassadors' who are "paid to praise" on social media and claim "great working conditions" while shooting down genuine grievances. Corporate Communism at its finest - praise the Party of Bezos - makes the CCP look like an amateur.

You can vote out Trump. You can't lift a finger against the march of Bezos and Amazon.

They are a horror company who are a clear and present danger to both US capitalism and democracy.

Several nations and states have now opened anti-trust investigations against Amazon. Lets pray something comes out of it or the world will be kneeling to Bezos before too long.

https://www.medianama.com/2020/08/223-amazon-antitrust-canad... https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/mt/ip_19_... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-03/amazon-s-...

[ghostwriter]

> A footrace (and sports in general) is a really poor metaphor for economics & tax policy. A better metaphor is pruning trees in a forest so that smaller ones actually get enough light to grow instead of withering away on the floor.

By that standard, a legit analogy in that case would still be basketball. Let's cut legs a bit to everyone taller 6' so that shorter ones actually get enough opportunity to score, instead of them abandoning this amazing sport and spending their days at office in a hope to get wealthy by their economic skills one day.

[mdorazio]

And there you go still using sports metaphors. Life is not a competition. Treating it like it is generally leads to bad outcomes for both individuals and societies.

[Akababa]

You're the one who brought up the forest metaphor, where plants compete for light.

[mrwww]

That's the thing, a bit of tax won't knock anyone down. Using that money to provide more equal access to opportunity creates more winners.

Running doesn't require much money, so a lot of people can do it and therefore you can get someone as insanely good as Bolt. If running required startup capital of $100k, would we have Bolt?

Healthcare, education and a safe environment does require a lot of money in the USA. Specifically, it requires you to be born in a family that has it already. If not, you are born with your legs cut off, but if you work really really really hard, you can be one of the lucky few who make it out, and compete with those born with two legs. It's just an extremely uneven playingfield.

[pessimizer]

That's exactly why it's not a good metaphor. The wealthy aren't especially talented, and redistributing their wealth does make everyone else faster.