[naming_the_user]

That’s also misusing maths though because Amazon is a global company so really you should divide by 8 billion or at least a couple of billion.

As a Brit I think I’ve derived significantly more than $1000 in value through Amazon’s existence as compared with the status quo beforehand, and that’s exclusively counting the shopping part and not anything else they do. You can ask the question about whether it would have happened anyway in a communist paradise or whether Bezos gets the correct percentage of the reward but I mean, it actually is a very useful thing.

Similarly with Apple and Google and so on. These companies make things that people for the most part choose to use.

[jay_kyburz]

This whole argument also assumes there is something called "Americas National Wealth" and that its a zero sum game where there is x dollars to be distributed around to everybody.

Capitalism is not a zero sum game, and people can choose to turn effort into wealth or they can choose to sit around and do nothing.

[naming_the_user]

Yeah. I feel as if there's a (small, but growing?) group of people out there who just sort of see, ok, well, everyone isn't as well off as I think they should be, so those who are doing well must just be hoarding everything. Which really just doesn't make sense at all.

It's usually based on nothing other than pure vibes.

It could theoretically be true if e.g. some billionaire just decided to buy up a load of houses and leave them empty just to piss people off, but whilst theoretically they probably could do this (e.g. if I back of the envelope it, Elon actually has enough net worth to offer everyone in my hometown double the market value of their house and then just leave them to rot without even renting them out), no-one actually does.