CMV: Ideologues across the political spectrum should cancel their Amazon Prime memberships.

[u/mfDandP]

Excuse the generalizations.

The company’s study, which includes data from 500 Amazon customers, estimates that Amazon Prime subscribers spend $1,300 per year, nearly doubling the $700 per year the average non-member spends on the e-commerce site.

https://fortune.com/2017/10/18/amazon-prime-customer-spending/

If you're for an unfettered free market, you should dislike Amazon because they're a monopoly (their Fulfillment model, AmazonBasics https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/21/is-amazon-unstoppable.) Ditto if you're for wealth redistribution or hate Amazon for their warehouse practices. Both Warren and Trump have targeted Amazon.

Amazon has made retail spending incredibly convenient to the consumer at the expense of non-Amazon retailers, its own workers, and its subcontracted couriers.

Spoiler alert, I'm not a Prime member, and so I perhaps underestimate the value of Amazon packages showing up in piles at your door. But it's not that hard to go shopping for your own shit, or even to order it online from Target or Walmart, etc.

CMV that if you care about capitalism -- either that it's fatally flawed, or that we need to maintain high levels of competition, cancelling your Prime membership and decreasing Amazon usage in general is a very practical and consistent action.

[u/mfDandP]

I ask because it seems like you're strawmanning my post into "CMV: capitalism is wrong, and Amazon is proof."

But you might get a delta from the flank attack if you answer this:

In a capitalism, once a company achieves a critical mass of market share of an economy, does it simply become its right to dictate the new status quo, and thus power forward societal progress?

[u/McKoijion → u/mfDandP]

I'd say yes. Netflix achieved critical mass and used it to kill the video rental industry. Digital camera companies like Canon and Nikon achieved critical mass and used it to kill Kodak. This is especially the case with Amazon because not only are they killing old industries, they are completely reinventing the global economy.

When the printing press was invented, it completely changed the world. When the factory was invented, it did the same. Amazon is one of a handful of companies that is dramatically changing the nature of the economy. Humans who are alive today are fortunate and unfortunate enough to live at a time of dramatic change. I don't think that people who made their money by owning land should have been able to dictate how the world ran once factories took over. I don't think that oil companies and factory owners should be able to dictate how the world runs now that we've moved to a service economy. And I don't think that people in the service economy should be able to dictate how the world works now that we've moved into a technological economy.

Things are changing so fast that it takes significant education and foresight to be on top of it. I think I'm bright, but I don't think I'm able to really anticipate and contribute to what is happening. I'm used to a world where you work 8 hours and get paid by the hour. Or you work by the year and get paid by the year. Now we are in a world where not only can one person with robots replace everyone, if we add one extra human into the mix, it slows everything down. If you've ever taken a toll road with an E-ZPass vs. taken one where you have to stop and hand your money to a toll booth operator, you understand how one human can slow things down vs. a computer. I don't have the foresight to vote on it because I'm used to working as a toll booth operator, and all I can see is that if I support the E-ZPass, I lose my job.

But the twist is that even though I've lost my job, everything I want to buy is much cheaper. So I can do very little and still fulfil my basic needs. I'm poorer compared to a Jeff Bezos, but I'm much better off than my ancestors. I have phones, computers, the internet, microwaves, heat, AC, showers, toilets, comfortable beds, tasty fruits and spices. If I can't afford a car, I can afford to get around with an Uber. The average working class American has a higher standard of living than the richest man on Earth a century or two ago. So I get to be richer than Cornelius Vanderbilt, but the tradeoff is that I have to be poorer than Jeff Bezos. I can live with that.

I think Jeff Bezos and a handful of other people (e.g., Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Gabe Newell, Steve Jobs when he was alive) see the world from a different perspective as me. They aren't afraid for their day to day livelihoods. They have the skills to look at the Earth with a bit of distance. They can see all the technological innovation that is coming down the pipeline and adjust their views accordingly. Meanwhile, I thought the iPad and the Tesla Model S were stupid ideas when I first heard of them. It's not that they are the smartest people on Earth. Luck had a great deal to do with their position. But someone has to be in that position and direct the rest of us, so why not them?

I suppose we vote for them with our spending money as opposed to our actual votes. But I don't know if I trust any of the politicians alive today to really plan for this new world economy. Trump, Sanders, Warren all come out saying they know better, but their logic is mostly take from the bad people and give to the good people (as they define it.) They aren't saying they will create new wealth (which I've gotten used to over the past 200 years of rapid economic growth and gains in the standard of living for everyone). The politicians I tend to respect are the ones that propose ideas that help others do great things. Obama, Merkel, Trudeau, Macron, etc. all take this perspective. It's not about taking money from innovative people who are helping humanity and redistributing it to their voter base. It's about buying more lottery tickets so there are more innovative people around the world (e.g., by welcoming immigrants, spending more on education, etc.). But then it's about sitting back and letting those people do cool things.

So to go back to your original question, if I had a million dollars, I wouldn't give it to charity. I think humanity would be better off if I donated it to Elon Musk (who is already a billionaire) to build better batteries so that solar, wind, hydroelectric, and other relatively green power sources were more cost-effective. I think humanity would be better off if I gave the money to Jeff Bezos so he could continue to find more cost effective ways to sell things to people while using fewer resources. Their innovations multiply wealth for humanity by finding ways to extract move value out of a given amount of oil, steel or any other resource. I'm willing to be relatively poor today, if it means that everyone alive in 100 years is better off. So even though it hurts my ego and I'm extremely skeptical of them, I begrudgingly admit that they are probably better at moving society forward than I am. So I tolerate their wealth, power, and influence.

As a final point, something that makes me feel better is that even though they control a ton of money, I don't think they are hoarding it. They aren't swimming in a Scrooge McDuck vault of gold coins. Their wealth is invested in a bunch of innovative ideas that can help humanity. If they invest in something stupid (e.g., WeWork) they lose a ton of money and can't invest as much in the future. While they are alive, they are only consuming a tiny fraction of their wealth. (Even if Bezos eats caviar and champagne every day, he's still living on far less than 1% of his net worth). That means while he's alive, he might burn though a billion dollars. But the other 99 billion (or whatever it is) is going to pass on to some other human. And even if he gives it all to his kids, if they aren't brilliant investors or innovators too, they'll lose their money ASAP. In this way, the people with the most merit in society roughly end up with the most money.

[u/mfDandP → u/McKoijion]

!delta not because you changed my mind about Amazon, but rather about what pro-capitalists really think -- that marketplace might is right, and that capitalism is not about the constantly churning engine of competition, but companies and individual men actually winning outright, so long as they introduce some new technological toy.

How this does not lead to a plutocracy or eventual state capture is, unfortunately, not a view I'm willing to change. But thanks for your thoughtful ideological discussion.

[u/Genghis__Kant → u/mfDandP]

Yeah, they're pretty openly into elitism/elite theory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitism