Comments

1

If you made $10,000 a day, every day, since Christopher Columbus landed in America, you STILL wouldn't have as much money as Bezos.

Nobody earns $2 billion.

2

@1, why are you talking a measly $2 billion? That's pauper paper compared to Bezos bucks.

Also, if you made $10,000 a day every day from the day Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, you would have to have committed atrocities on a vast scale in the Americas. In fact, you should be Person #1 if anyone's asking who's gonna pay for reparations. Plus, to add insult to injury, there'd probably be a statue of you somewhere by now.

3

That deafening sucking sound is the last of the American middle class going down the drain.

Welcome to mass poverty!

5

I have no fear of machines making machines. If there were no more jobs, but every good and service produced automatically, we would all be free from toil and potentially quite wealthy. At that point your socialism would make every bit of sense.

Even well before that, reading End of Work, we can just cut down our work week hours. Not a terrible idea I'd say, and if you can separate health care and other benefits from employment many employers would probably agree. Well rested happy workers for the same price as overworked ones? Sure.

6

Interesting comment @5. Clearly made from the perspective of Matt the Engineer and not Matt the Keen Observer of the Human Condition.

Forgive me, Matt the Engineer. Just giving you a hard time.

7

All your money won't another minute buy.

10

I don't even really care if people get rich or even obscenely wealthy. That's great for them. However, if even a single person dies because they can't afford to buy a lifesaving treatment, then the presence of billionaires shows the evil of humanity.

15

NOBODY should be worth $200 billion!

18

The problem with Bezos's (and others') massive wealth is not that they are rich, it's that the concentration of wealth into few hands gives those few a disproportionate power to affect the lives of everyone else. This is incompatible with a fair and democratic society.

We tend to forgive Bezos because his employees are paid either fairly in the case of warehouse sorters or very handsomely in the case of engineers, but the objection to rampant capitalism is not the objection to a bald man owning super yachts, it's the objection to an elite few to distort politics, monopolize markets, and yes, in so many cases, depress the wages of their employees, impoverishing millions while they control an amount of capital and resources far beyond that which they could ever personally utilize.

That wealth could and should be used to alleviate the suffering of the working class, create opportunities for all, relieve them/us of the NEED to labor all our lives and of course, create the socialist utopia we know is possible if we just dare to dream. It's not about Bezos, it's about capital and the power of the ownership class to control our lives. Money can be earned but that power cannot (should not, at least)

also @mellow / @17 I like your creepy, condescending style of writing. It's like reading the words of bourgeois Baron Harkonnen.

19

Charles, what is if with you and Bezos? He got rich creating something so useful and beneficial to millions worldwide that the company has become quite valuable. Most of his enormous wealth is due to his share of ownership--so? Why don't you go after massive inheritors of wealth like the Walton clan. Sam made the money, his kids just live off the residual value that they did nothing to create--true rentiers. That would seem to be the correct Marxist boogie man.

20

Bezo’s wealth comes from extracting value from the production of goods and services, in particular products that facilitate the exchange of goods and data. Separating out the cream—extracting value from the system—leaves the rest of the milk less rich. Wealth accumulated is wealth extracted. Our political economy allowed for this extraction process, for example allowing wages too low to support a broad middle class. Whatever the market will bear, they said. Now we see the fruit.


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