You created a hypothetical asking what if Amazon isn’t successful, that’s not very likely if history is any indicator.
How was moving to Washington to start amazon not ‘fair’? You can’t claim to be pro-business like the author does in a following tweet and also condemn someone for pursuing LEGAL means to start a business.
Is this the argument you want to go with or do you want to say Amazon is the most successful company in the world and success is guaranteed?
He moved to the state he felt his business would have the best chance to succeed. You consider that not ‘fair’?
You have to consider the basis of legality. If you theorize that capital (lobbyists) influence government. Then, you have a system where capital begat capital. You’re leaving small businesses and entrepreneurs by the wayside. Support for Amazon and google is not *pro-business* in that sense. They’ve used their market power to finance an unfair market. It’s the premise for the flaw in “let the market decide”. In a pure market economy innovation will be stifled by monopolies.
your reading comprehension is poor, read his entire thread again the law he was exploiting should have never existed, an unfair law leading to unfair and anti free market outcomes happened. it happens all the time. he's saying the government needs to go back to fulfilling its role of stopping this.
I was referring to when Bezos created amazon and relocated to the area he felt gave it the best chance to succeed. Condemning a 1-person business for moving (via a cross-country road trip) does not sound ‘pro-business’ to me.
And I was referring to the pro-business claim. Exploiting poorly constructed laws is a thing. I can’t fault that. My issue is with the people that finance their continuance.
Bezos moved to Seattle because amazon was an internet company and could locate wherever the state sales tax was lowest. Sounds like a savvy business move to me.
Condemning bad behavior is valid whether or not that behavior is legal. Calling for a change to bad laws that allow for exploitation is not in any way inconsistent with being “pro-business”
Are you being intentionally dense or is this just you I genuinely can't tell but go read that thread again because if getting defensive about him using amazon as an example in a broader statement about how the american economy is working and has changed over the last 40-50 years you really, genuinely, missed the point
What was the bad behavior? Driving across country to move to the best possible place to start his business?
I’m referring strictly to tweet #2 where he claimed Bezos’ relocation was not ‘fair’ I’m not talking about other claims or points he mentions later. I don’t disagree with his overall premise but I did disagree with the example he used in tweet #2
having the capital to exploit a law that allows you to build basically a monopoly may be completely legal, it may be completely good business move (it is, clearly) but is easily argued that it wasn't fair to the industry he entered, and destroyed, or all the millions of people it impacted
so you think leveraging a tax loophole that disproportionately benefits certain states to give you a leg up on other established companies is in any way in the spirit of fair from a free market competition perspective? the capital component is largely irrelevant but he wasn't poor when he moved, he was a senior vp at a hedge fund
The tech giant’s competition to find its second headquarters was always designed to have one winner: Amazon. Thursday’s news that the company is ditching New York City shows that it wasn’t prepared for the backlash to its disingenuous approach. https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019...location-abandoning-long-island-city-new-york Spoiler Amazon blames meddling local lawmakers for scuttling the deal, but the company should own up to its agency in meeting legitimate local concerns with hardball. It’s a recurring Amazon tactic. In Seattle, the tech giant stopped construction on a new building last spring to protest a proposed per-employee tax to raise funding for affordable housing and homelessness. There, Amazon got its way when the tax was rescinded by the City Council just weeks after it was passed. The entire HQ2 framing—and the false insistence that it would be a “full equal” with the company’s true home—can be seen as a rebuke of critics who question whether Amazon’s influence has been positive in Seattle. This is a company that likes to punish those who aren’t grateful for its presence. There are other ways for companies—even ravenous, fast-growing ones—to behave. Google is planning to develop a massive new campus in San Jose without taking any tax incentives. Microsoft just pledged $500 million to address the housing crisis in the Seattle metro area, a problem that it and Amazon helped create by generating more new jobs faster than the region could build homes. Salesforce waged a campaign to tax itself in San Francisco. These companies act not out of altruism, but out of political calculus: It’s in their best interest to maintain at least the illusion of meritocracy, to make people feel like they have a chance to survive even if they don’t work at one of the largest tech corporations in the world.
I think that context matters. I agree with the overall premise of the tweets, that there has been & currency is a problem in this country with companies benefiting from poorly constructed or intentionally unfair laws. This unfair advantage hurts competing businesses and can lead to monopolistic levels of power. I agree that Amazon has been guilty of this themselves - both with the HQ2 incentives and other actions in their past relating to how internet companies pay taxes & their deals with the city of Seattle. The point I was trying to make was in regards to the specific example mentioned in tweet #2, where Bezos' relocation to Seattle was deemed 'unfair'. The reason why the laws of how internet companies paid sales taxes at the time were poorly constructed was because the internet was not where people bought goods. E-commerce was not an established, successful, profitable industry. What you call a 'tax loophole', I call exploring & innovating in an unknown space. And for that I think Bezos should be commended, not condemned.
I worked on a corporate campus deal a couple years ago that cost about a third of this and by the end of construction it created more than 12,000 construction jobs. Property values in the area have since gone up 5x which goes straight into city and county coffers via property taxes.
Bezos should be commended for engaging in a business practice that you acknowledge is bad for business? He’s become obscenely wealthy as a result of those decisions. He needs no further commendation.
Yes. As I said, context matters. At the time Amazon was a 1-man company starting in a non-existent industry.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/...eattle-hostage-the-cost-of-being-amazons-home https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/amazon-holding-seattle-hostage_us_5af5ba76e4b032b10bfa4285 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/19/amazon-headquarters-seattle-215725 https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...helped-kill-a-seattle-tax-on-business/562736/
I can commend it as a business decision for him but deem it unfair to everyone else. That's not mutually exclusive.
Anyone who is really pro-business and free markets should be glad this didn't go forward. Giving tax breaks to large corporations is essentially the government picking winners and losers and promotes monopolization of industries.
It’s also funneling public funds to private purposes. It’s almost like socialism for rich people. Isn’t that a bad thing?
One of those rare instances when you should be able to unite the lefties and small government right. To the extent the latter even exists. I couldn't help myself.
It's not that rare in real life. When you actually have real life conversations with people, you can find a lot of common ground.