What You Don’t Understand

 

What You Don’t Understand 

WARNING: You may not like the point of view expressed by me in this op-ed essay. Much of the impetus for it is my reaction to an article run in the Washington Post, to which I subscribe. The Post runs op-eds from both sides of the aisle, including some, like this, which are far less than favorable to the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Bezos could, with the flick of a pen, kill or require prior approval for any such article. The fact that he doesn’t is part of what sets him, and the Post, far apart from Fox News and many US print journals.

        Let’s begin with a missive from Bernie (“no one is humbler than I”) Sanders, who is addressing what he sees as the wretched excess of successful US entrepreneurs.  

        “In my view, we can no longer tolerate billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk becoming obscenely rich at a time of unprecedented economic pain and suffering,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an email to The Washington Post.

        For simplicity’s sake I’ll focus on Bezos. Sanders seems to feel that Bezos and the others have done something immoral related to the global pandemic. He also would seem to have us believe that the increase in their wealth is, somehow, ill-gotten gains. In implying this, I think he conflates inherited wealth (Bush 41 and 43, JFK, Mitt Romney) with economic success by personal effort. Along the way, he is careful never to include such icons as pro athletes or entertainment figures, also a new wealthy class.

        To begin with, Sanders apparently has never heard of the failures of the UK post WWII Socialism experiment, focusing narrowly on National Health Care, a clear success when facts are considered …but…After decades of ever declining economic growth and ever rising unemployment, Britain largely abandoned socialism and turned toward capitalism and the free market. The resulting prosperity in the U.K. vindicated free-marketers who had predicted that socialism would inevitably fail to deliver the goods. Of course, the UK was now in the newly minted EU, all of whose other members were far less than socialist in those areas where commercial competition is involved.

        My point? Sanders can be correct on National Health Care and then jump the track in other areas. But back to the wealth issue. Jeff Bezos inherited nothing except a head for science, Bill Gates, precisely the same. He (Bezos) was a scholarship student who actually used his brains and university training to create a company which was an immediate hit because it fulfilled people’s needs.

        His wealth is usually reported as an amount of billions of dollars, leading too many ignorant persons to believe, apparently,  that somehow he gets a huge check annually. The wealth of Jeff Bezos is the value of his stock in his own company (Amazon). It’s only “money” if he sells shares, at which time he is subject to capital gains tax. He didn’t write the federal tax code, but Sanders disrespects him as if he thinks he did. (Sanders, by the way, is worth more than a million because of the appreciation of real estate he owns)  

    When Bezos makes money, Sanders seems to view this as profiteering, but profiteering is what the loathsome John Stossell justified during the aftermath of the last Texas hurricane, saying that price gouging ($90 dollars for a 12 pack of bottled water) was just “market economics.” Meeting the needs of consumers at a fair price (Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) isn’t obscene and it isn’t profiteering 

        Amazon was, and continues to be, a veritable lifeline to multi-millions of Americans during the current pandemic. No prices were raised even as demand increased. That’s the categorical opposite of profiteering. Every year, Bezos, like Elon Musk, spends a billion dollars’ worth of his stock on space research, while donating millions to multiple causes, including one grant of $10 billion last year alone. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives away billions annually, and the couple have pledged to donate 95% of their total wealth.

         Amazon added 500,000 jobs in 2020, including 400,000 in the United States. Those jobs pay at least twice the federal minimum wage, and provide employees with benefits like health insurance, 401(k) company matching, and up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave. The company also offered extra hazard pay from March to May 2020.  In raw numbers, the average Amazon warehouse worker is paid about three times the federal poverty level for a single person.  

        Once upon a time, about 140 years ago, there was a class of American entrepreneurs who came to be labeled “Robber Barons.” They created trusts and monopolies, cornering the supplies of metals, meats, fuels and money.  The names are familiar still; Rockefeller (oil), Armour (meat products) Carnegie and Morgan (steel), Gould and Morgan (banking), Vanderbilt (shipping), etc.  With one notable exception, Andrew Carnegie, they established large family fortunes through dubious means and while doing some good works, passed the bulk of their wealth on.

         Carnegie, on the other hand, once said “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced,” and gave away the vast bulk of his estate.  The methods used by those men to gain and preserve wealth are primarily illegal today, but sadly the 2007-9 housing bubble collapse seemed to indicate that the new villains and economic malefactors are far more likely to work for “product-less” concerns like Bear-Stearns, Lehman brothers and a number of other commercial banks. These are the real modern financial bad guys, not Bezos, Gates, and the rest of the tech providers, who simply provide requested products at fair prices.

        Bezos does, via electronic ordering and postal delivery, what Wal-Mart has done for decades, but has done it better. The various Walton heirs are collectively the richest family in the world, with a net worth of more than $247 billion. The Waltons' wealth comes from their inherited, controlling stake in Walmart. While Walmart workers live in poverty, the Waltons rake in billions every year from the company in dividends and sales of their Walmart shares. How odd that Bernie Sanders lambasts the tech giants Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, et al, while never mentioning the Waltons.

     Bezos, in just one of over a dozen charitable donations in 2020, donated 5 times as much as the entire Walton family did in the five years from 2014 to 2018! Think about that, Bernie, and get back to me.