The other day for some reason YouTube showed me this video by Robert Reich titled How Amazon Is Ripping You Off. Now, I'm not here to defend Amazon. They don't need my defense. For those that aren't familiar he was the Secretary of Labor under Clinton. He's a progressive of course. You don't need to watch the video the TLDR is that Amazon has a lot of market share and are able to use their position in the market to require many restrictions on sellers. Things like requiring that sellers on Amazon can't list their products on other sites. Pushing down search results if their prices are below certain levels.
I haven't fact checked any of Reich's claims. I don't care to. Its true, when you have a big company with dominance they can use that dominance. Of course Amazon is not ripping you off though. Not really. You know who is ripping you off? Literally. Every government. They steal your life force. The hard earned money you have. They do this because they have a literal monopoly. Unaccountable bureaucrats make rules that affect all of us. Sure, we can vote, hows that going by the way? But unless you're Bezos you don't have much say in how your money is used or how much is stolen from you.
Reich as a progressive has one answer to all market "problems". More government. More power to the few over the many. More theft. It blows my mind when I listen to people that complain about private companies while ignoring the state. Of course these large companies work hand in glove with the state. But when you think about it, why is that? Its because the state has power and the belief. The belief of the masses in their legitimacy.
So, what's the solution. Reduce and eliminate the state. You remove that center of power that these companies use to gain more power. Replace this with freedom of choice. Replace the money with Bitcoin. May there be a thousand Amazons and zero states.
That last part is where it gets difficult. Most people support the nation state because without it they would feel very vulnerable, in terms of security, defence and services.
These fears are obvs manipulated by politicians, but they are real, and well founded. And reducing the state has only been tried in practice by the marxists, but as we know the state in communist regimes did the exact opposite of "withering away". So, at this point, we get stuck? I would genuinely like to live in a world where everyone gets along, you can live and work anywhere, but how?
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Indeed. We may have to see a complete breakdown first.
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And that is what I'm afraid of. When things go south, the poorest suffer the most... There was a good debate on this somewhere else on SN the other day...
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I think you completely missed the point of the line you quoted. @kepford is basically saying, "Even if all of Reich's claims are true he's still wrong about who's ripping you off." He would only need to fact check Reich if he wanted to push back on the specific claims Reich was making.
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LOL. Wall of text. I read that as I didn't read it all.
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LOL. Dude, I am saying that his specific claims may be correct. That isn't the point. The point is what Amazon does is dwarfed by the state. I don't doubt what he is saying. I know some of it is true. I have enough knowledge about how Amazon and Walmart work. They do restrict sellers options. You missed my overall point.
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