Immigration

Did Jeff Bezos Earn His Fortune?

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

Last week the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Marian Tupy arguing that “Jeff Bezos Earned his Fortune.” Tupy founded Human Progress, sort of a web magazine based on the idea that escape from social stagnation – human progress – requires a “culture of optimism and progress.” In this framing, we owe our rise from subsistence living with no running water and medicine or other technological advances to the rise of this culture in the West. Human Progress is a Cato Institute program. CATO exists to move “public policy in the direction of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.” This is a free-market libertarian think tank that works against policy that regulates Capitalism in any way.

With this background in mind, it’s no surprise that Mr. Tupy believes that Bezos does, in fact, deserve to control an almost unimaginable amount of wealth (something on the order of $280B). 

I don’t disagree that Jeff Bezos should be a very wealthy man because of the businesses he started. But did the creation of online retail stores and internet cloud storage centers earn Bezos the obscene level of wealth he now controls? My back-of-the envelope math suggests that if he started spending a million dollars every day, he would need more than 750 years to spend all his money, assuming he never added another nickel to his bank account.

This level of wealth in the hands of one person is immoral and ridiculous. How does Tupy justify it?

He nods briefly to Amazon Web Services but focuses most of his argument on whether Amazon’s online retail platform saves people time, and how much. 

“Consider the arithmetic. Suppose an hour of labor is worth about $64, roughly the average gross domestic product per hour worked in the countries in which Amazon operates. If Mr. Bezos’ fortune corresponded to the total value that Amazon created, his $275 billion would represent about 4.3 billion hours of saved time. Divided among Amazon’s more than 300 million active customers, the saving comes to about 14 hours per customer over Amazon’s life. That’s nothing. Many customers save that in a month…

At $64 an hour, that means Amazon has saved its customers about 214 billion hours. Across 300 million customers over roughly 32 years (Amazon was founded in 1994), the saving equals about 22 hours per person a year. That is 25 to 26 minutes a week, or a little less than four minutes a day.“

I won’t challenge this math except to point out that if an hour of labor is worth about $64, and the pay range for most hourly Amazon workers is between $18 and $20, Bezos is paying this part of his work force less than a third of what their productivity is worth. Since Amazon’s gross profit in 2025 was around $360B, they could have paid each of their hourly workers another $20/hour and still raked in around $300B in profit. So while Amazon might be saving people a few minutes a day because they can order diapers online, they also exploit people who work for them. In other words, part of Mr. Bezos’ fortune comes from capturing productivity gains provided by others. 

Amazon cuts other costs on the backs of workers, most importantly by refusing to keep workplaces safe. In 2023, the US Strategic Organizing Center (a pro-labor group) reported an OSHA finding that Amazon workplace policies, especially in its warehouses and fulfillment centers, creates a hazardous workplace through inhumane discipline and monitoring systems. These policies require workers to remain on the floor except during specific breaks, even if they need a bathroom visit. OSHA and SOC have also documented cases of management refusing to provide medical treatment for workplace injuries. Changing these policies to improve workplace conditions would cost, money so Amazon leaves them in place. This of course means that some portion of Bezos’ fortune comes at the expense of worker safety. To the extent Bezos earned his wealth, he did so by exploiting and harming others.

Tupy also argues that Amazon forced other retailers to improve their websites, delivery speed, and product selection. What he fails to mention is the key change Amazon forced other retailers to make: lower prices. Target, Walmart, and other chains all had to match Amazon’s pricing, and to do this they had to keep their own employees’ wages low. This business model only works, by the way, because government subsidizes it through social welfare programs like Medicaid and SNAP, but that’s a subject for another day.

To do this, competitors had to adopt many Amazon policies, including worker pay rates. To cut costs while improving websites and delivery, Target and Walmart had to cut labor costs and degrade workplace safety. 

Amazon’s success carries important social costs as well. One reason for the death of small towns in America was the arrival of cheap retail, first in the form of Walmart stores and later with the ability to order goods online from Amazon. Yes, this saved people time, and in some cases money, but it also destroyed a key part of American social life: shopping trips to the city center or department store, lunch or dinner after, and the associated connection people form with others. 

We came to know the shop owners, cashiers, pharmacists, and other business owners and workers personally. Sometimes they helped us out of a jam. They almost always kept the proceeds from their business in the community, which Walmart and Amazon do not do. They created jobs that gave kids a choice to stay in the area rather than migrate to larger cities in search of a job.

Immigration, feminism, homosexuality, and slides away from the Church isn’t what killed small-town America. These groups in fact kept it alive by bringing new products and ideas (that killer taco place, for example). Cheap big-box and online retail killed it, and with it much of the economic activity that sustained it.

To be sure, retailers like Amazon and Wal Mart create efficiencies, with their best innovation coming in changes to supply chain management. We now have more choices, and goods that come at lower prices. Maybe Tupy is right, and each of us saved four minutes a day because we can click to order diapers instead of making a trip to a store. But this has come at a cost, both to individual workers and society as a whole. 

All of this means that Jeff Bezos deserves to be a wealthy man. But he has not earned the obscene fortune he now controls. He built this fortune by exploiting and harming workers, and by destroying a key component of community life, especially in small towns. His workers, and the local business owners he chased out of small-town America, paid much of the cost of building it. Is four minutes of time saved a day worth it?

Does the Constitution Give Congress the Power to Regulate Immigration?

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

Thanks to Ampersand over at Alas, a Blog, I ran across two articles by Ilya Somin arguing that the Constitution includes no enumerated power to restrict immigration.  Go check Amptoons out – he’s a killer cartoonist.

In the first, at Reason Magazine, Somin suggests that President Obama had the power to defer deportation for four million immigrants through executive order.  He thinks this is so in part because he doesn’t think the Constitution gives Congress no power to regulate immigration in the first place.  Later, in the Washington Post, Somin argues that the Migration and Importation Clause (Article I, Section 9) doesn’t fix this because it refers to slavery. Continue reading →

Crime and Immigration

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

Last night while watching the Democratic National Convention I had my Twitter feed up (@foggybottomline) so I could send out a few and follow what the Twitterverse had to say.  I don’t follow @JohnLibertyUSA so I’m not sure why this popped up in my feed.  As you can see I pushed back a bit, asking for a link, and we went back and forth.  Since a discussion like this calls for more than 140 characters at a time, I thought I’d move it to the blog.  Hopefully, Mr. Liberty and his fellow traveler @DeanPerkins will come over for a look.  Continue reading →

#TrumpWillNeverBePresident

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ 1 Comment

Writing at Salon, Anis Shivani predicted last week that Donald Trump’s campaign “will surely be victorious in the end,” because he appeals “to an elemental fear in the country, torn apart by the abstraction of the market, to which Clinton has not the faintest hope of responding.”  Trump, you see, “’builds’ things, literal buildings.”  People can actually visualize these buildings and the cities they were built in.  This contrasts with Clinton, according to Shivani, since her work with the Clinton Foundation and the State Department “represents…disembodiedness.”  “In this election,” claims Shivani, “abstraction will clearly lose and corporeality…will undoubtedly win.”

Another Salon writer, Musa al-Gharbi, doesn’t actually predict a Trump win, but he does seem to think the Donald has a path to victory.  He lays out three key reasons to think this: because Trump has more “opportunity to radically change public perception for the better” since voters don’t yet know Trump “as a politician,” because this election will turn on what voters think about both Obama and Bill Clinton, and because of something he calls “negative intersectionality.”  Al-Gharbi doesn’t define this very clearly, but he seems to be saying something about political correctness: that Trump’s bigotry and misogyny, “heard in the context of a fundamentally anti-white, anti-Christian culture war,” could actually make some voters see him more sympathetically.

These aren’t the only two writers working to outline a Trump path to the Oval Office.  These arguments mostly focus on three claims: both candidates have poor favorability ratings, Hillary Clinton is a bad candidate, and minority voters could shift to Trump. I challenge them below the fold. Continue reading →

Right Direction or Wrong Track?

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

Alex Castellanos couldn’t say it enough this morning on Meet the Press: 70% of Americans think the US is going in the wrong direction and want change.  To him this means Donald Trump has a chance to win the Presidency, since Hillary Clinton represents more of the same.

Americans have many reasons for answering “wrong track” on these kinds of surveys.  Castellanos conflates these reasons into a general annoyance with American government and its political leadership.  Let me suggest that much of the “wrong track” sentiment comes from disapproval of conservative social and economic policies and their obstructionist efforts to stop progressive changes people want.  This is true of both conservatives and liberals, but only on the conservative side does this translate to support for Trump.

Conservatives think the country is on the “wrong track” because they disapprove of tolerance for less traditional social, religious, and sexual norms, and wonder what the world is coming to when fewer people attend church, the coach cannot pray with the high school football team, homosexuals can marry and young women can have recreational sex without consequences.  They blame immigrants and minorities for their apparent loss of economic prosperity and political power and believe government does too much to help them.  They don’t like changes they see in their cities and neighborhoods as immigrants and people of color move in or cities encroach upon rural areas.  In fact, many people who say the US is going in the wrong direction actually want less change, and seek leaders that will finally put a stop to the madness.  These people reject the establishment GOP because they believe conservatives fecklessly promised to do so while knowing they would not or could not.

The only change they really do want is a shift from the “free markets can make everything work” that lead to wealth inequality and corporations moving their jobs overseas.  So they also reject the conservative governing establishment for failing to deliver the economic prosperity promised by Reagan and Americans for Tax Reform, and want US workers protected even if it means government action.   The core of Trump’s support comes from disaffected conservatives annoyed with change in American society, and seek restoration of traditional values and and a capitalism based on a balance between profits for shareholders and the needs of the nation and its workers. Continue reading →

Sunday Morning Coffee

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

A few things I read over coffee this morning…while watching the talking heads discuss Iowa:

Morton Guyton, writing at Patheos blog Mercy Not Sacrifice, discusses an ideological perspective he calls ” White Evangelical Nihilism:”

There’s a genuine ideological foundation for the ethos that makes Trump and Cruz so popular. I call it white evangelical nihilism.

When you’re told by your pastor that all the people outside of your ideological tribe are utterly wicked and deserving of eternal torture, that’s how it becomes a sin to compromise with your opponents politically and work together for the common good.

Everything about secular liberalism must be utterly antithetical to the Christian gospel and profoundly offensive to God. It has to be, or else secular liberals wouldn’t be worthy of damnation. So everything about liberalism is put into binary opposition with “God’s truth.” To believe in climate change is to believe that God is not in control of the environment. To believe that the government should provide for the poor is an emulation of atheist communism and a usurpation of God’s sovereignty. To promote “political correctness” is to silence the courageous proclamation of “Biblical truth.”

This tracks with a point I make when discussing today’s polarized American political climate.  Conservatives run on a set of existential issues on which there can be no compromise: abortion, homosexuality, taxes, and guns.  Two of these have their basis in religion and two in racism, but all four depend on the fundamental premise that only wicked, lazy or authoritarian people disagree with the right wing on these issues.  This is the fundamental American political problem we need to resolve.

Guyton goes on to reframe salvation.  Rather than a search for God’s help in saving individual sinners from themselves, he argues we should seek His help in saving other people from our sin:

Philippians 2:3 says, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” Imagine if Christians, and especially Christian politicians, were known as the people who regard everyone else as “better than [them]selves.”

Read the whole thing.  Excellent essay. Continue reading →