Trump vs. Amazon: right target, wrong messenger?
One dangerous thing about demagogues, said Jeet Heer in The New Republic, is how easily they can tarnish a good cause. Take Donald Trump and his war against Amazon. In the past week, he has been taking potshots on Twitter at Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos, accusing the company of putting retail stores out of business and exploiting the US postal service. That has helped slice $75bn off the company’s market valuation. Yet Trump’s motives are almost certainly personal. He’s obsessed with Bezos because Bezos also owns The Washington Post, which has been critical of the president. According to one White House source, Trump wonders, “How can I f**k with him?”. That poses a dilemma for progressives: undoubtedly Amazon needs to be reined in. But instead of using anti-trust laws to do so, Trump’s approach, like Vladimir Putin’s, “is to subordinate Amazon not to government but to his personal whims”.
But what terrible crime has Amazon committed, asked Michael Tanner in the National Review. For years, it has been engaged “in a nefarious plot to sell me things I want at a price I like. How evil can it get?” Trump says it has caused the postal service to lose money; yet Amazon has actually helped it make some by increasing the volume of package delivery. The tech giant is also in the dock for skimping on tax and, true enough – thanks to a series of exemptions and credits – it paid no federal income tax last year. But from 2015 to 2017, it stumped up $1.2bn in federal tax, and last year paid $211m in state taxes. It’s also said that thousands have lost their jobs due to competition from Amazon; but, Amazon has offset that by itself creating jobs for 300,000 US workers. No, the real issue here “is Trump’s Bernie Sanders-style misunderstanding of economics”.
On the contrary – the real issue here, said David Dayen in The New Republic, is “that government has been propping up the company for the entirety of its existence”. Amazon may pay sales tax now that it has warehouses in every state, but for almost two decades it never charged sales tax on online purchases; and through this simple price advantage it won its market share. It has benefited hugely under Trump, too, not just from corporate tax breaks, but from a change in federal procurement laws that allows the Department of Defence to buy all commercial items on Amazon. Yet to my mind, all the arguments about anti-trust violations, taxes and so on are “subplots in a far larger story”, said Matt Lewis on the Daily Beast, the story of a battle not so much of “big vs. small” as of “virtual vs. local”. Once, businesses were tied to a community and owed “at least some perfunctory responsibility for its wellbeing”. With a company like Amazon that tie is lost. Even if it doesn’t destroy jobs, it destroys the bricks-and-mortar retailers that make up a neighbourhood. “If the public ultimately sides with Trump over Amazon, it’ll have little to do with the details and everything to do with fear of a dark future.”