Finance

If You Don’t Like Jeff Bezos, Your Real Problem Is With Capitalism

You can’t blame a guy who’s playing by all the rules we’ve established for the natural consequences of those rules.

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Jeff Bezos (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Jeff Bezos headed Amazon for more than 20 wildly successful years. He started the company as an online bookseller, and was at the helm as it grew into a $1.75 trillion global powerhouse. This week, Bezos steps down from his role as CEO.

Jeff Bezos isn’t completely ceding control of the company. He is going to become executive chair of Amazon, and will remain its largest individual shareholder. Still, the former CEO and current richest man in the world intends to spend more time on philanthropy and his other ventures, like the Washington Post and space company Blue Origin.

Some are not particularly upset to see Bezos depart from the top job at Amazon. Bezos is planning, along with his brother Mark, to reach space aboard the New Shepard suborbital rocket system on July 20. With the trip approaching, multiple online petitions have sprung up to ask that he not be permitted to return to Earth. The leading petition, called “Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth,” is hosted by change.org. “Billionaires should not exist,” declares the description. It went from 33,000 signatures on June 20 to 150,000 on July 5.

The founder of the “Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth” petition says it started as a joke. But he also hopes that it will help his more serious message about wealth inequality reach a broader platform.

Indeed, Bezos has faced a great deal of criticism over a number of issues. He amassed an almost incomprehensible fortune while reportedly paying little in taxes at times (by using legal tax minimization strategies routinely employed by the wealthy). Some complain that Bezos has donated too little of his fortune (though he recently pledged more than $12 billion to philanthropic efforts). Workers at some Amazon facilities have complained about poor conditions and relatively low pay. Of course, Amazon has been perennially (and probably accurately) accused of driving what few mom-and-pop mercantiles remained out of business.

But none of that is really the fault of Jeff Bezos, or any other individual billionaire. All rich people use legal tax strategies to minimize their payments to the IRS. That is one of the ways they get rich. If they didn’t use many of those legal tax strategies for their businesses at least, they might violate duties owed to shareholders. There is no requirement that anyone donate anything to charity. As long as a business is paying at least minimum wage, and providing a workplace that meets minimum health and safety standards, there is no prohibition on requiring hard work. Our whole system of capitalism is based on the fact that someone who provides a service better and cheaper will outcompete lesser rivals.

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I am no defender of obscene wealth. You can find lots of examples where I’ve written in favor of a wealth tax or higher wages for workers or general checks on capitalism. But you can’t blame a guy who’s playing by all the rules we’ve established for the natural consequences of those rules. I believe the expression is, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” If you’ve got a problem with Jeff Bezos or billionaires in general, your real problem is with your legislators. Call them and tell them to tax the rich without building in a bunch of loopholes this time.

At the end of the day, we also have billionaires who are far worse than Jeff Bezos. At least his fortune was built by sending all the crap we need conveniently right to our doorsteps, which is far more palatable than how the Sacklers became billionaires (by poisoning hundreds of thousands of us with opioids) or what the DeVos clan did to get rich (create a huge multilevel marketing scheme). Plus, Bezos does some pretty cool things with his fortune, and you really have to hand it to him for how he smacked down those sleazebags who tried to extort him with dick pics.

Really, an online naysayer total in the six-figures isn’t so bad in a country of nearly 330 million, and even their rage is just a misplaced critique of unfettered capitalism. So, I say congratulations to Jeff Bezos on his retirement as CEO, and best wishes for the upcoming spaceflight.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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