Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates Be Damned

A too commonly seen sentence in recent years: “The wealthiest 1% have accumulated their fortunes at our expense.”

We need to ask about “at our expense” because the most cited guilty parties are all famous billionaires like Jeff Bezos who purposely ran Amazon as an unprofitable business for years. This is factual, look it up. So “at our expense” began with people buying books at less than normal cost to them! Oh and can’t we include the fact that even today with Bezos worth an estimated 139 to 185 $billion, Amazon is still the most popular seller of consumer goods in the world. Amazon has reported that its full-year 2021 net sales grew by 22% to $469.8bn compared with $386.1bn in 2020, despite global supply chain disruption.

Be honest, those who say ““The wealthiest 1% have accumulated their fortunes at our expense” — you are ignoring that people greatly enjoy having affordable products literally delivered to them the next day.

That is not Mr. Bezos’s crime. His crime is that he consciously planned and succeeded in building a monopoly and has plenty of money to manipulate elected politicians, preventing them and our system of justice from prosecuting him for that.

Even the political Right avoids criticizing Bezos and others for their monopolistic practices. Monopolies throughout history have proven to be the real harm against people of any nation. We see that European countries today are more astute and are charging the officials of monopolistic corporations for their crime. But even politicians in those countries report that when they get the attention of those corporations (including Facebook and Microsoft) they are inundated with so many corporate lobbyists they are unable to even see other legitimate people and organizations.

The latter is an attack on “the right of the people to petition government” when corporate lobbyists simply crowd out other petitioners.

That is what must be our concern: the formation of powerful monopolistic corporations by anyone. The exact same thing applies to monopolistic governments who use their police and military power to enforce compliance with anything the ruling autocrat wants.

Only those who’ve been seduced by Marxism have gotten accustomed to thinking “The wealthiest 1% have accumulated their fortunes at our expense” because Marx called for the “revolution against the bourgeoisie.” This literally means using force including deadly force to steal wealth “for the benefit of the masses.” Interesting that, so far, Communist countries always end up benefitting themselves at the great expense of their own populations.

Notice here I don’t advocate for a legal ban on this sentence (“The wealthiest 1% have accumulated their fortunes at our expense.”) No instead I advocate for us all to simply stop using this diversion from the dangerous fact: monopolists not the bourgeoisie are criminal culprits.

A kind of sidebar here: It was almost sickening to watch both Bill Gates (years ago) and more recently Mark Zukerberg sit before a congressional investigative committee and completely side step the charge of creating an illegal monopoly. Mr. Zuckeberg clearly knew that his claim to “be taking steps to prevent hate speech” would get a pass by the same politicians he practically owned. Monopolists, not the “top 1%” are the true threat to all of us.

We, as writers on Medium, can start the ball rolling. I don’t like monopolies, I don’t like most government intervention, I don’t like either political party. Instead I advocate for real critical thinking. Especially on the part of writers.