Terence Corcoran: Trump joins the anti-capitalist crusaders out to ruin the internet
As U.S. President Donald Trump launched his attacks on Amazon last Thursday, joining the leftist gang-up on the tech industry’s miracle workers and driving down the stock price of another internet-based corporate giant, I was doing some online shopping. I ordered a book, humidifier filters and a new iPad. As most of the world’s consumers know, such Internet shopping experiences are a breeze, with instant service, fast delivery and a chance to track down the best prices and models.
By the time Trump got around to his third Amazon-bashing tweet on Tuesday, my two Amazon orders had already been delivered and the iPad was on its way to being shipped from Best Buy, one of the big box retailers Trump claims to be defending.
Trump claims Amazon is not paying full price for U.S. postal package delivery services. And he complains Amazon is avoiding state sales taxes. As a result, he says, taxpaying retailers “are closing stores all over the country … not a level playing field!”
Trump is right. It’s not a “level” playing field. It’s a terrifically competitive field in which, thanks to the internet and the entrepreneurial brilliance of Jeff Bezos and other executives, the world of retailing and many other sectors is being turned into an uneven and rocky terrain filled with new and hitherto unimaginable challenges. Consumers, the true beneficiaries of capitalism, are riding the wave of innovation such unlevel playing fields inevitably deliver.
The story of my Amazon purchases, which happened to correspond to Trump’s anti-Amazon tweets, is mundane and familiar to most consumers, but it is nonetheless an amazing demonstration of astounding progress compared to the consumer reality of even a decade ago.
The story began on Thursday when I wasted a drive to a Toronto outlet of a major drugstore chain in search of a filter that would fit in the very same chain’s store-brand humidifier that I’d purchased three months ago. There were none in stock. What to do? Later, at home, the solution struck me: Why not try Amazon? At 9:07 p.m. Thursday, I ordered three filters from Amazon at $16.99 each, $2 cheaper than the drugstore’s price and with a promised delivery on April 1 — Easter Sunday.
Later that night, in a separate order, I clicked on Amazon to purchase a copy of Steven Pinker’s latest book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, a fitting title to order using the Internet, one of greatest feats of reason and science — and commerce — known to man.
Both the book and the filters arrived Easter Sunday, at my door.
As for the iPad, I placed the order online on Saturday through the website of Best Buy, the big-box electronic chain, which offered a better price and a newer model than Amazon had. With an e-commerce model set up to compete with Amazon, Best Buy will deliver the iPad to my door by the end of this week.
That’s what you would call competition at its best — unless you’re a politician or a government-knows-best interventionist theorist who sees radical change as a threat to the status quo or, more likely, as an opportunity to stir up fear and resentment against corporations and their executives.
Trump’s blast at Amazon was quickly picked up by the Democrats’ loudest anti-capitalist, Bernie Sanders. Asked on CNN whether Amazon had gotten too big, Sanders said: “Yeah, I do. I do. This is an issue that has got to be looked at. What we are seeing all over this country is the decline in retail. We’re seeing this incredibly large company getting involved in almost every area of commerce.” In another interview with The Guardian in London, Sanders linked Amazon to Facebook. “When you have companies like Amazon that have extraordinary power, when you have companies like Facebook that to a significant degree control discourse, am I concerned about monopoly power? Absolutely.”
With Trump and Sanders together leading the growing political attacks on the U.S. tech giants, the campaign to regulate, control and curb the activities of the industry will continue to expand. Whether Trump has any real case regarding the prices the U.S. Postal Service charges Amazon remains largely unclear. Given the governance mess in postal service, it is not impossible that the delivery of Amazon and other packages subsidizes regular mail.
Amazon, like Facebook, is the victim of exaggerated and false allegations that are being used to justify a rash of government interventions. One recent commentary talked of “the depressing tableau of Silicon Valley malfeasance” while others are warning of Amazon — with its relatively small market share — as a threat to the health of the entire retail economy. There are calls for new taxes, more aggressive competition laws, and more government involvement in the information economy and the internet.
These calls for action may diminish over time with the realization that the government activists calling for action are, in reality, out to control and limit the innovation and progress that these corporations are delivering to consumers and, until recently, investors.