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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

It hasn't crossed a threshold into being a big deal, but singling out an individual does look like bullying and bullying isn't funny.

Jeff Bezos has to respect the law or face a series of consequences up to imprisonment. We all know he is going to respect the law like we all do. It is mean spirited to write a (potential) law that disrespects him directly. He can't really respond to that.

Sanders should have stuck to calling him names in a speech, or informally calling it the Bezos' Act. That is just discussion and fair game. This type of formal embedding is unpleasant at a deeper level to no-one's benefit. We can do without that in politics, thankyouverymuch.

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When the individual is worth more than many nation states, I have no problem with singling them out.

Most of those poor nation states are that way because they have adopted Sanders' cynical attitude about business and capitalism.

even if that person is the richest man in the world, a US senator singling out a private citizen in formal legislation is still "punching down". you really shouldn't cheer for that.

I'm absolutely astonished at this definition of "punching down"!

afaik, it is commonly used to refer to situations where someone makes a joke at the expense of someone less powerful than they are.

do you disagree with my understanding of the definition, or are you implying that jeff bezos is more powerful than a US senator who made a decent run for the presidency and is acting in his official capacity as such?

The latter. Certainly, Sanders isn't powerless, he's the most popular politician in the US. However, he's only one of one hundred senators, almost all of whom are beholden to or influenced by—to varying degrees and on varying issues—the members of "the billionaire class", as he would put it. Bezos's net worth is currently over $160 billion. Q.E.D.

In a world where wealth distribution was flatter, and the richest person alive had access to like $100 million (a lot of money!), that would be one thing. The distribution is not so flat in our world, to put it mildly. Not to be pat, but money is power, and I think it's important to grasp the orders of magnitude at play here.

A senator who ran and lost a presidential election is not as powerful as the richest man on Earth, no.

That's always been Bernie's style. He finds a target for hate, and gets votes by stirring up the hate.

Won't someone please think of the poor billionares?

I hear that hit job of a book A Christmas Carol did unreparable damage to Mr. Scrooge’s reputation. A damn shame.

Mocking rich people for how they spend their money is a pleasant past time for humanity, not anything deplorable.

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