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"You have a company taking advantage of the perfectly legal rules that the system set up. OH GAWD better grab pitchforks."

People aren't allowed to be upset about something just because it's not illegal?

Be mad...

at the people who made it, "not illegal".

That's not Amazon. The anger, to the extent that it's justified, is misplaced.

Most of the tax breaks Amazon used are open for pretty much any company, and have been around for a very long time. But no one seems to want to repeal or fix these laws. In all of this, I haven't seen a single person talk about them. You can't agree to a set of rules then complain when someone actually follows them.

Many people may not even know about them. Encouraging people to channel these feelings into the ballot is well and fine, but let's not pretend there's anything close to a direct coupling between the will of the people and the will of their representatives, much less preexisting laws. People are allowed to be dissatisfied; they don't have to simply lie in the bed that they only had a partial hand in making.

I don't think anyone saying people shouldn't be dissatisfied. It's just that targeting Amazon with that ire is ineffective when it's the laws on the books that are the problem

Ineffective without other action, but not misdirected.

You do have to be logically consistent in your voting though, and you should be as well informed as possible.

You can't have people vote for anything shiny with "JOBS" written on it, and then get outraged when corporations get tax breaks.

Continuous outrage leads to the same results as continuous praise: Leaders who don't feel bound to the laws that their constituents have created.

Don't defend them when they are criticized for complaining about something they put absolutely zero effort into researching. Anyone complaining about Amazon and not the state government and/or the tax break programs is being ignorant and shouldn't be coddled.

Reality doesn't allow people to have it both ways. Either be upset that the system incentivizes the behavior, or be upset that the incentives failed.

In both of those cases, the blame lies at the feet of the elected officials. Granted, the implication of that is the blame lies at the feet of those who cast the ballots (George Carlin, we miss you). People always have trouble blaming themselves.

Corporations are jello. They take the shape of the mold they sit in. If they get big enough, the mold is the whole world's economy.

Not everyone voted for the ballots which supposedly led to these decisions. Moreover, politicians lie. When government policy doesn’t reflect the desires of the public in an ostensible democracy, I find it odd to blame the people who are ruled instead of the rulers. I don’t know much about George Carlin, but from what little I’ve seen of his political commentary, I doubt he would so quickly jump to blaming the ruled instead of the rulers.

Using this logic, people aren't allowed to be upset at anything, as long as it's a rational action within a system. This is a weird way to look at things!

You can justify all sorts of reprehensible behavior this way. "Either be upset that the system incentivizes slavery, or be upset that the incentives against slavery failed." But definitely don't be upset at the slaveowners!

Exactly. Realistically, most large-scale businesses will amorally fill whatever set of incentives exist around them, and the most effective way to keep them from being destructive is to regulate. However, businesses are made of people, and those people still have a moral obligation to society, even if most of the ones at the top ignore it. Actions beyond moral shaming need to be taken, but one doesn't preclude the other.

Please explain what moral obligation you think Amazon was shirking by bringing massive tax revenue to NYC and far above average pay jobs.

> Using this logic, people aren't allowed to be upset at anything, as long as it's a rational action within a system. This is a weird way to look at things!

That's not what was said, at all. Be upset at your politicians. This is a democracy despite what the cynics say. The vast majority of people mad at Amazon don't even understand that they weren't being given very special treatment. Most of it came from existing state incentive programs.

Why not also be upset at Amazon? They're doing something many people consider unethical.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon, billionaires and mammoth corporate entities in general, are not some inert goo. They actively shape the system to work to their own benefit, and they have massively more power and influence than the average citizen and even the average elected official.

> In both of those cases, the blame lies at the feet of the elected officials. Granted, the implication of that is the blame lies at the feet of those who cast the ballots...

Blame also lies at the feet of those people and organizations who twist the imperfect rules and governmental systems to suit themselves at the expense of others.

To put it another way: all software has bugs, and many of them get exploited. While it might feel just to put all the blame on the software engineer who wrote the code (after all, wasn't he supposed to have done a perfect job?), blame still lies at the feet of those people who chose to exploit the bugs to enrich themselves and/or do harm to others. Hackers are not an impersonal force of nature, they're people who made a choice.

> “all software has bugs... blame still lies at the feet of those people who choose to exploit the bugs...”

Nice analogy!

Except the tax incentives aren't bugs in your analogy to software. They're design choices. The system was given specific characteristics to produce the results that occurred (before Amazon backed out). If the system is so designed, then working in harmony with its design choices is not exploitation.

But I'll grant you, I'm just arguing the analogy.

The real problem seems to me to be that de Blasio is being a weather vane of sorts. He was a cheerleader for Amazon, doing the work to get them into the city. When that failed and political gain was to be had, he changed his tune to "OMG! I can't believe how evil they are! I'm a victim!"

Amazon didn't twist the rules, they played by them (unsuccessfully, as it happens). Nor was this at the expense of others. Whether Amazon got to build a headquarters in NY or not didn't preclude others from doing so. Whether Amazon got tax incentives to go to NY or not, didn't take money away from anyone else. Additional tax revenue that might have been collected is not money that _belongs_ to someone else.

It is reasonable to expect moral behavior from individuals. History tells us that corporations almost never display moral behavior. Partly this is because they permit decisions where each person in the corporation may assume that someone else will be moral; a very ordinary human failing. (Forward thinking beyond the framework of advantage for self and company is rare.)

Corporations as a whole don't have a conscience. That's why we regulate. That's why we create laws with which the harm corporations might do to people is reduced and minimized so that the benefits corporations can bring may still be realized. Anthropomorphizing corporations is only useful for generating anger, which, in turn, is only useful for political gain. (Discounting First Amendment goggles.)

That lands things squarely back on the voter's back in the system here in the U.S. If we go back to your analogy, voters are the ones hiring the designers and not invalidating the contract when the design goes off the rails.

>Private companies don't owe you anything...

Money quote.

These are businesses, not charities. So they have to make business decisions. Amazon was right to walk away. (And yes, I realize that the same business reality will oblige Amazon to put several more thousand jobs in NYC in any case. But guess what? I'd bet any money they won't put as many as they would have. They will put several more thousand in DC instead.)

Before anyone gets mad at Amazon for behaving in this manner, yell at your political leaders for making these offers in the first place.

It is exploitative.

Any company founded in the US is going to use the resources US provides - roads, trade & economic power, the USPS, the talent pool etc for Amazon. When their success is built on that foundation, they owe it to the government (& taxpayers) to return the favor and show some goodwill.

Instead, taxpayers subsidize them when they're growing, then they want to cheat as much as legally possible on their taxes when they're grown up.

If you advocate letting Amazon get those tax breaks, yet yelling at the politicians who allow them, thats a basic mismatch between what you say and your revealed preferences. Don't blame politicians when they cater to those preferences.

> then they want to cheat as much as legally possible on their taxes when they're grown up.

If it's legal, it isn't cheating...

Only if you believe there is no difference between whats legal and whats moral.

So why isn't your outrage with the government that adds tax incentives for businesses? It's like being pissed off at people who live in section 8 housing for not paying enough rent...

I do think the government giving preferential treatment to some businesses is anti competitive, didn't say otherwise.

That doesn't mean those who take advantage of unfair laws are completely absolved of blame either - they made a choice. You/grandparent seem to be saying businesses (and the real people who make these decisions) have zero responsibility to society besides what is legally forced upon them.

To put your logic back to you, if someone hacks your phone, steals all your data and blackmails you, you should be "outraged" only at the engineers who let the security vulnerability go through (i.e created the incentive), but not the hacker who is actually exploiting that vulnerability.

> exploitative

That isn't an appropriate word. Clearly, the City of NY, or whoever is negotiating with Amazon, is big enough not to be pushed around if they don't want to be. It is a negotiation.

It the political system is screwing over tax payers, that flat out isn't Amazon's problem. It is the voters' problem.

> When their success is built on that foundation, they owe it to the government (& taxpayers) to return the favor and show some goodwill.

The philosophical point of a corporation in a capitalist system is to create goods and services as cheaply as possible. In theory, it would be nice not to charge corporations any tax, to keep prices low, and only tax the income and capital gains of the owner as money flows out to them from the company.

I doubt that absolutist approach works in practice; the situation isn't simple enough and the capitalists would figure out some sort of creative accounting scheme to avoid the money ever making it to them (actually, pretty sure they already do that in America, since American corps usually don't pay dividends). But in theory corporate tax is just bad for everyone.

The City of New York and the executive of the City of New York are not one and the same.

The executive of the State in conjunction with the executive of the City tried to do an end-run around the City Council by using power in laws that people forgot existed. But this law required an approval from the State Legislature, which was not willing to grant it unconditionally. The political system is working as intended.

> Yeah, I put five dealers against one another in a bidding war to get my business the last time I shopped for a car. Amazon can do the same thing.

Surely the reason most upset people are upset is that these deals with governments tend to involve tax breaks, and taxpayers have every right to concern themselves with tax policy. I doubt many of those people would also be upset with your car negotiations.

They offered Amazon $3B tax breaks, while the city would have profited $27B. The city would have a net gain of $24B.

Now the city doesn't gain anything.

That seems overly simplistic. I doubt that Amazon are the only ones with any likelihood of bringing new jobs to New York in the near future.

> I doubt that Amazon are the only ones with any likelihood of bringing new jobs to New York in the near future.

Not anymore. Why would a company want the hassle? Go to New York and have an idiot bartender trash our goodwill or go somewhere else where they roll out the red carpet for us.

That jobs would come with or without Amazon (more likely with Amazon, since Amazon HQ would be a huge business attractor for smaller companies) - nobody would say "well, we're going to open office in NYC but since Amazon is already there we won't". Other companies would open anyway, yes. But Amazon won't. It's not a fixed pie, it adds up. And NYC just took a huge piece of this pie and threw it into the river. To spite Bezos. Hope it's worth $24B to them.

> No one forced any of these states/cities to join this bidding contest. They willingly participated.

This lacks context. Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo participated in the bidding context, basically by themselves. They didn't have a mandate to do this from anybody, since no one ever mentioned groveling on their feet to shovel tax breaks at a corporation. (In fact, Bill de Blasio was pretty much elected on a 'soak the rich' platform, which is a line he is more than happy to push when he knows there is no realistic chance of it actually happening.) They then conspired to do an end run around the legislative branches of their respective jurisdictions, and almost succeeded.

American states and cities are not authoritarian or run by a single emperor. There are built in checks and balances, and quite frankly everyone involved misjudged the pushback they would get by openly trying to ignore all of that.

I also wanted AMZN to come to the city. Yes you are right its doing whats best for them by taking advantage of the tax code. However you can’t just say that the system is broken and Amazon is just a bystander taking advantage of it. Amazon is partly responsible, through lobbying, for why the system is broken.

> I put five dealers against one another in a bidding war to get my business the last time I shopped for a car

Now try the same trick with five Bentley dealers. Nope, no discount because they know you can afford list price.

I don't mind that there are incentives for SMEs. I do mind that behemoths like Amazon can drain the pool to the detriment of others.