The wild world of politics can get goosey at times. For some time now Bernie Sanders (a liberal socialist and a millionaire) has been making fun of Jeff Bezos (a liberal and the wealthiest man in the world) because Bezos’s companies have many employees who earn so little at their jobs that they also need government-provided welfare to keep body and soul together.
One suspects that Bernie is just pulling the old Jesse Jackson trick of shaking down a rich businessman and is trying to coerce some cash from Bezos, and for a while I thought that Tucker Carlson, who has been reporting Sanders’ badgering of Bezos on his nightly Fox television program, was just making fun of Sanders because the leftist senator from Vermont is a rich, socialism-espousing hypocrite.
But Mr. Carlson, whose Fox TV program I dote on and watch faithfully, is taking his ridicule of Bezos more seriously than I’m comfortable with, by comparing Bezos’s under-paying an employee with a moral issue, because some employees’ lack of income causes the average American to have to subsidize the Amazon empire with higher taxes and more federal bureaucracy in order to provide financial assistance to those employees. It seems that Tucker may have missed the point that businesses are not established to assure a large income to employees, but were rather set up to make money for the employer.
The argument that Amazon is under-paying its employees reminds me of some fool union organizer who used to appear occasionally as a talking head on TV, and always took the opportunity to bash Wal-Mart for under-paying its employees and not allowing unionization of their stores, while at the same time he would ridicule Wal-Mart employees for continuing to work for peanuts at the evil Wal-Mart. This more-intelligent-than-thou ridicule of employees for working for any particular company is insulting to the employees who are the best deciders of whom they will work for and how much money they will accept for their efforts.
There’s also the argument that an employer, such as Wal-Mart and Amazon, must decide the salary that’s advantageous for them to pay for the positions for which they are hiring. So as things have always worked, the employer sets the salary and the employee accepts or rejects the job offered. It seems that Tucker may be stepping on the toes of both the employer and the employee with his anti-Bezos position, just like the anti-Wal-Mart lackey criticized Wal-Mart, but it’s none of a third-party’s business. Salaries are negotiable and a person working for an employer has already accepted the employer‘s offer.
One hopes Tucker is just poking fun at the left in his aligning with dumb old Bernie, and I share his making fun of both Sanders and Bezos.
