I remember when Bezos and Amazon were coming up. We thought of them like Earth Shoes and the Whole Earth Catalog. Hippie start-ups. And then when he got bigger, what was noticeable was his debt. His firm never made any money, cried poor, but somehow kept being capitalized because of its potential.

Now it’s easy to see that allowing such e-commerce without State and Sales Taxation did immeasurable harm to bricks and mortar stores, and to community development. Additionally, we’d be much better served by a variety of smaller, linked e-commerce retailers, whose internet sales operations corresponded with a physical store. Amazon’s huge warehouses are nightmare employment scenarios, and having one person in charge of such retailing largess is an invitation for despotism (as Ralph Nader explains here).

Trump threatened to tax Amazon. There exists the hope that as we stop shopping there, and purchase instead through other networked e-commerce sites, sufficient legislation may one day come along to couple with the boycott and reduce Amazon’s outsized influence.