Jeff Bezos Is Wrong

Wealth and Media Ownership

Late last month, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon who purchased the Washington Post in 2013, wrote this to the Post’s employees:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.

I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.

I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.

Jeff

Bezos published this letter on Xwitter.

Well, who wouldn’t be for freedom and individual liberty? I am. I’m very much for freedom and individual liberty, in fact. So what’s wrong with Bezos’s stance?

My argument with Bezos

I object to this letter not so much because of what Bezos is for as why he’s for it and what he omits—or, perhaps, what he elevates as the “two pillars” that he consider the future of our society.

On a purely Constitutional/American society basis, a reasonable argument can be made for these two ideals as pillars of American life.

But the problem is that Bezos, as his letter develops, defines freedom as “free markets.” He also says that freedom “minimizes coercion.” I’m not particularly in favor of coercion, but it is a fact that our society depends on coercion in various areas of life in order to live well together.¹ Speed limits, taxation, and all manner of things are regulated by laws, and they do in fact coerce us. For good.

Great wealth, which Bezos certainly has at this point in his life, also definitely removes a whole lot of coercion (for him) that ordinary people, including many Amazon workers and you and I, experience on a daily basis. Bezos of course has profited immensely from free markets.²

To define freedom as essentially a matter of economics and commerce is to minimize and perhaps even ignore many other areas of life where freedom is possible and may not exist for other humans. Is it a stretch to say that, for Bezos, freedom mainly means economic freedom? I don’t think so. Economic freedom is mainly experienced by those who have inherited wealth or attained it through commerce, and that commerce frequently is at the expense of other human beings.

Individual liberty is also a good thing, generally. My complaint here is that Bezos misses the goals that are explicitly stated by the country’s founders—namely, that all of the rights we are granted are not only for my personal liberty but also for the common good.

In this statement, it seems to me that Bezos essentially takes a doctrinaire Libertarian line of argument. What he cites as the two pillars he wants to support are basically the perspective shared by all Libertarians, and that perspective is that government should never infringe on either free markets or my personal liberty. This is a failure to understand even what the Founders saw as important—or at least gets at the issue only partially, incompletely.

Libertarians generally miss the important point that all of what we do together, under our government, should not be just for individuals but for the society as a whole. Jeff Bezos is, quite unsurprisingly, a Libertarian in his ideology. I have yet to meet or chat with a Libertarian who understands the broader implications of the Constitution for the life of American society.³

A Christian disagreement with Bezos

From a Christian perspective, what’s wrong with Bezos’s perspective?

As I’ve read Scripture through the years, and especially in the past few years, it’s become clear to me that the primary function of government (whether by kings—usually—or by others) is to provide for justice, not individual freedom or free markets, even if the latter are perhaps a result of the primary function. I’m not going to take this post to get into a full-orbed discussion of justice and righteousness in Scripture, but it’s quite clear in many texts that goal of government is to provide for the well-being of all of a nation’s people. That’s a short definition of biblical justice. No one gets left out; no one is ignored.⁴

One can even make a good argument that many ancient governments—not just Israel’s—were expected to operate according to this principle, even if most of them in practice did not.

This, of course, is nowhere on Bezos’s agenda. He’s not a Christian (so far as I know), so perhaps it’s unfair to hold him to a Christian standard. But it is worth noting that Christians should not support his approach to what’s good for society: it’s incomplete, it misses the most important things.

So what about the Washington Post?

Merna and I have had a subscription to the WaPo for some time. We read news there; the fact-checker (quite valuable these days); and some of the opinion columnists. Quite a few subscribers (200,000 or so?) canceled their subscriptions last fall, when Bezos brought in a new editorial director, who clearly aimed to chart a different direction for the paper. I wondered whether we should follow suit, but we didn’t.

Then, with this letter in late February, something of a new crisis: should we cancel now that Bezos has indicated that the Post will support a different direction, editorially, than it has in the past? So far, I think we’ll keep our subscription for two reasons:

1. In the modern world (and perhaps not merely here, but in times past as well), it’s nigh impossible to keep one’s hands completely clean. Where do you buy your gas? Should one shop at Walmart or not? What about Amazon, which is so very convenient in many ways? Many of us are likely to draw our lines in somewhat different places. The opinion editors who have left the paper I’m following in their now independent ways (mostly on Substack). In that sense, I’m not missing anything significant . . . yet!

2. If the reporting descends to lower levels of care or accuracy, we’ll reconsider. As long as the reporting continues to be factual and comprehensive (defined as not avoiding topics due to fear of offending politicians or business people)—and the newspaper may at some point cross that line—we’ll drop our subscription. So far, I don’t feel like we need to fact-check the Washington Post (unlike other well-known media outlets).

What do you think?

1. We may also be experiencing a Constitutional crisis, because in many respects the current administration is refusing to accept the coercion that is represented by court judgments against actions taken by the administration.

2. Our government is currently—and has, at least for the past two decades—failed to protect the American people from the ravages wrought by monopolies and monopsonies. Our anti-trust laws are not being enforced, and we need new tools to make the economic playing field more level than it currently is. Any number of businesses that were good for our society were overwhelmed by the very rich corporations, which typically swallows up the good created by those businesses and gives us less freedom in terms of where we shop, what choices we have in terms of how we buy things, and so on.

3. If you think I’m slandering Libertarians inappropriately—and you’re a Libertarian—I’m happy to engage in conversation.

4. Nicholas Wolterstorff says:

“Government is a gift of God. It’s not of the devil or something that we wish we could get rid of or anything like that. But it’s something to be thankful for — when it doesn’t become a raging beast, of course, when it does what it’s supposed to do. And what it’s, above all, supposed to do, Psalm 72 says, and Paul says in Romans 13 and lots of other passages, is secure justice, that that’s the fundamental task of government, of the state.

So I begin there. I recently read a book that I found extremely illuminating by Benjamin Lynerd, called “Republican Theology.” It talks about some conservative attitudes toward government and the state over the last century or so. He quotes lots of figures and speeches and articles. And the theme that comes through over and over is not that the business of government is to secure justice in society but that the business of government is to secure individual liberty. What struck me in reading the book was that almost nothing is said about justice; it’s just the securing of individual liberty. And that for me, was an eye-opener.”

The entire discussion can be found here.