Amazon Is Our Hero, Not The Villain In The Piece.

The Amazon tax debate debacle shows, again, how far the West has fallen behind the IRon Drapes of Europe, the US and the Pacific. This company has structured its affairs, apparently, so as to pay as little tax as it legally has to in most of the countries it operates in, and by doing so has become one of the most innovative companies in the world, opening the world of books up to all of us, and making books cheaper while availing readers of an abundance of authors we wouldn’t have access to otherwise. Yet are they lauded for this? No, in the new slave West where morality is turned on its head, they are marked as the enemy:

Andy Street said Amazon could “out-invest” and “out-trade” UK companies if the Government does not take action to force the online retailer to pay tax fairly in Britain.

“There is less money to invest if you are giving 27pc of your profits to the Exchequer,” Mr Street told Sky’s Jeff Randall. “Clearly, if you are domiciled in a tax haven you’ve got much more [money]. They [Amazon] will out invest and ultimately out trade us. And that means there will not be a tax base in the UK.”

Let’s read that from the point of view of a free man.

A company that is allowed to keep its own earnings can invest those earnings to innovate on behalf of the consumer, and keep their prices lower. 27% of their profits kept by them does far more to benefit consumers and raise the quality of living of all of us, than that same money going to financially and morally bankrupted welfare surveillance states that have enslaved us, and are dimming the lights of freedom and liberty all over again as they push whole nations over the fiscal cliff and destroy the middle class.

Thanks to Amazon I can sit in bed at 2.00am, almost anywhere in the world, browse any author in the world, buy their book for possibly a third of the price I would’ve been paying ten years ago, and have it downloaded to my ebook reader within a millisecond. More, I’m writing a novel: let’s say it content is such that traditional publishers wouldn’t have a bar of it, because it advocates via narrative classical liberal values and the concept of the free world that should’ve been our legacy. Well, no problem, Amazon gives me the ability to self-publish to a world-wide audience: some authors whose voices would never have been heard otherwise, are doing quite well by this, and creating a readership for themselves. Amazon, far from being the villain, is the most moral of entities; one of the biggest promoters of free speech in a world where free speech is under constant attack. Perhaps instead of opprobrium they should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

I propose the answer is to give all of Amazon’s competitors the tax breaks they have, because that’s how the consumer will really win. That’s what will raise the living standards of the free world better than all this money going into the cruel mincer of the surveillance state. But no, that won’t happen, we can't have successful companies being able to out-invest and out-trade the Nanny State, and, of course, brute men and women like these need their welfare cheques, so let’s crush Amazon under the iron fist of state, and I can go back to just reading the Income Tax Act 2007 behind the IRon Drape. That's how far the West has fallen.

Oh, and regarding that quotation, note that damned word again? 'Fairly'.