PageSix and Others Owe Jeff Bezos an Apology

At a gala fundraiser for the Baby2Baby charity, Jeff Bezos donated half a million dollars.

Get a load of the ungracious reaction:

"Everyone was waiting for him to donate something," an insider said of the world's second-richest man, "but he didn't. Then someone donated a million dollars. And then a little later, [Bezos] donated $500,000. There was an audible groan from the room."

"If someone else can donate a million, Jeff Bezos can donate more than a million," they said. [bold added]

Then "journalist" Oli Coleman piles on in the next paragraph:

It may seem [Because it was. (!) -- ed] an ungracious reaction, considering he did drop half a million -- until you consider that Bezos is estimated to make around $142,667 per minute. So he in theory made more in the five minutes he spent pretending to eat the chicken than he donated the whole night.

So? Jeff Bezos is wealthy because he improved the lives of millions by making it easy for us to buy things we need -- particularly during this pandemic, when many of us needed to stay put or were wrongly forced to do so.

It boggles the mind that anyone could so easily forget this.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that Bezos, simply by doing a heroic job of making things run so smoothly, has been alleviating the lot of many children and parents directly or indirectly already, to the point that he deserves to be honored by any number of similar charities.

Ayn Rand made this clear in her 1965 essay, "What Is Capitalism?," when she discussed how much members of a society benefit from the work of those at the top of what she called the pyramid of ability:

Image by Seattle City Council, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

[T]the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor -- the man who discovers new knowledge -- is the permanent benefactor of humanity .... It is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one's sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform .... In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him; but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the "competition" between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of exploitation" for which you have damned the strong. [bold added]

What would the author of that snitty piece -- or the ingrate "insider" -- or those groaning, envious mediocrities at the gala -- have done during the pandemic without Amazon? I don't know, but they owed Bezos gratitude to begin with and it is beyond disgraceful for them to complain about a gift he generously chose to give.

If they won't say it, I will: Thank you, Mr. Bezos.

-- CAV