February 26, 2025 - 6:00pm
One of the world’s richest men wants his newspaper to push policies that favour the rich. That’s the upshot of Jeff Bezos’s announcement today of a new regime at the Washington Post. Henceforth, the Amazon boss decreed, his paper’s comment pages will promote libertarianism (“free markets and personal liberty”), and will not publish opinions contradicting these central principles.
While the story has a dog-bites-man quality — breaking: tycoon prefers low taxes and weak unions — it’s still a dismaying turn. Since the Wall Street Journal comment pages (where I cut my teeth) are also strictly committed to free-market libertarianism, it leaves the New York Times opinion page as the only national print outlet where writers can argue for greater union density and more robust antitrust enforcement, say, or against Wall Street’s hollowing out of the real economy.
Bezos’s reasoning is ahistorical and infuriatingly self-serving. Free-market freedom, he says, is “ethical — it minimizes coercion”. That’s one of the big myths of modern libertarianism: the notion that coercion can only come from the government, while the market is a zone of perfect competition, in which everyone can always find a better deal elsewhere.
To see why that’s untrue, consider… Amazon. In 2020, the mega-retailer terminated the employment of Christian Smalls, a worker at one of its warehouses on Staten Island, New York, who had sought to organise his fellow workers. (In an internal memo, Amazon characterised Smalls, who is African American, as “not smart or articulate” — this, at the same time that the company took a leading role in corporate America’s Black Lives Matter advocacy).
Why did Smalls resolve to mount collective action in the first place? By now, the Dickensian horrors of Bezos’s foundries are well-known. Bathroom breaks are often too short to permit workers to make it across the vast span of the warehouse and return to their work stations in time. Bezos offers his workers only a limited amount of “time off-task” and docks their pay for what Amazon calls “time theft”. Sometimes, this forces workers, especially older ones, to relieve themselves in bottles or in dark corners.
A managerial culture of fear is all-pervasive. “Amazon tracks workers’ every movement inside its warehouses,” reports the New York Times. Even top performers have been fired for as little as a single underproductive day. Even for managers who don’t ruthlessly dismiss workers, the explicit aim is to create an atmosphere of generalised terror, according to internal documents reviewed by the Times.
Meanwhile, on the cultural front, Amazon drew the ire of many conservatives and gender-critical feminists for its decision to delist Ryan T. Anderson’s 2018 book about transgenderism, When Harry Became Sally. The firm claimed, bizarrely, that Anderson’s scholarly work violated the firm’s policies against hate speech. After the 2024 election, Amazon began selling the book again.
Minimising coercion, indeed. The only meaningful defences against such abuses are countervailing power mounted by labour unions or government regulation. Yet the Washington Post will no longer host arguments in favour of such measures.
Beyond morality, Bezos waxes historical. “A big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm,” he claims. That’s one of the shibboleths of modern libertarianism: an invented tradition used to retcon the American past to reflect Chamber of Commerce preferences on issues such as trade, immigration, and labour rights. In reality, US economic might and dynamism were built on Alexander Hamilton’s decidedly un-libertarian model. The Hamiltonian system relied on a strong state to protect manufacturing, weave together a national market, and ensure the flow of credit (i.e., tariff, canal, and the Bank of the United States).
There were proto-libertarian opponents of that system, to be sure, mainly in the Southern slavocracy. If they’d had their way, Britain would have defeated American industry, and the new republic would have remained little more than a swampy resource pool for European manufactures. In the event, it was heirs to the Hamiltonian tradition — the likes of Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon — who won that debate, bringing about a blended political economy that, at its best, encourages government, capital, and labour to cooperate for the national welfare.
That isn’t to deny a historical role for free enterprise. It’s merely to point out that prosperity resulted from the tension between material forces and ideals: state and enterprise, capital and labour, individual rights and solidarity. It would be one thing if a national newspaper like the Washington Post set out to give greater weight to the free-enterprise side of the ledger. But that’s not what Bezos’s new regime promises: “Viewpoints opposing [free markets] will be left to be published by others”, he wrote.
There is a rich irony in an oligarch touting his commitment to freedom in a memo narrowly restricting the range of views available at his paper.
Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It
SohrabAhmari
“The only meaningful defences against such abuses are countervailing power mounted by labour unions or government regulation”. Er, what about competition for workers in a vibrant free market economy with proper controls over levels of immigration? And it is not necessarily racist to describe someone in an internal memo as “not smart or articulate”. A lot of people – of all races – are not smart or articulate.
The notion of competition as a panacea is at the heart of libertarian ideology. In the libertarian / Econ 101 Arcadia, every market features numerous sellers and buyers. In reality, under industrial conditions and owing to factory and network effects (increasing returns to scale), most markets are dominated by a handful of actors. Amazon, for example, controls 80 percent of online book sales.
Under such conditions, prices and wages are indices of relative market POWER, not pristine reflections of supply and demand or marginal productivity. Millions of workers (sellers of labor) going up against a single employer (buyer of labor) have very little bargaining power. Hence, the need for unions to create a measure of symmetry.
Does personal liberty not include freedom of association?
Not, unfortunately, as Anglo-American employers and their mouthpieces define it.
But they don’t get to define it…
Unions have historically reduced the possibilities of increased production levels, we have had many examples in the UK.
That in itself reduces workers opportunities for higher wages, there has to be a better way than the adversarial battle between unions and employers.
Regulations can and do protect workers and having a labour market that is swamped with migrants has probably done more than any other action to reduce wages and conditions.
Indeed. It’s the adversarial effect that cripples the free market, and renders the Western democratic model at a distinct disadvantage with authoritarian Eastern powers.
When Barbara Castle produced her “In Place of Strife” proposals during the Wilson government in the 1960s, this was recognised. We seem not to have moved on much from there.
Yes, Castle’s In Place of Strife was a huge missed opportunity for Labour with Callaghan being the leader of those who opposed it.
Ironic that Callaghan was brought down by the type of Union action it sought to control.
Sohrab, I see you are a student of the school of thought that says that more big words means more erudition (i.e. brains). 😉
In fact, less is more, and like a poet or lawyer, pick your words with care and thrift. Too many words, and too many large words especially, obscure and do not elucidate your point.
I thought it was well elucidated, teach.
Meh, this is weak sauce. 80% of online book sales, but where are the orders fulfilled? Probably in a few huge distribution centers. And those distribution centers are in places where there is a lot of labour to draw from. Are the people working there forced to fill book orders? Or perhaps there is nothing better to do in that part of town? Everyone, and I mean everyone, is underpaid. Even a CEO of a big company is comparing wages with other big company CEOs. You’re right, its at the margins, and if a book order filler decides she’s found something better to do she’ll leave. There’s no need to invoke the divine POWER in that decision. You can always go back to doing what you would have done if there was no book distribution center in town.
In the US, at least, we have the ability to invoke anti- trust laws to break up monopolies and oligopolies. There seems to be bipartisan agreement that these should be employed against Big Tech, Big Pharma and outfits like Amazon.
What labor market has only “one buyer of labor”? You should be referring to the wage elasticity of labor. Workers who earn more have skills for which there are limited substitutes. A functioning education system (which we don’t have mainly due to unions) would give people skills that make them more unique, less interchangeable and thus better paid.
Not sure there’s ever been a “vibrant free market economy” at least not if we mean ‘vibrant’ in a sense that correlates with prosperity. Economies relatively free from Goverment, and immigration preasure, like Somalia, haven’t been all that prosperous.
Looking forward, while I’d agree Amazon haven’t been exactly been competent in the AI space compared with more ethical companies – there’s now enough easy to implement Open source & off the shelf solutions that it’s unclear competion for workers is likely to be much of a concern for them. Mr Ahmari is spot on with all point IMO.
In the event, it was heirs to the Hamiltonian tradition
And given his fondness for tariffs: Donald Trump! Should we consider an endorsement of Mr. Trump (who’s a billionaire), Sohrab?
https://www.compactmag.com/article/he-s-still-the-one/
After Bezos announced this on X, the woke hordes are melting down, posting images of their canceled subscriptions and calling him a…drum roll…fascist!
In other words, this is probably a massively positive thing. Leftists always have the same meltdowns when they have to share space with other peoples opinions.
Indeed. Just like toddlers who have to share toys with siblings.
Free markets and personal liberty favour the rich?
Who knew?
What’s your definition of “Print” Media? Are you saying WaPo, NYT and WSJ are the only ones that qualify? The LA Times seems pretty open to state-run, highly unionized economies for instance.
I frequently read every RCP and it normally contains at least 2-3 pro-Union articles per day (although maybe that is purely in the digital realm).
The LATimes isn’t a *national* paper. It’s a regional paper. — Sohrab Ahmari
And it reflects the Hollywood, tax and spend, liberal/socialist California majority. No doubt contributing to the mass exodus of citizens and industries from California to places like Texas and Florida.
Regional and local papers regurgitate a steady stream of liberal AP group think.
Not sure I believe all the stories of slavocracy in Amazon warehouses but suffice it to say capitalism and free markets have been the systems that have given working people the highest standard of living in the past and can do so again.
Welfarism destroys our economies and our values
Just one more step on the road to fascism, with many steps to come. One day the average American will wake up, but it may be too late.
Fascists in favor of personal liberty? Hmm…
They did wake up. Hence, Donald Trump.
It was only a matter of time before Bezos took control of the paper he bought. I will wait and see what he does before condemning it, something the press should do more of, it seems on every story someone declares the sky is falling before anything has actually happened. This is what the Post’s liberal columnists are doing now covering Trump, a month in and it is already the end of the world, and I am already tired of cries of the end of democracy. It is all pretty boring. The press has lost all its credibility. I don’t think Bezos can make things worse.
The Post is bleeding subscribers and losing millions. If you’re going to own a tax write off, you might as well do what you like with it. It will be interesting to see if the paper does better with the new libertarian editorial policy, but I keep thinking of Arthur Jensen and Howard Beale.
When you lose millions of dollars printing newspapers, getting a tax write off still means you are losing millions of dollars.
The WAPO has been guilty of plain lies and incorrect reporting for years, which is why many are leaving them. When a newspaper constantly tells us that the sky is green and the grass is blue, at some point we wake up and realize they are completely full of shite.
Well said.
The combination of free markets and personal liberty sounds good to me. Classic Liberalism at its finest. Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, before the NeoCon Bush Wars and the Orwellian Obama/Biden Progressive Movement that consumed the US and the world.
Such was innovation’s cradle that beget the World Wide Web and brought the digital age upon us.
I hope Bezos means it. Optimistically assuming he speaks true, the evidence of his intent should be actualized within WaPo’s pages.
That said, I don’t understand why it took the billionaires’ club (Bezos, Zukerberg, etc) so long to comprehend where we were as a society. The progressive utopia of the past decade-plus is not a place for free markets nor is it a place for personal liberty.
If Bezos makes good on his word, I’ll return to reading The Washington Post.
Much as I agree with free markets and small government, and I approved of his intervention to prevent his newspapers as a whole officially supporting the Harris campaign, I can’t agree with Bezos on this. It’s the opinion section after all. None of us benefit from hearing only the same opinion over and over again.
A proper newspaper offers both liberal and conservative editorial opinions. A few years back, so did WaPo…which it stopped doing during the Obama administration and when their sole (but brilliant) conservative columnist, CK, died. It also used to have lively reader debate in comments online — which came to an end about the same time — when conservative reader comments were censored via an automatic computer censor.
One problem is that most US cities don’t have viable multiple newspapers — because there’s little profit in printed news due to new media ( internet, wide range of TV news channels, podcasts, etc.) that are really fast. When I was a lad in the 1960’s, for instance, there were 3 major papers in Houston (Chronicle, Post and Press). The Post and Press failed, leaving only the Houston Chronicle, which was acquired by the Hearst group, which is hyper-liberal.
We have been hearing a very limited subset of (liberal) opinion from the MSM for some time.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is true for company owners AND for unions both. Each has cracked the whip when they had it in their hand (and some good ones have treated their workers and employers fairly). But for one to say: “Unions good, management bad”, makes one a simpleton and no student of human nature.
This poorly articulated response to Mr Bezos’ decision seems to be making his point for him. While I disagree with the author’s version of both the history and the theory of what made America great (eg, the govt doesn’t protect the little man, it protects the politically connected man — shall we examine the way teachers unions profited teachers during Covid at the expense of the children they claim to serve?), whether or not you like the author’s politics, he obviously has a perfectly fine outlet for disseminating them (ie, UnHerd). Why does the author need the Post to publish his views?
More to the point, if viewpoint neutrality is an obligation, why not extend it from ownership to authorship? Why isn’t this author giving us a ‘fair and balanced’ argument for every side? Oh that’s right… because in the land of the free you should be allowed to spend your time and talents — and money — promoting the beliefs you believe in, not the ones you don’t.
This is a typical somnambulistic non-event. Unionism is on a steady decline and a confident path to oblivion. Free trade, generally speaking, includes fair trade. The small “f” fair trade concerns workers and environmental protections and needs reciprocal emphasis.
Funny how it wasn’t a bad thing when the WSJ was the only vaguely libertarian newspaper while the progressives had the WP, NYT, LA Times and almost every other newspaper.
Don’t like Bezos and his power? Don’t buy from Amazon. Lots of people don’t.
There is a deep contradiction in people who on the one hand dis Bezos and resent how rich he is, and after writing the comment flip over to their Amazon tab to order their next whatsit
Love the fact that a NYT journalist finds this alarming.
Anything that causes Leftists to have life shortening spasms of chronic anger is a good thing.