Last week the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Marian Tupy arguing that “Jeff Bezos Earned his Fortune.” Tupy founded Human Progress, sort of a web magazine based on the idea that escape from social stagnation – human progress – requires a “culture of optimism and progress.” In this framing, we owe our rise from subsistence living with no running water and medicine or other technological advances to the rise of this culture in the West. Human Progress is a Cato Institute program. CATO exists to move “public policy in the direction of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.” This is a free-market libertarian think tank that works against policy that regulates Capitalism in any way.

With this background in mind, it’s no surprise that Mr. Tupy believes that Bezos does, in fact, deserve to control an almost unimaginable amount of wealth (something on the order of $280B). 

I don’t disagree that Jeff Bezos should be a very wealthy man because of the businesses he started. But did the creation of online retail stores and internet cloud storage centers earn Bezos the obscene level of wealth he now controls? My back-of-the envelope math suggests that if he started spending a million dollars every day, he would need more than 750 years to spend all his money, assuming he never added another nickel to his bank account.

This level of wealth in the hands of one person is immoral and ridiculous. How does Tupy justify it?

He nods briefly to Amazon Web Services but focuses most of his argument on whether Amazon’s online retail platform saves people time, and how much. 

“Consider the arithmetic. Suppose an hour of labor is worth about $64, roughly the average gross domestic product per hour worked in the countries in which Amazon operates. If Mr. Bezos’ fortune corresponded to the total value that Amazon created, his $275 billion would represent about 4.3 billion hours of saved time. Divided among Amazon’s more than 300 million active customers, the saving comes to about 14 hours per customer over Amazon’s life. That’s nothing. Many customers save that in a month…

At $64 an hour, that means Amazon has saved its customers about 214 billion hours. Across 300 million customers over roughly 32 years (Amazon was founded in 1994), the saving equals about 22 hours per person a year. That is 25 to 26 minutes a week, or a little less than four minutes a day.“

I won’t challenge this math except to point out that if an hour of labor is worth about $64, and the pay range for most hourly Amazon workers is between $18 and $20, Bezos is paying this part of his work force less than a third of what their productivity is worth. Since Amazon’s gross profit in 2025 was around $360B, they could have paid each of their hourly workers another $20/hour and still raked in around $300B in profit. So while Amazon might be saving people a few minutes a day because they can order diapers online, they also exploit people who work for them. In other words, part of Mr. Bezos’ fortune comes from capturing productivity gains provided by others. 

Amazon cuts other costs on the backs of workers, most importantly by refusing to keep workplaces safe. In 2023, the US Strategic Organizing Center (a pro-labor group) reported an OSHA finding that Amazon workplace policies, especially in its warehouses and fulfillment centers, creates a hazardous workplace through inhumane discipline and monitoring systems. These policies require workers to remain on the floor except during specific breaks, even if they need a bathroom visit. OSHA and SOC have also documented cases of management refusing to provide medical treatment for workplace injuries. Changing these policies to improve workplace conditions would cost, money so Amazon leaves them in place. This of course means that some portion of Bezos’ fortune comes at the expense of worker safety. To the extent Bezos earned his wealth, he did so by exploiting and harming others.

Tupy also argues that Amazon forced other retailers to improve their websites, delivery speed, and product selection. What he fails to mention is the key change Amazon forced other retailers to make: lower prices. Target, Walmart, and other chains all had to match Amazon’s pricing, and to do this they had to keep their own employees’ wages low. This business model only works, by the way, because government subsidizes it through social welfare programs like Medicaid and SNAP, but that’s a subject for another day.

To do this, competitors had to adopt many Amazon policies, including worker pay rates. To cut costs while improving websites and delivery, Target and Walmart had to cut labor costs and degrade workplace safety. 

Amazon’s success carries important social costs as well. One reason for the death of small towns in America was the arrival of cheap retail, first in the form of Walmart stores and later with the ability to order goods online from Amazon. Yes, this saved people time, and in some cases money, but it also destroyed a key part of American social life: shopping trips to the city center or department store, lunch or dinner after, and the associated connection people form with others. 

We came to know the shop owners, cashiers, pharmacists, and other business owners and workers personally. Sometimes they helped us out of a jam. They almost always kept the proceeds from their business in the community, which Walmart and Amazon do not do. They created jobs that gave kids a choice to stay in the area rather than migrate to larger cities in search of a job.

Immigration, feminism, homosexuality, and slides away from the Church isn’t what killed small-town America. These groups in fact kept it alive by bringing new products and ideas (that killer taco place, for example). Cheap big-box and online retail killed it, and with it much of the economic activity that sustained it.

To be sure, retailers like Amazon and Wal Mart create efficiencies, with their best innovation coming in changes to supply chain management. We now have more choices, and goods that come at lower prices. Maybe Tupy is right, and each of us saved four minutes a day because we can click to order diapers instead of making a trip to a store. But this has come at a cost, both to individual workers and society as a whole. 

All of this means that Jeff Bezos deserves to be a wealthy man. But he has not earned the obscene fortune he now controls. He built this fortune by exploiting and harming workers, and by destroying a key component of community life, especially in small towns. His workers, and the local business owners he chased out of small-town America, paid much of the cost of building it. Is four minutes of time saved a day worth it?