Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Good question.
It's easy for me to answer just as asked: I am a partial owner of Amazon through my pension plan (S&P 500 component). And I am an Amazon customer. So no ethical problem.
But what if we changed the hypothetical so that I stopped being a customer, and, on top of that, Jeff Bozos took Amazon private?
And on top of that, let's say that they stopped the worthless-to-me practice of hosting anonymous reviews and instead linked to professional signed book reviews at sites like nybooks.com?*
Then it would be tempting to me to take Bezos's machine cycles with no possibility of him profiting from it.
I think it would be a worse to put wear and tear on the carpets of a Mom and Pa store than to take the machine cycles of a billionaire. But I'm a little uncomfortable saying that, because billionaires are human too.
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* I'd love to have a good comprehensive search engine for professionally done signed book reviews. Do anyone know of one?
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By this logic I can do whatever I want in a store, as long as it's listed on an American stock exchange as I hold a
Total Market Index. We'll ignore that I don't get any voting rights or other benefits of ownership, and that the fund provider uses sampling to match the index. But I'm an owner of every public company so I can browse and buy elsewhere all i want!