The Sickness of “Fairness”

So this morning, as I posted a new order through my Amazon Prime account, I was slapped with an Amazon tax for the first time. Starting on October 1st, Michiganders were hit with the new ”Main Street Fairness” law. Indeed, ”Main Street Fairness” is the name of the law – wish I were making this up or stealing this terminology from Atlas Shrugged. A quote:

Traditional retailers had argued that tax-free Internet sales unfairly undermined their business.

Fair, unfair, fair, unfair – this law is intended to be an economic protectionist measure for local retailers, but the fact that it is considered “fair” to tax Main Street (middle class consumers) to benefit big (but local) business should be mocked by us Main Street consumers who must now be involuntarily plundered in the name of “fairness.”

Local, big-box retailers, once again, have had their horse-and-buggy business models turned into relevance – overnight – via government dictate. Still, the reality is that I can sit in my underwear at 5am and click “order” on an oversized, heavy item from Amazon and have that item arrive in about a day, with no additional shipping cost to me as a Prime member. That is in place of me going out and fighting traffic and construction to get to a crowded, suburban shopping mall being converged upon by bored patrons fighting for a parking space, and then wandering around in the mall side-by-side with the catatonic masses only to deal with sour-faced, unhelpful, teenage floor clerks who make me feel as if I am a nuisance for making them work to find me an item in the stockroom based on a floor model, and get that purchased good paid for and out to my car.

Leave no stone untaxed, as only the redistributionist state can do.