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Amazon has never paid any dividends.

I don't think anything more needs to be said.




What is that supposed to prove?

Btw, Amazon has done stock buybacks. Which are economically equivalent to dividends, but get different tax treatment.


That the two things that the comment I answered too claimed are wrong:

1. Not paying dividends is communistic. Few people would accuse Jeff Bezos of being a communist.

2. Bad things will happen if no dividends are paid. No, nothing bad has happened to Amazon because they didn't pay dividends. Another example is Apple that didn't pay any dividends between 1995 and 2012.


I'm afraid you are arguing against a strawman.

Obviously, the commenter meant any returns to shareholders, whether that be dividends or stock buybacks or anything else.

Second, the commenter was obviously also talking about the economy in general. Individual companies being run in peculiar ways won't bring down the economy.

As an analogy: some companies give away some products for free. But it wouldn't be a good idea for companies in general to give everything away for free.

Of course, you can still disagree with the points that the commenter made about no returns to shareholders leading to communism (and whether that's bad or not). But please show some charity in interpretation, if you want to have a productive discussion.


You are the one that taking liberties with interpretation. The exact quote thaumasiotes argued against was "Nothing will happen to the business if the owners don't get any dividends." My italics. So, they was clearly not talking about the economy in general.

And if you go back in the thread, it was not a general argument about society. If thaumasiotes wanted to do it about that, that would be the straw man, because no one argued for prohibiting companies for paying dividends, and no one argued that society would be fine if no company ever were allowed to pay dividends.

Finally, if I show some lack of patience with thaumasiotes, it is because they are shouting "Communism!" instead of actually presenting any coherent argument. And that in discussions about economy is the reminiscence of Godwin's law.




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