NOTICIAS

Miami, FL — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined The American Conservative’s podcast, Right Now, with Helen Andrews, Arthur Bloom, and Ryan Girdusky to discuss Amazon, dignified work in America, and how best to support working families across our country. See below for highlights and listen to the full interview here.

On Amazon, opportunity, and dignified work:

“What made the American Dream possible… was the very unique and straightforward formula: the ability of an entrepreneur to start a business, make it succeed, and make a profit, because you’re taking a risk, and the jobs it created for American workers that allowed them to own a home, get married, start a family, and retire with dignity. 

“And it was that arrangement that made us different from anywhere else in the world. It’s what gave us this extraordinary middle-income working class in our country that set us apart. Every country has rich people; every country has poor people. Very few, if any in human history, have had so many millions of people from all sorts of backgrounds who have been able to achieve happiness as they define it. 

“So I think that behooves there being friendly relationships between labor and business. I don’t think one can succeed without the other, generally speaking. Except in the 21st century, we have a globalized economy in which it’s quite possible to be a company like Amazon, with headquarters in the United States, benefiting from our laws, benefiting from the protections of our court system and so forth, but who in many cases don’t have to have American workers in order to make a lot of money. You can be a large, multinational, American corporation and make a lot of money, but not necessarily benefit working Americans…

“That’s an efficient decision they made. But from a policymaking perspective, it isn’t good for our country… My view of it was this: Amazon is openly hostile to everything we would call conservatism, traditional values, traditional views. They are eager participants in the culture war against traditional thought, extending all the way to the censorship of ideas they don’t agree with… They were one of the first ones to kick President Trump off web services, which denied his entire political apparatus access to the world wide web for a substantial period of time. So they were active, eager culture warriors… 

“They’re actively against us on everything — except when someone wants to raise their taxes, or increase their regulations, or they need our help to prevent their workers from unionizing. Then obviously they want to run under the umbrella of the conservative movement. That’s a good deal! I don’t know why we should be overextending ourselves to rally to their side on these economic issues that they care about when they are hostile towards our values on everything else.”