While Richard Cohen's column on Feb. 15, on New York's rejection of the Amazon deal raises a handful of legitimate points, there are two areas in which it is utterly wrong: the headline and the conclusion. "Blocking the Amazon deal doesn't help anyone," blares the headline. New York has among the highest real estate costs in the country. Adding a large number of high-paying jobs in Queens will overheat the market further, hurting the less affluent. Also, the tax breaks given to Amazon would have to be absorbed by other businesses. The price pressures Amazon already exerts on local retailers are destructive enough without giving Amazon a tax advantage denied to local retailers. 

Which leads to the largest falsehood in the article: the claim that refusing to knuckle under to Amazon is evidence of an anti-capitalist bias. This is only true if one holds that the only acceptable definition of capitalism is the utterly unregulated, law-of-the-jungle variety. Our nation decided otherwise early in the last century. For many years after that, we had relatively robust antitrust enforcement, preserving what may be the single most important benefit of capitalism − free and fair competition leading to sane prices and wages. Giving tax advantages to a corporate behemoth strikes me as more inimical to competition and anti-capitalist than anything Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proposed. 

Bill Morrison

East Lyme