Jane Clark Scharl, from an essay on applying the principle of subsidiary to one’s purchasing:

It’s easy to bewail the rise of Amazon, but Amazon only perfected a process that started long ago. Sears Roebuck did it, but so did the Dutch East India Trading Company. This is the process of drawing commerce away from small local providers and centralizing it around huge suppliers, and more importantly, of pulling money away from local communities and dumping it into the coffers of massive conglomerates. Money is power, and companies like Amazon suck this economic power out of local communities and concentrate it far away. They violate the principle of subsidiarity in a profound way.

It’s certainly true that Amazon has made it possible for us to obtain many goods that would otherwise be unavailable to us. But think about what else has happened because of this: local businesses have shut down, and even where they haven’t, the person-to-person interactions that happen when you go to a physical store are becoming less frequent. We truly do live a world of scarcity – a scarcity of basic human interaction.