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New York lawmakers have created a serious mess of ecommerce. Their financial greed has led them to start requiring sales tax to be collected from Internet companies that have affiliate marketers in the state of New York. The state of New York has decided to abuse it’s power and stick it to businesses. New York is anti-business. Hard to believe about the financial capital of the world, but as the stock disclaimers always say, the past is not indicative of the future!

What am I talking about?

Let’s start with typical ecommerce. States can only require sales taxes to be collected in states where the company selling the merchandise has operations. For example, Amazon has no employees in the great state of New York, so Amazon charges no sales tax to people who order from New York.

Pretty simple right?

New York figures they found a loophole. Affiliate programs. These are programs setup by ecommerce companies where they pay people like you and me a percentage when our marketing efforts generate sales. New York is gambling it’s citizens’ tax dollars and the legal funds of Amazon (and other businesses) that they can get away with a fast one.

Let’s say Amazon wins. Shouldn’t the state of New York pay the legal fees of Amazon? Wouldn’t that make sense? Shouldn’t a government be held accountable to the laws they enact that infringe on the businesses constitutional right to conduct commerce. Yes, commerce rights are written into the constitution. Not even an amendment. The brilliant authors of our constitution most likely foresaw the greed of lawmakers like those in New York and explicitly “hard coded” commerce protection into our constitution.

Amazon is going to incur all sorts of costs to protect itself from our government. The cost to cover New York’s outlandish sales tax requirement to Amazon and ecommerce companies is tremendous. New York lawmakers don’t care. They just want more money to waste on programs and perhaps give themselves another pay raise. And they are doing it because they are New York. I’m sure that Amazon has a large percentage of their sales in New York. Not like Amazon can just walk away from New York. It’s a huge market.

Walking away from New York is what everyone should do though. Boycott New York. Don’t fly there. Don’t stay there. Don’t call there. Don’t do business there. No trade shows/conferences there. If New York wants to puff their economic chest on the rest of the country, let them do so in isolation. A boycott of New York would so significantly cripple their economy that they just might get the point.

Guess what New York? You are part of a nation, the United States of America. It’s not called the People’s Republic of New York!