{"id":33720,"date":"2015-11-27T02:00:19","date_gmt":"2015-11-27T07:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33720"},"modified":"2021-03-07T12:57:52","modified_gmt":"2021-03-07T17:57:52","slug":"a-different-view-of-uber-and-other-ride-sharing-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/27\/a-different-view-of-uber-and-other-ride-sharing-services\/","title":{"rendered":"A different view of Uber and other ride-sharing services"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Tracinski on Uber as a form of &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2015\/09\/29\/the-free-market-its-like-uber-but-for-everything\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Objectivist LARP<\/a>&#8220;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If it sometimes seems like it\u2019s impossible to restore the free market, as if every new wave of government regulation is irreversible, then consider that one form of regulation, which is common in the most dogmatically big-government enclaves in the country, is being pretty much completely dismantled before our eyes. And it\u2019s the hippest thing ever.<\/p>\n<p>I was reminded of this by a recent report about yet another attempt to help traditional taxis compete with \u201cride-sharing\u201d services like Uber and Lyft: a new app called Arro, which allows you to both hail a traditional taxi and pay for it from your phone. So Arro takes a twentieth-century business and finally drags into the twenty-first century. This certainly might help improve the taxi experience relative to how things were done before. But it won\u2019t fend off Uber and Lyft, because it doesn\u2019t change the central issues, which are political rather than technological.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Uber has been hit with complaints that it\u2019s running \u201can Objectivist LARP,\u201d a live-action role playing of a capitalist utopia from an Ayn Rand novel. That\u2019s pretty much what it <em>is<\/em> doing, and the results are awesome. And the benefits don\u2019t stop with more drivers and lower rates. Uber is ploughing a fair portion of its profits into another wave of technological innovation\u2014self-driving cars\u2014that promises to offer even greater improvements in the future.<\/p>\n<p>All of this should counter some of the despair about how to promote free markets, especially among urban elites who have been programmed by their college educations to embrace the rhetoric of the Left. Give them half a chance, and they will flock to capitalist innovations run according to the laws of the market.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that they don\u2019t want to admit it. That\u2019s where the euphemism \u201cride-sharing\u201d comes in. To cover up the capitalistic nature of the activity, they tell themselves they\u2019re \u201csharing\u201d something that they are quite obviously paying for, and paying at market rates. Imagine what could be accomplished if they were just willing to drop the euphemisms and embrace the free market.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Tracinski on Uber as a form of &#8220;Objectivist LARP&#8220;: If it sometimes seems like it\u2019s impossible to restore the free market, as if every new wave of government regulation is irreversible, then consider that one form of regulation, which is common in the most dogmatically big-government enclaves in the country, is being pretty much [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,53,15],"tags":[1410,68,527,661,547],"class_list":["post-33720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-politics","category-technology","tag-gigeconomy","tag-objectivism","tag-publictransit","tag-regulation","tag-smartphones"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8LS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33720"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64509,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33720\/revisions\/64509"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}