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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

The US taxi market was a shitfest.

The rest of the world, not so much.

All that's really happened is that Uber side stepped some of your shitty laws. The efficiency gains, etc is all bullshit, not much has changed here in the UK apart from now you can use an app rather than a phone call. They turn up a minute or two quicker, wow. Uber are subsidising our rides a bit at the moment so it's like 20% cheaper for now. I hear prices go up after a year or two.

As for taxis during peak time, rich people can now pay more for priority pickups with surge pricing. That's not a plus for society, it's a plus for rich people.

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In the US, I could always make a phone call asking for a taxi. They would tell me it'll arrive in 90 minutes, and the odds were 50:50 it would never arrive at all. That's not because of any shitty law, that's just gross incompetence in incenting their drivers.

Well, deliberate undersupply of taxi medallions could be considered a shitty law.

Not only rich people but poor people who are really in a hurry. If you're suddenly about to be late for work, it's probably better to pay surge pricing than get fired. Of course it's not entirely fair since a rich person can afford to treat more trips as important than a poor person, but it's still better than the traditional system which is a gamble and ignores priorities of riders.

But don't you know, if you make things easier for rich people, the benefits trickle down. Or is the argument currently that people who can't afford the inflated prices don't deserve transport? Not sure.

Rich people contribute more to society, so the second order effects of benefiting rich people end up benefiting the larger population as well.

> Rich people contribute more to society

Maybe in the sense of economic contributions, but this is far from clear for contribution defined in a general sense.

[citation needed]

"top 3,000 earners pay more tax than bottom 9 million" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/tax/11233...

There's also the basic observation that many big companies that provide valuable products and services pay rich people lots of money to run them or compensate them for their financial help. Would there be an Uber at all without anyone getting rich off it?

Another observation - when we need a doctor or a lawyer, we find their contributions to us to be worth so much we'll pay them more than we pay a cleaner. After all, we could do the cleaning ourselves if we had to but the barrier to start operating on ourselves or writing our own contracts is higher and those rich people have invested work in overcoming that barrier so they could provide those services to people who can't.

Isn't that basically what you'd expect with a progressive tax system? Paying taxes is not the only way to contribute to society -- almost all the money people earn do to some extent, through taxes, and consumption, and investments, etc. Which contributes more I don't know. That's why I was hoping for a citation.

To your second point, there is evidence that CEO performance is negatively related to their pay: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1572085. Measuring competence is difficult, wealth is a appealing proxy but maybe not that reliable.

If all non- or low-taxpayers removed themselves from society, you'd quickly find out who is contributing and who isn't.

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