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There's a system set up to determine what rules are necessary, and some VC-funded bro isn't in a position to second-guess them (beyond his power at the polling booth).

Your standard seems to be that a service should be legal if two or more people agree on a contract("providing a service people want and thus want to pay for").

But by that standard, there isn't a single regulation that is necessary. Sell a car without seatbelts? Sure – all fine if you can find people to buy it. Migraine treatment with low-dose cyanide? Some people will try it.

Regulations are attempts to (a) protect third parties from externalities or (b) to allow people to survive without doing an incredible amount of research into everything they consume. It's easy to dismiss them because we have no idea of all the things that aren't happening. But the fact that your money has been safe at banks for the last 70 years, or that deaths from fire, food-born illness or traffic accidents has been reduced dramatically – all that traces back primarily to government regulation.

> There's a system set up to determine what rules are necessary

See "regulatory capture", and all the other ways that system can be broken or exploited. Also see the long history of how regulations written for yesterday's technologies work badly on today's and completely prevent tomorrow's from being created.

I'm extremely skeptical that this particular issue could have been effectively fixed another way, because I've seen what the proposed "solutions" looked like that "played by the rules".

> Your standard seems to be that a service should be legal if two or more people agree on a contract("providing a service people want and thus want to pay for").

No, that's not the completely general standard I'd advocate, though that would still come a lot closer to reasonable. A general standard would also internalize any externalities (and any parties affected by them) before evaluating that metric. (Though keep in mind that "reduces the demand for a competing service" is not an externality.) Overall, though, a world in which individual consent always wins would be better.

(We'd be better off still with a world where one of the providers of those services wasn't also, unrelatedly, engaged in various unethical behaviors such as discrimination.)

In any case, I'm not interested in turning this into a general evaluation of structures and approaches to regulation and government, not least of which because that would retread well-trodden conversational territory with little new to cover.

I think it's worth focusing on the specific case of "is the world better or worse off" here, and then asking how, if you see the specific path taken as a problem, the same goal could have been achieved in another way.

> to allow people to survive without doing an incredible amount of research into everything they consume

You shouldn't have to do 100% of the research yourself, but I think you should have a choice of who you delegate that responsibility and trust to.

From what I've read, it appears that Uber operates largely within a zero-sum space. I. e. they're not build around some innovative technology that improves everyone's life, but have simply ignored a few rules, allowing them to reward one class of people with $1 for every $1 they take from another class of people.

The statistic that's going around is that they're subsidising each trip at a rate of 50% – i. e. taking from the VC investor and giving it to the customer. At the same time, they're undercutting the income and benefits currently enjoyed by taxi drivers. The net effect is both the lower and upper class paying to the mostly middle-class customers. The contribution from investors isn't going to continue forever, so lets assume they somehow find the economies of scale, or market power to raise prices, to break even –although I'm somewhat sceptical because I don't know how a trip in LA gets cheaper if there are also drivers in Barcelona.

So now the customers get rides that are cheaper by anywhere from 50% to 0%, the latter if Uber manages to establish some sort of market dominance. And taxi drivers earning $40,000 are replaced by Uber drivers earning $30,000 and having no health insurance.

Is that worth it? That probably depends on your politics. There's the economic fundamentalist perspective that markets are always fair and if that means you have to work in a coal mine where the air smells funny and by the way Johnny didn't make it out today, then you should have better paid attention in school.

Personally, I think more equitable societies are more fun to life in, and kicking possibly hundreds of thousands of people a step down the economic ladder will, in the long term, hurt almost everyone – the trickle-up effect seems to have much more empirical support than the opposite

Regarding the actual service provided: it's a better service in a way that has nothing to do with cost, and it would remain a better service even at a higher cost than a taxi. (And due to efficiency improvements, it could also theoretically provide better rates than a taxi while paying drivers the same, or pay better while charging riders the same.) The entire experience of requesting a ride and getting one represents a massive improvement over taxis.

I don't know anyone who uses such services because they cost less, rather than because they work better.

"Ignoring regulations so you can help people by providing a service they want (whether you make money doing so or not) is entirely different, and far more reasonable. "thats what Pablo Escobar probably thought at some point too -:)

This is one of the very important ways in which dumb rules get fixed. Like, the prohibition on cannabis wouldn't have the support it does if we were really good at enforcing it - people need the experience with not-X to decide on supporting that policy.

When it comes to providing a service that people "want (and thus want to pay for)", all sorts of things could be sold to people that fit that criteria. There's no moral or legal exemption for "meeting demand" that suddenly makes it "far more reasonable" than the base instinct of "making money".

By this criteria, Theranos was merely "meeting demand" for finger pricks over needles, FDA and their "regulations" be damned. Despite the millions spent trying to convince people that regulations are merely tools of regulatory capture, most regulations exist for a reason. Operating from the default point of view that regulations are evil is why we're seeing the EPA and Clean Water Acts gutted. Heck, even NOAA got slapped around today as a result of this attitude, and they merely provide information.

Uber's actions were all about "making money" under the thin veneer of giving the people what they wanted. You can find that same rationalization in many organized crime movies.

> You can find that same rationalization in many organized crime movies.

Those organized crime groups are usually also involved in businesses where bad law has made it illegal.