People like to use this as an excuse to attack capitalism in general, a la "if corporations didn't run things, we would charge as little as possible instead of as much as possible". However, this is entirely missing the point; it's critically important that businesses charge as much as they can get away with. Why? Because prices are how market information is communicated, and high profit margins indicate an imbalance between supply and demand. If Uber charged the bare minimum they could get away with and still survive, there would be no incentive for competitors to come in and attempt to undercut them, leaving the supply/demand mismatch as it is. In a zero-overhead idealized market, competitors would keep coming in until profit margins were within epsilon of zero; obviously we can't do exactly that in real life, but we want to get as close to that as possible.