Progressives Are Regulating Away Equality Benefits of Uber, Airbnb and Google

Can anyone take this article seriously?

> "Progressives are singling out technology companies for new regulations. For instance, in New York, the City Council has just voted to cap the number of ridesharing vehicles for services like Uber and Lyft, and may require that drivers earn a minimum amount"

Taxis have been limited in New York since forever. Uber is not being singled out in this regard.

So pro-consumer regulations = harming business = increased inequality. Got it.

How anyone could argue that the benefits of the gig economy actually improves worker lives is beyond me. I tend agree that it's better for the consumer in terms of price and service, which I guess you could say reduces inequality because more consumers can afford access that used to be cost-prohibitive. But by and large, if more and more workers don't have a steady and liveable wage, health care, and retirement benefits, this leads to drastically increased inequality.

I tend to think that pointing fingers to anywhere but the tax code and resulting social services or UBI to reduce inequality is barking up the wrong tree.

The author certainly has a couple of valid points, especially that there is a certain amount of equality distribution and trust-breaking provided by the "gig economy".

However, what the author totally misses is that the regulation movements are not without merits, often due to blatant abuse and profiteering:

- Uber gets flak because of surge pricing, whereas (at least in Germany) taxis are mandated to provide the same price to all customers, no matter source or destination, or the skin color or BAC of the passenger

- AirBNB gets flak because instead of people renting out their spare rooms, a lot of "hosts" abuse the system and run straight hotels in residential areas, with all the problems this incurs (noise, drunkards, sometimes illegal prostitution). In addition for many years AirBNB dodged the hotel and tourist taxes that hotels had to pay, thus depriving the cities of tax revenue.

- Google, well, is Google - their customer service is non-existing unless you are handing them over dollars (which isn't even possible for many services).

- Facebook/Twitter/Youtube... same problem and their "algorithms" were abused by hackers and right wing trolls to feed the population vile conspiracy theories and xenophobia.

Turns out that the state does have to provide regulatory frameworks or the "free market" will simply screw over the weakest people in society.

I was interested in what he had to say until I got to:

"California imposed costly and complex regulations on the voluntary exchange of data with such services as Facebook and Google."

Righttttt......

Let’s not forget Time was purchased by major right wing political influencers.

"Progressive" is marketing term backed by a shaky ideology that has been totally twisted to serve the powerful.

Eric Holder for example was hired for big money by Uber to push the narrative that background checks for Uber drivers is discriminatory against minorities, never mind that lack of background checks exposes women (especially women of color) to a lot of danger from sex offenders.

Another example is in my own city of Seattle, Comcast for years has been successfully advocating against broadband competitors and one of their "arguments" is that building out higher speed internet in high income areas will cause inequity that will affect minorities in poorer neighborhoods. By "progressive" logic this makes perfect sense but it's obvious that it's simply a powerful company blocking out competition.