If you do not like the sharing economy, then do not participate in it. "Other people should not be doing this, and should not be doing that, ..." is one bridge too far. For heaven's sake, who the hell are you, to tell other people what to do?
At any rate the armchair philosophers should not advice others on what should be allowed or not.
Apartment complexes don't have HOAs and sometimes it can be a huge hassle to contact your landlord to fix the sink, much less to investigate and shut down your neighbor's illegal Airbnb operation.
It's not hard to imagine a world in which most software is SaaS.
It's also not hard to imagine a world in which the car company decides to stop selling and start renting.
Arcade game manufacturers realized early on that it's stupid to sell a machine that makes $30K for $2.5K, so they started opening arcades. Nolan Bushnell went and made Chuck E. Cheese, and Taito was doing the same thing. Sega does it in Japan still.
I know a guy who lives on a yacht with his family, he finances trips via the dozen or so rental houses he owns. The people renting from him may never buy a house, given that building new ones here is becoming hardly possible due to zoning.
So yeah, good luck opting out when nothing is for sale anymore.
And it's not due to zoning. Zoning exists so that load of excess people does not make a neighborhood unlivable, or there will be too much traffic and getting to and from job becomes impossible.
Wanna fight it? Push employers to let people work remotely. It's not possible for low paying jobs e.g. waiters, but these don't buy or rent anything anyway, for most professions where people have a shot of getting into a real estate market, there is such option. Let people work remotely and suddenly you'll realize there is a shitload of almost free real estate around.
Also well, the very small fraction of homeowners who have a privilege of owning these places have effectively won a lottery. They naturally have to protect their winnings. Basically for every one of them there is a 1000 or more of people who own place out of a highly sought-after area like the Valley where his real estate does not appreciate and brings no rent. If you take the averages, all-accounted yields from real estate are laughable and way under the yields from a stock market.
Can we say that someone who bought stock that skyrocketed 1000x, 20 years ago, has to be penalized for it, or be forced to sell? It is either a very smart insight (or inside, but in case of stock it's way way way more probable than in case of real estate), or just blind luck. It doesn't mean same trick is reproducible at any given moment if you have money to buy, the mathematical expectation of profit you will make buying anywhere you could pick at all, is quite low and you better go to a stock market.
Some people need a world in which they have exactly one employer, as well as a fixed bi-weekly salary, dropped into their bank account, because that is how they want to live. Good for them!
I like to scavenge my surroundings for opportunities, and make money from stuff that occasionally happens to drop from a tree. Once in a while, I meet people who like to do a deal with me. I sell. I buy. I trade. I just love it. I am simply NOT interested in a boring world of bi-weekly wages paid into a bank account.
I do not consider tycoons to be a threat. It is the little, petty SJW bureaucrats that take too much of an interest in other people's business who are the problem.
You nailed the problem, actually. Stop giving authoritarians too much power to tell us what economic activity we can do. Stop the endless mess of subsidies which make honest business unprofitavle. Your argument supports the person you disagreed with.
I'm a voting tax-payer: thats how government of the people, by the people works. We pay the taxes so that our representatives stop this kind of "shitting in the commons" nonsense. The ubers and airbnb are avoiding paying community costs, avoiding compliance with safety laws, avoiding all kinds of things, while simultaneously exporting the profit into other peoples hands, by giving some to individuals at a cost to everyone else in the peaceful enjoyment of their own property.
Telling people what to do is what government is all about.
Its why minimum wage exists at all. Without it, the most desperate depress wages to the absolute edge of starvation and destitution. It is not, and has never been, and never will be an answer to poverty, but it is a promise by the government that your time can never be valued at less than an absolute floor they set.
Because nature and reality are cruel. For many people, in many circumstances, their time is practically worthless. Minimum wage has a carrying effect on the economic baseline - by having minimum wage workers, there exists industry to meet their extraordinarily limited means. Its the old Ford adage that he need pay his workers enough to afford his cars lest he have no market to sell to.
This matters to state level actors the same way opiates in the US matter. If isolated, rare, instances of irrationality reign and someone ends up dead from a drug overdose that is a manageable risk for the freedom granted in return. But when millions are addicted, tens of thousands are dead, and whole communities are collapsing from it the individual choices that led people to drug addiction are a consequence to the whole of society.
It doesn't even need be in that large a scale. If your brother is a drunk he will by nature he less productive and stable in his life, more prone to disease and illness, and often fall upon his family for support because he cannot support himself due to his own choices. You can then of course choose to not help him, but for those that do their now deflated resources from supporting their drunk brother depress their participation in markets they would have had more voice in. It takes only one bad apple to ruin a family, a bushel to destroy a community, and an orchard can ravage whole counties.
Its why anyone contemplating suicide is told its a selfish way out. Because you make the choice, but everyone else gets to deal with the consequences. Almost nothing you do is wholly restricted to yourself alone - everything has consequences, and society at all is built on a foundation of trading personal liberty for freedom from others liberties.
We already create enough in taxation and economic deadloss in market inefficiencies to finance nearly 10k/year to every citizen.
Even if you solved the money in politics problem (which is hard) you still have the issue of a substantial portion of the US congress being elected in uncontested lifelong seats where the citizens have been thoroughly indoctrinated enough into either major parties ideology that they never consider voting for anyone but their incumbent. As long as politicians can feel their seat is guaranteed representing their own interests rather than those of their electors becomes the norm.
So to even begin having a conversation about social dividends you need to radically revamp American elections to incentivize the legislature to represent their constituents. Which requires competitive, representative elections (which means you cannot be using first past the post everywhere) and substantially diluted power and influence so that buying influence over the legislature is less trivial (which almost always means substantially more seats in US congress to make buying a majority of seats more difficult).
Which is by nature a constitutional amendment, which the congress itself would never ratify because it would end their gravy train of private influence and wealth so many currently enjoy. So you need it to come from the states, but the state governments are often just as corrupt and out of the control of the citizenry, if not moreso for their lack of publicity and presence in conversation, so you would need to figure out how to fix them first.
Its a crazy massive expansive problem Larry Lessig was campaigning on in 2016, and Andrew Yang could learn a thing or two from before having pie in the sky conceptions of being able to institute UBI given the structure of the present US federal government.
I think it would have been smart if Uber let drivers set their own prices, then they'd be more akin to Amazon sellers, who feel more independent (but get screwed in other ways).
How do you know that these people haven't already put time and effort into trying to get an "actual job"? It would seem to me that the free market does not serve everyone with equal economic opportunity and that the world economy is more nuanced than what your average libertarian would like you to believe.
I'm not in the US myself, but I think for the HN crowd in general moving to someplace else isn't a problem as we have the financial means as well as the independence. Other social groups might be more dependent on the social support around them (family, friends and maybe government). For them, moving to another place would be akin to resetting everything and starting a new life, with all the associated risk.
You're doing no such thing. You're actually preaching that people with less opportunities than you should be left with even less options because your paternalist view of them makes you feel you're entitled to tell others how they can and cannot do to earn a living.
Wait til you hear about criminal law!
More cars on the road, encouraged by the incentives of Uber/Lyft, affect pollution, road congestion, and public health.