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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

Ah so I guess it’s best to crush humans rather than have the business fail. Maybe we should, I don’t know, ensure there’s no need for these body and soul crushing labor for cheap? Support mass transit so you don’t need Uber, support those out of work so they don’t need Uber, and support the handicapped with local transit pickups friendly to them so they don’t need Uber. Then only the investors need Uber and they can make the business work or they can fail and it won’t become a massive crutch for our shit “free market” economy.

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Who is being crushed? The drivers signed up for this. They could also get other jobs or collect unemployment. The people who decide that this work is better than doing that should be respected for their choices and we shouldn't try to take their incomes away by killing the companies they work for.

To put it simply, taking peoples' income away by killing their employers does not help them; it hurts them.

This is just an old tired argument about the “free market” which absolutely does not exist for these folks. You’re simplifying this problem beyond recognition. It’s not so simple to do any of those things. I’m not even going to argue against it’s as you can literally find every argument for and against this ruling out there, again I’m not going to waste my time educating you. There isn’t much other option for these drivers and this ruling just lets them be taken advantage of more and more.

To me your response sounds very much like "let them eat cake". Would they be better off without any job at all if those companies did not exist?

My response was targeted towards the discussion. There are things this country badly needs but putting paper over them via laws we cannot reverse is a bad idea. Just because you have a dumpster fire out back you have to deal with doesn’t mean you should bulldoze the building, and to me the codifying of contractors like this prop does is like a bulldozer versus waiting a while for the fire dept to come in the form of better worker rights.

Clarification: those people do not have choice between good and bad job. They either have a bad job or no job at all.

We take the incomes away from people who are willing to do the job but aren't licensed to drive.

Are you opposed to that regulation also, or is there some rubric we can use to choose what regulation is acceptable?

> We take the incomes away from people who are willing to do the job but aren't licensed to drive.

You can't take something away from someone if they never had it.

They would have had it if the regulation wasn't put into place.

Is regulation created today different than regulation created in 1950 for some reason?

Like sure, it's worth accounting for the 1950 regulation apparently working well enough to keep when you look at it, but you are arguing that further restrictions are self evidently bad and existing regulations are (apparently anyway) self evidently fine.

> support those out of work so they don’t need Uber

Our dwindling birthrates make this harder and harder to do unless we stop supporting retired seniors and end retirement benefits. Seniors are on their way to outnumbering other demographics. Historically, working adults outnumbered seniors 4 - 1. Now it’s getting closer to 2 - 1 which is still unsustainable.

Just like capitalism, socialism and socialist programs need the right kind of population growth; or both systems fall apart.

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