"Sharing economy" should share its wealth
sfbg.com
sfbg.com
Ok I don't think when an entrepreneur says "disruption" he means "exploiting my community." The community wants Airbnb and Uber, that's why the pay for them.
Really? A specific community wants Airbnb and Uber. Other specific communities do NOT want them. Most rental companies and condo associations probably do NOT want Airbnb. Cities may or may not want Uber (at least not outside of their control & tax claws).
Airbnb & Uber are able to be cheaper than their "competitors" (hotels & cabs) at least partially because they don't have to live by the same rules: taxation & regulation. People that I know that like these services use them because they're generally cheaper than the alternative (also the cool app, certainly). They pay for them because the alternative is to pay more elsewhere. That's the friction caused by taxation and regulation, at least partly.
When an insured cab crashes insurance companies are there to help people potentially rebuild their lives.
When an uninsured cab crashes without insurance and there's no insurance... Well then you're out of luck. And lets not forget that it's not only the customer of the taxi that can get hurt in a car crash.
I wouldn't be surprised if many taxi fees and regulations went to help the roads that those taxis proceed to drive on (in many places). Uber cars aren't contributing to that and the steadfast refusal to do so at the behest of municipalities hurts everyones system as a whole.
It's not just about whether the consumers will choose to use this or that. It's about a system that works for everyone. Of course you can overdo regulation, and disruptors are a necessary forward for change but just because of libertarian principles which have never worked as espoused anywhere doesn't mean that these people shouldn't be subject to certain regulations and shouldn't thumb their noses when asked to comply.
Now most of this is just what I think. I don't have examples where a municipality requires its taxis to pay for the roads through fees, but hopefully the point has been made clearly.
I thought gas taxes were the established way of paying for roads anyways. And all drivers should be required to have insurance to begin with - the fact someone else is in the car has nothing to do with it.
I have no choice if my neighbors choose to use AirBnB, but I do have to deal with the consequences.
Nuisance law and other private means of address simply aren't available when you're dealing with a constant stream of strangers.
If you want to protect yourself from AirBnB, there are ways to do it.
You have a choice on whether to rent out your apartment on AirBnB. You balance the money you can make from doing so against the risk created by randos walking through your building. Your neighbor, on the other hand, bears additional risk if you decide to rent on AirBnB,[1] but does not benefit in any way from the transaction. This is a textbook example of an inefficient negative externality.
[1] It also substantially reduces her property value, as people hate buying property in buildings with lots of transients. Condo prices in a building with apartment units can be substantially lower than in a building without them, purely because people put a lot of value on not having renters in their building.
Here's a hypothetical: What if we "disrupted" the regulation on what you can hook up to the electric grid and how you have to do it, so everybody can start messing around with "throw-on" connections as they do in Egypt?
Probably a lot of HN users would dislike having to cope with the thus ensuing frequent power-outages. The problems that Airbnb causes in residential areas can have a similar impact on life, it's just that it is the life of people from a different demographic than the HN crowd.
Understand that these businesses have a larger impact on the economy and your community than just the money flowing between them and their customers. Also understand that laws exist for reasons--not infallible reasons, just reasons. Whenever a law seems to be completely nonsensical to you, start looking into it a bit more. Typically, the answer is just behind the curtain, or people were exploiting the system in ways you didn't even think of.
Breaches of contractual obligations are civil matters. You don't go to jail, generally.
That is absolutely the best way to handle it and Airbnb should require appropriate documentation that hosts are insured appropriately and aren't violating the terms of their leases. But Airbnb wont do that because then they would have fewer hosts and thus less revenue. The answer that the original article tried (and failed) to say is that Airbnb and others should be responsible for ensuring that their operators are within the law but they don't and claim ignorance.
Benefit to whom? And how can you say that? Nobody knows yet what the total cost of externalities and benefits are for Airbnb.
You're also thinking about one use case. What about a condo owner that decides to use Airbnb for profit, and just rents the room from afar, hires a cleaning service, and treats it like a hotel? The other residents of that condo end up assuming all of the risk, security breaches, and headaches of an endless supply of tenants. There are many other uses cases with different externalities associated with each. As a society, we have to decide what's acceptable and what's not--and that's where laws come into play.
>As a society, we have to decide what's acceptable and what's not--and that's where laws come into play.
That sounds great in theory. In reality the government is far from perfectly competent. Additionally you get corruption where the government tries to protect an existing industry from competition at the expense of everyone else. Or jerks that shout "Not In My Backyard!" whenever anyone tries to change anything. People are irrationally resistant to new things and that is, on average, far more of a problem than the new things themselves.
The problem is that the benefit and the cost of the externality accrue to different people. When that happens, you get a higher level of the activity than is economically efficient.
As far as your neighbors are concerned, they're probably more concerned about the rotting car you have on blocks in your driveway. Or any of the zillion other perfectly legal but annoying things you do, like paint your house bright pink or let your kids run screaming around the yard at all hours of the day. At least with Airbnb properties, if you don't like your neighbors, they'll be gone in a week. Permanent neighbors you have to live with, no matter how batshit crazy they are.
Anyway, I will not address your other points--you are clearly only thinking about one use case and trying to start an argument where there is none.
Individuals who are not concerned with insurance may find that they should have been.
Governments should not make it their job to protect individuals from every bad choice they could make.
Why is this concept which is so simple so terribly hard to grasp?
Essentially, one role of government is to step in when there are harmful things being done to people. This author seems to argue that this is exactly why some things are regulated, and argues that their "competitors" (probably not the right term) should fall under the same rules: hotels, taxis, etc.
Personally I agree that the government's job isn't to protect people from their own stupid choices, but it's a big grey area of where to draw that line.
Individuals can freely choose a taxi cab
over Uber if insurance is a concern for them.
This is what economists call an externality [1]. A voluntary transaction that looks good to the two parties who have a choice in the matter, but which imposes a cost on a third party who doesn't have a choice.
If I own an apartment and the apartment next door gets sold to an investor who rents it out on AirBnB for nightly loud parties, eroding my property's value, that's the same thing.
No, it is the job of law enforcement to enforce laws. Uber should fire drivers that are known to be breaking the law, sure, but requiring that they screen up-front for lawbreakers is the same as requiring drug testing or other such nonsense.
At work they ask Bob to take a widget to a customer. Bob drives his car to the customer but is involved in an accident before he gets there. This is the only time Bob has ever driven for the company like this.
Bob finds that his insurance does not cover him. He could lie and not mention the widget delivery, but that is fraud and is a serious crime.
We could say that the widget delivery is irrelevant and that the insurance company should just pay the money but insurance companies are SCUM and they employ many people whose only role is to see how to reduce or avoid paying money to the customers.
Personal policies rarely cover commercial use of the vehicle.
If the people want some protection from being exploited by ruthless companies, that's what they get.
An gee, what surprise, most people don't want to spend their days looking over their shoulders and constantly having to be concerned with every little detail for fear of getting screwed.
They just want to get from A to B in the certainty that in a civilized, well-organised society these things are properly arranged.
Why is this concept which is so simple so terribly hard to grasp?
As a general principle, businesses should bear the cost of the externalized risk they create. If you run a taxi business, which is what Uber does regardless of how you try to lawyer your way around the definition of "taxi," then you should bear the cost of insuring against the inevitable collisions and accidents that arise from your business.
By being exposed to risk by uninsured operators? The operators (drivers or hosts) undercut current offerings (taxis and hotels) by not being insured.
My point isn't that these services are net good (though I do think so). It's that any "net bad" argument that doesn't consider these benefits isn't serious and so discredits its own side.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...
I'm not saying I agree with the article in its' entirety, but there is a solid reasoning behind taxation.