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Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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The fault line in this discussion lies between the different perspectives on the common good in question.

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.

Consumers have a choice not to use their services. If they are so bad, no one is making you use them. The rules supposedly exist to benefit consumers. But if that was the case, consumers wouldn't knowingly use services that don't comply to them.

The rules also exist to benefit society.

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.

While good in theory, the rules are more than likely to be abused to limit or get rid of uber entirely to protect the existing taxi industry. If corruption and incompetence weren't issues we could just trust them to do whatever and not have to worry about it.

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 am not a "consumer", I am a citizen.

I have no choice if my neighbors choose to use AirBnB, but I do have to deal with the consequences.

Please explain, I don't understand how that would affect you.

You have no legal right to choose your neighbors in any case.

No, but I have a legal right to compel my neighbors not to interfere with my habitation of my own living quarters through nuisance law.

Nuisance law and other private means of address simply aren't available when you're dealing with a constant stream of strangers.

If you had an HOA, you would. If you're renting, it's not your property to police.

If you want to protect yourself from AirBnB, there are ways to do it.

> Consumers have a choice not to use their services.

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.

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