The “people” are going to win. The ordinary people. The people who want easy, fast, convenient and cheap transportation. The people who cannot get this from public transportation with its fixed routes, crowds, and fixed fares. The people who cannot get it from cabs whose prices include a hefty monopoly (cartel) rent. The governments are going to lose.
But this is a question of time, and right now the governments are fighting Uber. They are banning Uber and regulating it.
No clearer case of the evil of government regulation can be found.
As always, governments are making paternalistic arguments of safety to justify imposing expensive regulations that decrease safety. If a person had a stroke, an accident, or a life-threatening attack, would not the option to use Uber be helpful? Any market for any good or service has a safety dimension that consumers and companies price out in the market without need of any bureaucratic interference. If Uber drivers are rapists and robbers in numbers greater than what one ordinarily encounters or if Uber drivers are speed demons and have accidents, this is soon discovered by consumers who then avoid the service. Uber the company has very strong incentives to recruit decent and good drivers, as do any companies where workmen come to one’s home or where a company can be sued if its employees do wrong. The more risk-averse consumers will avoid Uber right off the bat and continue to use government-regulated drivers.
Uber saves time and allows people greater access to jobs, shopping, safe areas of entertainment and places of employment they might not otherwise reach. Uber leads to a reduction in personal use of the automobile, and that provides many kinds of savings and benefits. It could lead to a net increase in auto use as opposed to other forms of transportation, but this would be efficient because of the increased benefits obtained by users of the service. The worth of these and other opportunities cannot be calculated by government politicians, who, by the way, are lobbied by the existing public transport bureaucrats and taxicab monopolists.
6:28 am on December 15, 2014
