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free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture

The Uber Rebellion

Customers in Germany and elsewhere have flouted irrational attacks on the popular ride-sharing service Uber.

As I have explained before, Uber’s software lets passengers and drivers connect in a way that bypasses regularly regulated taxicabs. Cabbies don’t necessarily oppose the innovation. Many see Uber’s app as a nifty way to get customers. And, of course, many riders see it as a nifty way to get rides.

But taxi dispatchers? Well, that’s another story.

At least it is in Germany, where an organization for dispatchers called Taxi Deutschland has kvetched that the San Francisco company lacks the Necessary Permits to do electronic dispatching in Deutschland. Thanks to TD’s loud complaints, a German court issued a temporary injunction against Uber, prohibiting it from conjoining ride-seekers and ride-givers in happy synchrony.

Uber decided to keep operating in the country anyway, despite the threat of huge fines.

They’ve gotten lots of moral support. In response to the injunction, customers quietly but firmly told regulators “Laissez nous faire!” — a.k.a. “You’re not the boss of me!” — by doubling, tripling and even quintupling demand for Uber’s app. Matthew Feeney of Cato Institute points to jumps in signups in the days following the court’s order: in Frankfurt a 228 percent jump, Munich 329 percent, Hamburg 590 percent.

Last July, in the U.K., Brits surged their signups eight times over after protests against the company.

Keep up the good work, rebels.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Buy Whoppers to Oppose Whoppers

U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown has proposed a boycott of Burger King. Try Wendy’s or White Castle instead, he urges.

Why? Are the Burger King burgers moldy now?

No, they’re still delectable. In fact, I’m stepping up my patronage of Burger King thanks to Brown’s attack. All who seek to productively improve their lives should follow suit.

For that’s the actual crime here. Honest self-improvement. Contrary to Brown, though, it deserves no chastisement.

Burger King has been caught pursuing an opportunity to improve its offerings and bottom line. It is buying Tim Hortons, a Canadian coffee-and-donut chain. It will also be moving its headquarters to Canada.

Why?

Because our federal government taxes corporate earnings more heavily than many other countries do, the Burger King move north means a smaller tax bite. More money for the shareholders.

And, thus, less money for Uncle Sam.

Fine with me. I don’t begrudge an honestly earned dollar. And our government’s wastrel ways  won’t be cured by ever-higher taxes on us. But if politicians fear the exodus of U.S. firms for tax reasons, why not eliminate that motive by reducing corporate taxes?

Brown gestures in the direction of lower taxes but also demands a “global minimum tax rate” to thwart absconders. Nah. Chuck the stick. Just use the carrot. Slash what U.S.-based firms must pay and American firms will stay.

Slash them enough and maybe successful foreign firms will move HQs here, too.

Entice the economic titans who benefit us so much; don’t chase them away. Instead of badgering with boycotts, inspire with freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

Unsustainable Pseudo-thinking

One of the fashionable thought-killing words offered by the cliché-recycling movement is “sustainable.”

In the common tongue, as spoken by many, many environmentalists, this term implies that we will run out of all our stuff pretty soon unless everybody on the planet (except maybe Al Gore) is put on a strict low-consumption regimen.

The environmental movement has adopted the color “green,” but “drab-gray” is what comes to mind when I’m told that we must treat economic goods as existing in a fixed quantity, only to be skimpily apportioned (by regulators), never massively expanded (by profit-seeking producers, as they’ve done whenever free to do so).

In fact, as economist and Cafe Hayek blogger Don Boudreaux argues in his article “Unsustainable Platitudes,” market actors tend to swiftly counteract shortages that occur in a market context. When supply of a good slumps for whatever reasons, prices for it rise. Rising prices yield predictable effects. That is, they

  • nudge customers to economize; and
  • entice profit-seeking producers and vendors to create more of the good, or
  • provide good-enough (or better) substitutes for it,
  • or both.

This is Economics 101, teachable in one lesson.

The Wall Street Journal saw fit to quote Boudreaux, provoking the ire of enviro-cliché aficionado Joshua Holman. He contacted Boudreaux to accuse him of “[emitting] word pollution . . . to block the work of the many activists struggling to save our planet from overuse, exploitation and destruction.” In reply, Boudreaux suggests that reality “cannot be grasped, and it certainly cannot be improved, with slogans.”

Slogans do have their place. They’re just not a sustainable substitute for reasoning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Help Airbnb Win in San Fran

Whenever companies invent radical new ways of making life easier, there’s a good chance someone will kvetch about how hazardous the new way is and/or how rudely inconvenient for those wedded to old ways.

That’s true when it comes to smartphone apps that helps users buy rides outside the usual regulated-taxi context (as I’ve discussed here and here). It’s also true in the case of Airbnb, whose app connects renters and home owners.

Airbnb and other companies are fighting to reform San Francisco’s restrictive housing laws, which have helped inflict one of the most hellish housing markets in the country. The Fair to Share San Francisco website says that the town’s housing laws are “outdated” — which understates the case, since the strictures weren’t valid to begin with. Regulators prohibit San Francisco residents from subletting their residences for fewer than thirty days.

This makes things tough for an app designed to broker short-term rentals.

Airbnb has also been hassled in New York State, where it has been forced to turn over some data about its users to the attorney general as prelude to turning over even more data about users the AG decides may be breaking the law.

It is indeed unfair to outlaw you from peacefully using your own property as you wish. If you live in the San Francisco area, you can help change Fog City’s smoggy housing laws by signing a petition at the Fair to Share site.

Strike a blow for Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Original photo by Dave Alter, “Lombard Street San Francisco,” some rights reserved.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Old Rules Gotta Go

Old hat. Long in the tooth. Creaky as an outhouse door.

These are just some of the expressions that apply to how our cities, states and metro areas are run — by ancient principles that do not serve the common good.

Last weekend I wrote about the ongoing revolution in transit, the peer-to-peer online app services offered by Uber, Lyft and the like. These ride-sharing services allow normal folks to give and receive car rides at great convenience.

They blow mass transit “out of the water” and throw taxi service sideways. Super-convenient, they make it cheap and safe for people to co-operate in new and productive ways.

Art Carden, at EconLog, notes the “social waste” that governments add to the system. While the new app-based services provide true solutions to the high transaction costs of negotiating among many people, governments give us squabbles: “the battle over the rules governing the conditions under which people will be allowed to do certain things is pure social waste,” Carden argues. “The social waste is reflected in the resources consumed in the fight over the rules.”

We’ve gotta have rules, of course. But they needn’t require micromanagement, massive restrictions, or high taxes.

The new era will be run (if allowed) on the basis of convenient co-operation, transaction costs reduced by communications technology.

The old era that still rules the roost runs on clunky old ideas that Carden rightly calls “mercantilism,” the political ideology that Adam Smith argued against . . . in 1776.

Government should undergird free markets, not intrude and dominate by licensing near-monopolies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Google Mugged By Reality?

Google says health care is unhealthy.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has conducted what he calls a “fireside chat” with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In one much-cited passage, Brin observes that although he is excited about making gadgets like glucose-measuring contact lenses, health care, because “so heavily regulated,” is “just a painful business to be in. It’s not necessarily how I want to spend my time. . . . [T]he regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that I think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs.” Page echoes his colleague.

A blunt, and fair, observation. But it makes one wonder why these super-entrepreneurs have not been more critical (at least so far as their search engine can tell me) of Obamacare, which multiplies mandates and prohibitions in the medical industry by an order of magnitude.

Top Google executives are known to be liberal in their politics, and presumably have been sincere. It seems, though, that reality is not cooperating with any ideological tilt they may yet harbor in favor of government paternalism.

It’s in fields with which a businessman is best acquainted that he is most likely to recognize the value of freedom — at least his own, if not always that of competitors. So perhaps we should hope that Brin, Page and other Google principals try to achieve something great in every industry there is. That way, they can come around to consistent, principled support for freeing markets.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.