As originally reported by Janet Burns of Forbes, the New York City Council has denied city residents access to additional ride-sharing services. In a 39-6 vote, the bill caps the current supply of New York City Uber and Lyft drivers for the next 12 months and implements a minimum wage of 17 dollars per hour. In what City Council Speaker Corey Johnson referred to as reforming an industry “without any appropriate check or [government] regulation,” Councilman Eric Ulrich argued, “This is like putting a cap on Netflix subscriptions because Blockbusters are closing.”
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Samizdata quote of the daySamizdata Illuminatus (Arkham, Massachusetts) · Economics, Business & Globalization · North American affairs · Slogans & Quotations August 25th, 2018 |
 15 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Couldn’t be any clearer. The desire of free people to engage in a legal transaction with other free people must be checked and regulated.
Because power and control.
Amazing, in days past the man proffered some excuse in order to “reform” (read: regulate) an industry, but today they don’t even bother, if it exists, just demand a license for it. The shocking thing is most people take this as a given. The war against big government has a long way to go.
I’ll be damned, somehow a man with a connection to reality got elected in The Rotten Apple.
It’s a tenuous connection at best. Here’s a line from his Wikipedia entry:
This may be a somewhat surprising conservative bent, seeing as he serves as one of only three Republican council members (out of 45) in NYC. But I still wouldn’t call him reality-based. Perhaps “less addled.”
This is good. People who vote left should be made to suffer every possible inconvenience that their government can manage to inflict on them, the more expensive, the better.
As New York City Council is elected by the people of the city I can’t really see a problem with this.
By their choice of councillors the people of New York are denying themselves cheaper taxis.
Because not everyone votes for them, pete
Yes Perry, but the rest bear some responsibility for failing to persuade the lefty voters.
The real problem is that most people are conservative but too lazy to vote, whereas lefties are much more energetic.
We have to make some decisions collectively, Perry.
If everyone could choose their own laws and rules we’d have anarchy, and life would be miserable for everyone including libertarians.
Are there any “Libertarians” still around? All I see around me is rules and regulations about everything, we are no longer a free Nation, free to enjoy ourselves as once we did. In the last war, apart from rationing which was a good thing, we were far more free than anytime in the last 30 or 40 years. And it is getting worse by the day!
The police have to arrest some people, pete, else we’d have anarchy in a far more immediate sense. It remains sensible to object if they start arresting more and more people for more and more bizarre offences.
A review process devoted to eliminating all laws not rigorously provable to require a one-size-fits-all decision could spend a long time eliminating no-brainer cases before it reached debatable ones.
Mr Ulrich is quite right, and good for him. OK course, the entire council know he is right, they can work it out from first principles, using reason, which they possess yet reject. The basis on which they are doing this is that they know what effects it will have, otherwise they would have no interest in trying it.
And here in the UK, Mr Corbyn is suggesting that with the rise of Amazon view (or whatever it is) and Netflix, the answer is not to say ‘Well, however puts out the best offerings will succeed, how exciting.’‘ but rather to impose a tax on what costs people nothing (at point of use) Google etc., but to tax tech companies to create a BBCFlix, which will presumably colourise and dub the entire Soviet propaganda film archive whilst digitally inserting the ‘right’ minorities and characters to make it ‘relevant’, and then be amazed that only the most masochistic Remainers watch it. This will lead for demands that watching it be made compulsory in the interests of ‘balance’ and ‘democracy’.
bobby b
I made no assertion that he was “reality based”, merely that he had a connection to reality. Perhaps I should have said it was a vague connection.
Given the stupendous amounts of money involved in the buying, selling and financing of New York taxi medallions – I was going to call it a ‘cottage industry’ but then a quick check showed that there’s actually hundreds of millions of dollars in play in this market – I am frankly surprised that some hard-hitting investigative journalist isn’t digging into the supporters of these ride-share caps on the City Council and trying to find out whether there aren’t some – diverse motivations, shall we say? – for their support of a measure which denies and limits the choices of their voters.
Of course, I’m joking. I’m not surprised at all. When you let elected politicians decide what may be bought and sold, the first thing that will be bought and sold – is politicians.
llater,
llamas
For all the talk of the statism of California (and it is horrible) New York State remains the least free State – see the recent survey by Reason magazine (and Reason has found New York to be the least free State since the survey started – for example try Home Schooling your children in New York State).
And the heart of statism in New York State is New York City, which has been the centre of the growth of statism in America for about a century. The “prosperity” if New York City is from the “financial services industry” (little manufacturing is left in the city) – which depends on the flow of Credit Money from the New York Federal Reserve. Even more than London, New York City is a Credit Bubble economy – the taxes and regulations of London are not really much worse than the rest of Britain, but the taxes and regulations in New York are much worse than most of the rest of the United States. So there is no good reason for those millions of people to be there any more (however wonderful it may have been in the past) – other than the flow of funny money from the Federal Reserve which (directly or INDIRECTLY) funds everything.
By the way… this may PARTLY help explain the rich leftists of New York City, for their wealth is artificial and they know it is artificial. So they see no MORAL case for resisting statism.