Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Libertarian Economist: We Were Wrong" video.

  1. Yes, that's a major part. An interesting case is the current regulatory disparity between taxis and ride "sharing" services like Uber. The regulations on taxis exist because people got fed up with overcharging, unfair wages, poor cab conditions, assault, etc. The same sort of thing is happening with the less regulated ridesharing services from both the perspective of employees (currently classed as independent contractors) and consumers. Predictably, the right wing libertarian response is to turn back the clock and deregulate the taxi industry so that it is "competitive" with Uber, Lyft, etc. It's probably true that taxi services can't compete with ridesharing because of regulation, but a regime of deregulated competition would just reproduce the original situation where consumers and workers were underserved. http://time.com/3592035/uber-taxi-history/ But the other significant part of regulation is the part that corporations and interest groups lobby for and that work in their interest. The hard conservative notion that regulations are unilaterally imposed on business by government just isn't true. There are certainly times when the public will and political will (often two very different things) align, but I would suspect far more typical is the alignment of corporate interest and political will to pass regulations that can serve business with a very narrow public benefit, if any. Words like "regulated" and "deregulated" don't really tell us enough. We have to always ask, "for whom?"
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