Seattle’s Ride-Share Companies Threaten Transportation Monopolies

photo via Greg Gilbert/Seattle Times … Lyft cars are marked by their distinctive pink “mustaches”

 

A curious fight is underway in Seattle right now, as the city tries to figure out how to deal with “ride-share” companies like Uber and Lyft. The Seattle Times has a fairly balanced article on the issue, which discusses that the main point of contention currently is the fact that Uber and Lyft drivers are “unlicensed” cab drivers, for all intents and purposes. From the Times:

Habitu Sallehu pays hundreds of dollars a year to be a legal for-hire cabdriver in Seattle. The fees help pay for detailed city inspections of his records, his Toyota Prius, and the entire for-hire industry.

Lately, the 43-year-old Ethiopian émigré has seen drivers offering the same services as he does in cars with furry, hot-pink mustaches attached to their grills. But the drivers for that company, Lyft, and a second outfit, Sidecar, operate without any licensing or inspections from the city.

A third service, UBERx, also allows unlicensed drivers and vehicles into its ride-sharing fleet. The city says their lack of licenses makes the services of all three companies illegal and potentially dangerous.

The reason for Uber and Lyft’s increased popularity? Because they targeted the demographics of Seattle correctly, selling their whole service on it’s use of smartphone technologies. For either company, riders schedule their ride through the company’s custom app, and, in both cases, take care of their payment method through that same app. Or more simply put: Uber and Lyft et al innovated in the free market and are now threatening one of the favored monopolies of the government/State : transportation.

The Times points out the taxi cab companies “preferred” status if you will, and the government’s overregulation of the industry, has been going on for decades:

Seattle Councilmember Sally Clark said she’s impressed with the innovative approach to offering quick, affordable transportation in dense, urban areas, but she and other council members are on the fence about whether Seattle should find a way to make their services legal, as is. The current taxi and for-hire cab industry has been highly regulated in Seattle for decades, with caps placed on the number of licenses available and expensive fees used to fund the monitoring of drivers.

That paragraph does a lovely job of the inherent hypocrisy of government: they push for the masses to adopt more “environmentally conscious” modes of transportation, and when companies spring up to provide just such a thing, well, they still have to “pay to play”, as it were. LOL.

Also contained within our referenced Times article is a fun little section on for-hire drivers. Again, the market responds to consumer needs, and these for-hire drivers are one of the responses. Private business people attempting to make a better life for themselves and their families, while also attempting to better the quality of life for Seattle residents. What’s the government/State response? Heavy- handed and profit-killing as usual:

Meanwhile, three city inspectors actively fine legal for-hire drivers for violations all the time, said the president of East Side For Hire, Samatar Guled. Sting operations sometimes catch for-hire drivers picking up people who flag them down, something only licensed taxi drivers are allowed to do.

Police also fine them. Last month, for instance, a police officer pulled Sallehu over in the South Lake Union area when he saw a woman open Sallehu’s door at an intersection where he was stopped, then walk away. The officer interpreted it as Sallehu trying to solicit an illegal ride, according to a police report, and gave him a $513 ticket.

Guled thinks Sallehu can fight the ticket, but still views the scrutiny of his actions as harassment and, in light of the city’s dismissiveness toward unlicensed drivers, discrimination.

“Which is more safe: a driver who is licensed or a completely unlicensed car and driver?” Guled asked. “I don’t like to bring up race, but we’re almost all East African immigrants trying to play by the rules and the city is coming after us. Why is that?”

Hey may have a point, as, at least with my experiences in interacting with Uber, they mostly appear to be educated, upper-middle class white kids etc. But, I’m also a bit disinclined to take anyone seriously when their first reaction is RACISM!

Regardless, the next bit of the story is probably the *real* crux of this burgeoning fight: Namely, the taxi cab companies are feeling tense because their government sanctioned transportation monopoly is being threatened by these new upstarts:

The influx of unregulated ride-sharing services has hit taxi drivers hard too, said Tommy Key, general manager of Yellow Cab’s Puget Sound Dispatch.

“The drivers feel if they are being regulated by the city so hard and paying all these fees, these people need to be doing the same to level the playing field,” Key said.

It should also be noted that public transportation has been a big fight in the greater Seattle metro area for the past two years or so, as King County Metro, the main transit service for urban Seattle, has been facing serious financial issues due to the effects of the Great Recession. So not only are Uber/Lyft et al threatening the for-hire drivers and established taxi companies, they’re also threatening the State’s *own* transportation infrastructure and monopoly.

One also has to wonder  if the Zipcar program has any affect on this particular fight as well. For those unfamiliar with Zipcars, they’re essentially enviro-friendly cars that Seattle residents can “rent” for specified amounts of time for a fee. In essence, it’s the same idea motivating Uber, Lyft et al. And hell, Zipcar even announced its partnership with the City of Seattle back in 2009, extending it’s services to all 10k city employees.

It will be curious to see how the city responds to this fight. Again, one of it’s favored monopolies in transportation is under attack from a free-market innovation. Instead of embracing this and attempting to make sure these businesses continue to be successful, the state’s response, as always, is to attempt to impose “control” , either in the name of “safety” or “fairness.”

Or, more simply:

 

 

WA State Superintendent Haz A Sad that $160 Million Is Set To Go Back to Taxpayers

Apparently, the Washington State Supreme Court decided earlier this year that the state had stolen too much money from it’s citizens with its application of the state’s “estate”/”death” tax. In their ruling the WA SCOTUS decided that $160 million should be paid back to those who’s money was stolen from them. So, for once, WA SCOTUS makes something of a reasonable decision (unlike the time they overturned an initiative that had been approved by voters four separate times over the course of 20 years) to give money back people the state had, for all intents and purposes, stolen from them.

Now for the lulzy part. Here in Washington State, that same SCOTUS decided that the state legislature had not been meeting it’s state constitutional duty to “fully fund education”, and basically told the Washington State Legislature to get it’s shit together. So, here we come to today, when I receive this adorable email from Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn’s office:

(last sentence of the second paragraph is the best)

 

“If the bill does not pass, the money would have to be returned to those who originally paid the taxes.”

That’s right folks. Dorn is actually *pissed* that people’s who’s money was stolen from them by the State the first time *might* actually get to hold onto it. House Bill 2075, referenced in the email above, essentially would be a retroactive law that would be in defiance of the WA St SCOTUS ruling. Or, as the NFIB Washington profile shared with me last night :

Legislative error + litigation = WA supreme ct ruling state owes $160M for estate tax overpayments … @FoolishReporter @lpwa @Reuvencarlyle—
NFIB Washington (@nfib_wa) June 13, 2013

… #waleg wants $, calls it unfair loophole, decides to change law retroactively to keep cash. Merica @FoolishReporter @lpwa @Reuvencarlyle—
NFIB Washington (@nfib_wa) June 13, 2013

Good times everyone!

Till next time.

Equality, Inequality and the NBA

 

 

 

LeBron James making the entire New York Knicks team look silly

 

Jason Collins, long-time NBA player and the first active professional athlete to “come out of the closet”

 

Americans are so enamoured of equality, that they would rather be equal in slavery, than unequal in freedom — Alexis De Tocqueville

I recently shared the above quote on Twitter the other day, and got a curious response from a follower on there, in which they asked how is it freedom if some people are inherently unequal to others? I replied by stating I didn’t know that equality and freedom were supposed to be the same thing. They, in turn, replied by saying that isn’t what they were implying. When I asked what exactly the question they were asking was trying to accomplish, I ended up getting crickets.

Regardless, de Tocqueville’s quote and the question from my friend raises an important issue in the argument between big government, social justice advocates and smaller government, free market advocates. Those who push for equal outcomes among people seem to ignore one simple fact about humans as a whole: we are unequal in almost all things when viewed on an individual to individual basis.

To illustrate this point, we’ll look at the two basketball players pictured above, LeBron James and Jason Collins. To begin with, don’t forget that all players in any professional sport are the top one percent of the top one percent. In the NBA’s case, there are approximately 450 players distributed among the 30 teams in the league. Again, keeping in mind that active NBA players likely represent the absolute best players in the world, the occurrence of inequality among humans is easy to see.

Collins, who most recently got publicity for announcing he’s gay, is, at best, a journeyman NBA player. In his 10+ year career in the league, Collins has averaged 1.1 points per game, and about six rebounds per game. LeBron, in his 10-year career, has averaged  nearly a triple-double over the course of his time in the league, with 25.1 points per game, and approximately 6 rebounds and 6 assists per game.

So, in the highest concentration of basetball talent in the world, you have two players who’s stats can’t be further apart. Accordingly, their salaries reflect the inequality in the amount of talent the two players have. For instance, Collins averages about 1 million a season, while LeBron’s earnings for the 2012-13 season were approximately 19 million. And, in this situation, to proclaim that Collins is deserving of Lebron’s salary is patently ridiculous.

And yet, that’s the argument that we hear all the time today from the left. Income inequality is through the roof, and the only just solution would be to try and provide for equalized outcomes for everyone. Pulling from our example above and applying it to a more everyday scenario, the left essentially suggests that a cashier in a Wal-Mart is deserving of a wage commensurate with that of a highly skilled worker or middle management.

Within the larger context of our society, equality and freedom are there, despite the inherent inequality among us. Because, you see, both Collins and LeBron had equality of opportunity to choose what to do with their lives. In turn, because of the equality of opportunity, one can also argue that their freedom is unrestricted as well.

Well, that’s it for today. The pain meds are making my brain foggy, and I’m surprised I was even able to spit out 600 words or so. Til next my time, my friends.

 

 

 

Ennobling the #IRS? Lolwut?

As the IRS scandal continues to unfold, and the abuses of the agency under the current administration continue to be uncovered, it seems difficult to think anyone with an ounce of common sense would defend the actions of the rogue agency. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in the weeks since this scandal unfolded, there are those who are willing to do just that. I got my own dose of it this morning, when I received a reply because I retweeted one of Kirsten Power’s tweets on today’s hearings.

@kirstenpowers10 @FoolishReporter Read the law before you cast aspersions on public servants. #CorporateMedia—
Douglas (@dashman65) June 04, 2013

(pause)

 

My first response was despair that someone would defend the government, especially one of it’s most odious manifestations in the form of the IRS. And then, after a little more thought, I seized on the fact that our Twitter friend labeled IRS agents as “public servants.” That got me to thinking… Does the IRS actually serve the public in any true sense?

I mean, firefighters serve the public by putting their lives on the line. Same with police. Same with military. Hell, even the rare politician can *actually* be said to be a true public servant.

But definitely not the IRS.

Because what is the IRS? Nothing more than an administrative apparatus meant to make sure the government gets it’s cut of *your* money. Nothing more, nothing less, really. It is a servant OF the government, FOR the government. If there are people who believe IRS agents are brave souls who one day dreamed of making the world a better place by ensuring taxes are paid and laws and regulations are met, then we are definitely in a strange place (And I’m pretty damn sure we crossed that bridge awhile ago). And if there *are* people actually like that (and I’m not disinclined to believe there might not be), then the mire the agency finds itself caught up in currently makes perfect sense.

What the IRS scandal and those who defend it are also illustrative of is the state worship that seems to infect many these days. When you replace God (or the recognition of any sort of higher power, regardless of labels) with the State, a transference of infallibility happens. If God is infallible, and the State is now God, then that leads you to the conclusion that the State, therefore, is infallible.

The benevolent God-State, with kindly leaders from which all munificence issues.

Don’t believe me? Again, just look at the tweet above. A person defending tax collectors.

This, in a country that was founded on a tax revolt.

 

 

 

The Trump Card for Arguing With Statists

 

 

For anyone who argues for smaller, more limited government, or no government at all, it can be amazingly frustrating to argue with those who are fully inculcated to the idea of a large, God-like state. No matter what you say, no matter what statistics you pull out, no matter what anecdotal evidence you provide, there’s no swaying them. After awhile, they’ll tell you that what you are arguing for is the perceived chaos of anarchy and that you hate people etc etc etc.

Well, as I’ve begun to expand my horizons when it comes to the intellectual arguments for a small, limited or no government, I came across this beautifully succinct quote from the economist and historian Robert Higgs:

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.

In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

History, and the evidence therein, tells us that the growth of the state is anathema to the individual, and to large groups of individuals, as Higgs points out. It wasn’t anarchists or limited government proponents who tried to erase history in Laos, who killed 10s of millions of their own civilians in peace time China, nor was it anarchists or any of it’s lighter variants who attempted to systematically destroy the Jewish people in Nazi Germany.

Indeed, it was proponents of the state, of the all-powerful God-like State, that are responsible for those atrocities.

But *why* do we find this unending allegiance to the expansion of the State, here in contemporary America and around the world? Well, as Murray Rothbard, the gentleman in the meme picture above pointed out in his extended essay “Anatomy of the State”, it’s because the intellectual class/academy are intertwined with the State, and provide the State with an authority-backed reasoning for what has been shown time and again to be the unreasonable existence of the State:

For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise, and at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the “intellectuals.” For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the “opinion-molders” in society. And since it is precisely the molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.

Makes a lot of sense doesn’t it?

Either way, just remember Higgs’ quote the next time you find yourself caught up in an argument with *anyone* right or left, arguing in favor of the expansion of the State. The burden of proof is not on *anyone* who dares argue for less, limited or no government. The horrors of the 20th Century can all be placed directly at the feet of the State in it’s various incarnations attempting to perfect/equalize mankind. Force them to attempt to explain it away.

You’ll have some fun, I promise.

 

Cloward-Piven 2.0 : Using the Elderly To Overwhelm The System?

 

Seattle-area reporter Brandi Kruse has an interesting story today, about a private company known as Benefits Data Trust, and one of it’s proxies, Washington Benefits Center, and their attempts to enroll elderly persons in Washington State in the basic food stamp program. Here’s a quick transcript of the story:

Kruse V.O. : 77-year-old Allan Blackman knew he didn’t qualify for food stamps.

Blackman: My income is about 50,000 a year. I’ve… got a house that I own, along with the credit union. I own a $6,000 bike.

Kruse V.O: But earlier this year, the Seattlite got a phone call and a letter saying he could qualify for the state’s basic food program.

Kruse: What did you think when you got the call and got the follow up letter?

Blackman: Well this must be part of the Obama campaign to get everyone on welfare. That’s what went through my head (laughs).

Kruse V.O: He had been contacted by an organization called the WA Benefits Center. A not-for-profit that operates out of a call center all the way in Philadelphia.

Voice over: Thank you for calling the Washington Benefits Center.

Kruse V.O. : The organization is a branch of the Benefits Data Trust. They work with the states of Pennsylvaina, Maryland and Washington. Here they help track down elderly residents who could qualify for food stamps.

Deanna Minus-Vincent: In Washington, only 43 percent of seniors who are eligible for basic food are receiving it.

Kruse V.O. : Deanna Midas-Vincent, a spokesperson for Benefits Data Trust, says its their job to get those people enrolled. Babs Roberts, with the state Dept of Social and Health Services, says the elderly are an underserved population.

Roberts: You often hear them say, give it to a family, to the children. I don’t need it. What we need seniors to understand is they’re absolutely entitled to this. This is not a necessarily a handout, it’s a nutrition program. And good nutritious food is as important to their health as their medical prescriptions are.

Kruse V.O. : Benefits Data Trust is paid for their work. The federal government gives them $80 for each person who applies for food stamps, and another $50 for each application that’s approved.

Blackman: The notion that they’ve gotta go rounding up people to give them this benefit…it sounds preposterous to me for the government that’s basically broke and bankrupt to be spending money like that.

Kruse V.O. : And while Benefits Data Trust says they have a proven data driven approach to targeting people who qualify, Blackman says he’s proof that their approach doesn’t always work.

Kruse: Why would someone like him get a letter saying you may qualify for food stamps?

Deanna Minus-Vincent: Um, I think there’s times where the data we get isn’t as clean as we’d like it to be.

Kruse V.O. : Benefits Data Trust has only been working with the state for a few months. In February, which is the latest month with data available, they helped 14 people apply for food stamps. Six of those apps were approved.  

Thankfully, Blackman seems to have some sense, and realized the preposterous-ness of this particular situation. Regardless, there’s some weirdness in this brief story.

a) The fact that Benefits Data Trust basically acts like a sales-referral model, where people are incentivized to enroll the elderly in the food stamps program is just downright creepy.

b) The state employee’s view of the situation that “ we need seniors to understand is they’re absolutely entitled to this. This is not a necessarily a handout, it’s a nutrition program. And good nutritious food is important to their health as their medical prescriptions are.” Basically, that statement equates to a view that the elderly don’t know best and can and should only be helped by the government. Statism for the win!

As I thought about this story though, I was reminded of the Cloward-Piven strategy employed in New York City in the 1970′s. For those unfamiliar with the Cloward-Piven strategy, it’s an idea formulated from the radical left of the 60′s of a top-down, bottom-up strategy to crash current institutions.

David Horowitz and Richard Poe did an excellent job in their book “The Shadow Party” chronicling the professional left’s attempts at bankrupting the city by flooding the welfare rolls, :

“New York’s welfare rolls had been growing by twelve percent per year already before (NCY mayor John) Lindsey took office. The rate jumped to 50 percent annually in 1966.”

Because of this, “welfare spending in New York City more than doubled, from $400 million to $1 billion annually. Outlays for the poor consumed nearly 28 percent of the city’s budget by 1970.”

This was achieved through the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), headed by a man named George Wiley. Horowitz and Poe note that Wiley and the NWRO were apt to use aggressive, intimidating tactics when stating their case, most clearly illustrated in a 1970 New York Times article:

“There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests– and on occassion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones.”

In that case, the left focused on minorities and used them as a weapon to wield against the welfare system. Now, it appears that the tactic has shifted to the elderly. As has been noted in many places and in many different fields in recent years, America has an aging population. From the Administration on Aging website (www.aoa.gov):

The older population–persons 65 years or older–numbered 39.6 million in 2009 (the latest year for which data is available). They represented 12.9% of the U.S. population, about one in every eight Americans. By 2030, there will be about 72.1 million older persons, more than twice their number in 2000. People 65+ represented 12.4% of the population in the year 2000 but are expected to grow to be 19% of the population by 2030. The information in this section of the AoA website brings together a wide variety of statistical information about this growing population.

In short, we’re gonna continue to have a lot of older people sitting around over the next few decades. And what better way to crash the collective system than to enroll as many of them as possible on food stamp programs at either the state or federal level?

Things that make you go hmmmm….

Chris Kyle Encountered Chechen Jihadists in Iraq in 2004

Imagine my surprise when I was re-reading Chris Kyle’s “American Sniper” over the weekend and came across this passage:

 

 

In case you were wondering, it’s about 1,200 miles from Chechnya to Iraq. So, looks like anti-American sentiment fueled by radical Islam has been cooking in that part of the world for at least a decade. Tell me again, though, how the Boston Bombers were “good guys” and that their affiliation with radical Islam *isn’t* really the issue?

Anyways… also found this meme pic this weekend, which certainly seems like something the immortal Mr. Kyle would have appreciated.