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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Uber is a great example of why lobbying can be a good thing. Taxi regulations date back to the days of horse-drawn carriages. That does not by itself make them obsolete, but at the time taxi regulations took their modern form, cities (especially on the east coast) were more densely populated, cars were much more polluting, and there was little that would allow disseminating information about the quality of taxi service among consumers. In short: the externalities and information asymmetries that justified taxi regulation in the first place have declined substantially.

Lobbyists are well-positioned to inform legislators about how the market is different today, and why the animating purposes of taxi regulations may no longer be applicable, or at least may not have the same force they used to.

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> Lobbyists are well-positioned to inform legislators about how the market is different today...

Lobbyists don't inform, they spin and skew.

Lobbyists take the facts and portray their clients in the best light possible. Other lobbyists can take other facts and undermine those narratives. It's a combative process that is pretty good at ferretting out conflicting evidence because the parties involved have strong incentives to elicit that evidence.

The alternative is "neutral" fact-finding by unelected technocrats. I'd rather have a system where the environmentalist lobby and the coal lobby fight it out than rely on some bureaucrat to come up with his version of the facts with no input from anyone else.

Great; now what about the various constituencies who cannot afford lobbyists? Well, they just get screwed, because who cares.

What constituencies are those?

The actual independent taxi drivers, for example? Unless they start some union of taxi drivers, they have no voice.

They have a union: http://www.nytwa.org

Taxis and taxi-like services have costs, like increased congestion and pollution, which are borne by everyone in the area they're operating, but which are not really in the interest of any of the major players in the lobbying picture.

There are a huge number of lobbying groups that do work on behalf of the environment.

They have nowhere near the resources of commercial groups and they don't get nearly as much access. Anyway, "there are environmental groups" seems like a facile response because pollution is only one of the costs of adding more cars driving around in circles all day to the streets.

The general public.

Spoken like a lobbyist.

Government administers regulations on behalf of the people. If they're failing to do so then the political process is broken. Lobbyists do not fix broken political processes.

> Uber had been working on the council members for months. “They kinda run this,” Alpert said in February. “I keep feeling they will just wear you down. If we end up in court, we will have to lose just based on resources.”

This doesn't sound like they're simply informing legislators of new information nor does it sound like the legislators had the resources or the time to do anything but roll over.

> Government administers regulations on behalf of the people.

Is that meant to be descriptive? Because I don't know where to start. "The people" isn't even an entity expect in a defunct branch of classical political philosophy.

And I do think this isn't an ideological claim. I believe this could be stated by socialists, libertarians, democrats..

I'm not a lobbyist, though my wife used to be. She lobbied on behalf of a construction trade organization. 98% of her work involved telling legislators about the benefits of integrating design and build phases of construction (instead of hiring a separate architect and contractor and doing design and build in separate phases).

Lobbying is a way of structuring administration of regulation that shifts responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to people. Do you think politicians should be sitting around reading papers about the reputation economy and thinking about where those ideas can be applied? It would be intractable and a huge waste of time considering the vast universe of concerns involved. And it's not like ordinary citizens are clamoring writing letters about how the reputation economy enabled by smart phones makes certain taxi regulations obsolete. It's far better for lobbyists to do the relevant work and tell politicians what they should fix and why.

"Lobbying is a way of structuring administration of regulation that shifts responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to people"

Or does it "shift responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to" corporations looking to maximize their financial benefits, regardless of its impact on society?

No.

The entire point of elected officials is that their decisions aren't based on who has money. If we depend on lobbyists then only companies big enough to afford them get a seat at the table. That's a plutocracy.

> Lobbying is a way of structuring administration of regulation that shifts responsibility from unelected bureaucrats to people.

Wait, are you asserting that corporations are people? Uber is not a person and the article suggests that they used their considerable power to take the decisions regarding their regulations out of the hands of the government officials of Portland and thus farther away from the people of Portland.

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