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Comment by overpaidgoogler | Hacker News Reader

People support Uber because they support the logic of the free market, which is that the government should redistribute wealth, but not fix prices, including wages. Yes it's tough being a taxi driver, but the real problem is that it's tough being a person who for whatever reason can't get a high paying job. Fixing high wages for taxi drivers doesn't solve this problem, because it doesn't provide jobs for those who don't get to be taxi drivers.

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'the logic of the free market, which is that the government should redistribute wealth'

I do not think this is correct. The free market is a way by itself to distributes wealth. 'Re'-distributing wealth would mean the government interfering. For example by setting fixed prices so drivers earn more money and Uber making less profit (higher losses ;-) (and/or passengers paying higher prices).

Yes, restrictions on prices indirectly redistribute wealth. But what I was saying was that the government should only redistribute wealth directly, via welfare and taxes (eg income, sales or vat).

> The free market is a way by itself to distributes wealth.

The free market only causes agglutination of money.

Society has decided that certain jobs should come with certain minimum standards attached to them, that's true of caterers, hotels, surgeons, airline pilots... and taxi drivers.

A free market sets the standards by aggregating individual decision's

"Society has decided" is not a good substitute for an actual reason for a policy. I'm not arguing against democracy here. I also think you are confusing minimum pay with minimum qualifications. A medallion is not a qualification, it is an arbitrary limit (yes there are other reasons for the limit like congestion, but the article discuses pay)

Not being able to get a "high paying job" is not really the problem.

The problem is that the "market" has so far failed to distribute enough wealth to satisfy everyone's needs and for most of those that you can argue that market has been able to satisfy, they are essentially slaves to that market, with little to no mobility.

There's a difference between "you're not qualified for this job" and "too many other people are doing this job".

Presumably Uber's customers have decided that the New York taxis do not meet their minimum standards -- else they would just take a taxi. And who better to make this decision than the people involved?

The flaw in your argument is that if anything goes wrong they will expect New York's authorities to intervene.

"Society" rarely makes such decisions. Governments do. The narrative that government is controlled by society as a whole for its overall benefit is a fascinating fiction.

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