[Veratyr]

Because individuals won't make decisions that benefit society as a whole. They'll make decisions that benefit themselves and themselves alone.

People will simply use whatever's cheapest and easiest without much thought into anything else.

[CamperBob2]

So, all I have to do to impose my will on you is to insist, backed by little to no evidence, that highly-regulated taxis "benefit society" more than less-regulated rideshare services do. Correct?

It seems that the people who determine what does and does not "benefit society" have a significant amount of unwarranted power. If this weren't true, we wouldn't be seeing cases like this one where the people -- the same ones that supposedly make up the democracy in question -- insist on using unauthorized/illegal rideshare services.

If your response to my reasoning is, "Well, it's a democracy after all, they're getting what they voted for," then the contradiction is too obvious to bother pointing out.

[Veratyr]

My point was intended more as a general one, that you can't simply assume what the market chooses is actually the best choice, as individual market participants have different priorities to the collective.

> So, all I have to do to impose my will on you is to insist, backed by little to no evidence, that highly-regulated taxis "benefit society" more than less-regulated rideshare services do. Correct?

No, the regulations predate Uber. Uber needs to either change the law through lobbying or adhere to it.

> It seems that the people who determine what does and does not "benefit society" have a significant amount of unwarranted power. If this weren't true, we wouldn't be seeing cases like this one where the people -- the same ones that supposedly make up the democracy in question -- insist on using unauthorized/illegal rideshare services.

> If your response to my reasoning is, "Well, it's a democracy after all, they're getting what they voted for," then the contradiction is too obvious to bother pointing out.

What we have isn't democracy, it's representative democracy, which addresses exactly the problem I was originally making. The masses can't be expected to make informed decisions on everything that concerns them, so they elect a few people who can on their behalf.

When an average person decides Uber vs. Taxi, in the 10s or so they spend thinking about it, they're not considering the impact it'll have on the local economy, the safety features of the vehicle, the qualifications the driver is required to have or the regulations they're required to adhere to. All your average person thinks about is that the Uber app is already on their phone, the car will arrive quickly and in the grand scheme of things, the likelihood of something bad happening is small.

Elected representatives will listen to experts, consider the wider impacts of their decision and do their best to make a decision that benefits their constituents. Sometimes that decision will conflict with what their constituents would choose themselves.

[CamperBob2]

And people wonder why a Reagan or a Trump or a Brexit appeals to so many voters.

Just because you can regulate something doesn't mean it's always a net win for society to do so. The EU definitely seems to have missed this particular clue.