[AnthonyMouse]

Several of those things aren't even necessarily illegal and are the sort of things they shouldn't have had have any reason to do unless they were being targeted by a media campaign or captured government. There is also some dispute about whether some of those even happened or are just mischaracterizations from the media campaign.

It's like saying "well, they weren't only violating the taxi medallion cartel laws, they were also violating laws against evading enforcement of the taxi medallion cartel laws". There is a central cause here.

[ok_dad]

Move the goalposts any more and they’re going to be outside the stadium. What laws matter to you? I agree there are shit laws but why can uber break them with impunity but individuals are jailed for smoking some fun lettuce?

[AnthonyMouse]

The question you should be asking is, what do you want to do about it? Throw the people challenging the taxi cartels in prison, or get rid of the laws against fun lettuce?

[ok_dad]

Something else, I’m not sure what yet. Honestly, I’m not the best guy to ask but I know that I don’t want startups to continue breaking laws with impunity and I don’t want individuals to get imprisoned for stuff they do that isn’t affecting others in a meaningful way.

[AnthonyMouse]

There isn't really a something else. You have bad laws that are in practice only enforced against the little guy. You could demand they also be enforced against the big guy, but that's hard to do when they're bad laws, isn't really a great outcome because they're bad laws, and its primary benefit would be in service of calling attention to the flaw so the bad laws can be repealed. And then maybe you should just start there to begin with.

[BrenBarn]

That is partly true, but it's also true that vastly increased enforcement against the big guys would still be better than what we have now.

[AnthonyMouse]

Suppose that the status quo is the worst option, the second worst is enforcing the bad laws against the big guys, the best is getting rid of those laws.

Now, that might not be the case. Given the existence of bad laws, having someone who is able to break out of the bad cage might be better than if no one can, but let's consider what happens if we assume that it's worse.

Regardless of how they're ranked relative to each other, you would only pick either of the two worse options over the best if it was easier to do it. But getting bad laws enforced against well-heeled players is actually the hardest thing to do because they're doing something sympathetic and have the resources to fight, which is harder to do than repealing the bad laws.

[opello]

Why isn't at least one of those things actually addressing (disbanding, regulating, whatever--left to people experienced in policy or with context to have some remediation plan) those taxi cartels' behavior?

[AnthonyMouse]

The argument is that getting rid of the bad laws is better than enforcing them more rigorously. This can be applied to the laws propping up the taxi medallion cartels as well as the ones prohibiting personal drug use. Then anyone (not just Uber) could compete with them and thereby disband the taxi cartels previously using those laws to constrain competition.

[opello]

I agree that removing bad laws is good. I think by introducing the second, culturally charged topic (1.) taxi cartels, 2.) recreational drugs) you diminish the possible interpretations of your perspective.

The other downstream conclusions make sense too, but the linkage is more opaque making it difficult to appreciate.

Also hard to acknowledge is--who decides which laws are "bad"? Generally, societal outcomes should test the efficacy (toward some comparably abstract societal good) of laws, which then prompts the legislature to do something between patting themselves on the back and authoring actually effective law.

[AnthonyMouse]

> who decides which laws are "bad"?

It's better to ask the question in a different way. We know what bad laws are. They're laws that benefit some interest group at the expense of the general public, e.g. by constraining competition or diverting tax dollars to cronies.

So the question is, how do you eliminate bad laws? This isn't a question of what a hypothetical legislature should do if it was full of good faith actors, it's a question of how to structurally align the incentives of a real legislature with the interests of the general public so that they're inhibited from passing bad laws.

[thwarted]

Because more money and special interests are behind fun lettuce smoking enforcement than local taxi companies could put behind protecting their own cartel from interlopers. If the taxi companies had more money to dump on politicians than is poured into drug enforcement, then the priorities would have changed.