[ghshephard]

That's precisely the tragedy of the commons - there is no "someone else" when it comes to things like water and air pollution, so without government regulation, there is no incentive to protect the commons, only use it in a manner to maximally improve one's own economic self interest, in a manner that harms all in an aggregate manner more than the community has been benefited.

It's a net-loss without some form of government regulation.

[thisosound]

It's only a market failure, because it's publicly owned. Oceans and air is tricky, but rivers and lakes can certainly be privately owned.

But, regulation is also a public good and therefore also a market failure... so you end up with regulations that harm 99% of the people, like in the case of Uber in France.

[vacri]

For someone asking for evidence earlier, it's odd that you so like to toss around '99' like it's a factual number.

[thisosound]

It's not a literal statement. Customers lose and taxi companies benefit. 99%/1%.

[mikeash]

This really gets tiresome. Somebody states something pretty obvious, like the fact that the massive environmental harm of leaded gasoline outweighed the minor benefit to drivers, and you're right there asking for evidence without doing any work yourself. But when you make a much more precise and much less obvious claim about a specific set of regulations harming 99% of people, then "it's not a literal statement" and we should, apparently, not even think about asking you to back it up.

[vacri]

Anyone who works with demographics in a serious manner is aware that a 99% split is extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

You're actually saying that the regulations on Uber hurt 99% of the people of France. Children? The mentally ill? Prisoners? Soldiers stationed overseas? Farmers? People too poor to afford taxis in the first place?

Hell, people outside the Uber areas of service, which is apparently just Paris?

Each of these demographic segments pretty much wholly have no interest in something like Uber, and slice off percentage point after percentage point. And even when you take your twenty/thirty/fortysomething urban parisian with the money for car hire, plenty have life patterns that don't need a taxi or uber - they walk or cycle or bus or train it about.

'99%' is utter, utter tosh, both in the literal, and more importantly, in the contextual figurative sense it was given.