[dchest]

How can it be that it's perfectly valid to "question the current regime" and "the way it all works", but not the existence of licenses? Did you just randomly defined bounds of the discussion that we can have, and called everything outside of those bounds dangerously ignorant?

[matthewmacleod]

No. Blanket rejection of the existence of licenses – "There's absolutely no justification for requiring a licence" – is not useful at all. There are, objectively, justifications for requiring a license.

[pgeorgi]

The problem with 'questioning the existence of licenses' is that Uber always plays the same tune, world wide - even if those licenses work very different in different locales.

Not every taxi system works as bad as San Francisco's and in some areas (eg in Germany), when counting by the numbers Uber is the bully: tons of money and international reach vs. regional taxi companies with a handful of cars.

People tend to be quite opposed to 'rent-seeking schemes' on hn. Except when it comes to Uber, which is _the_ example of a rent seeking, as the 20% parasite between customers and drivers while trying to tear down the advantages of the existing system that get in their way (safety regulations, accessibility guarantees).