Jared Polis is on a veto spree and I wanted to point one out, not because it’s surprising, but rather because it’s such an obvious betrayal of the concept of freedom that supposedly underlies libertarianism.
House Bill 25-1291 aimed to increase safety for passengers, including optional audio and visual recording during rides and a ban on drivers offering their passengers food and drink. It would have also added some new background check requirements and allowed a person to sue, instead of going to arbitration, a company or driver in the case of death, sexual assault, personal injury or kidnapping.
The bill was sponsored by Rep. Jenny Willford, a Northglenn Democrat who said she was sexually assaulted by a Lyft driver last year. Prosecutors charged the man who allegedly attacked her earlier this month. Willford is also suing Lyft over the incident.
I know someone who took a Lyft ride in Denver and was harassed by the driver. It didn’t get to the point of assault, thankfully. So, data and anecdotal evidence both point to a problem with a service that lightly vets drivers before putting them in a position where they can drive around potential victims.
Uber threatened to leave the state if the bill was passed. Polis’ statements about vetoing the bill referenced the possibility of those ride services leaving the state.
Is it freedom to have a duopoly leverage their control of the market to extort the population of a state when their representatives seek to regulate them? I think it’s the opposite — it’s a form of slavery to corporations.
Gig economy ride services have convinced their investors and also a lot of politicians that they’re a big, complex, indispensable app. They’re not. There’s no reason that Lyft or Uber couldn’t be replaced by some other not-very-highly funded startup in Colorado. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a company in Canada called Uride that has a successful ride-hailing business in two dozen smaller towns there.
If Uber exited Colorado, a similar company could swoop in, and they’d be abled to recruit from a large pool of experienced drivers immediately. It would be a month or two of turmoil, but in the end, we’d all be hailing rides in Colorado on a different app. I’m sure Uber would do its best to make the transition seem as difficult as possible, but in the end, the invisible hand would have slapped them down for their intransigence.
Instead, Polis crumpled under pressure because he only values the freedom of corporations to do whatever the hell they want. That’s 21st-century libertarianism in a nutshell. Freedom for people with money, and fuck everyone else.
