>It is the observation of their numerous complaints, lawsuits, and behaviour (typically quitting after only a few months). Of course it's paternalistic. You're

>It is the observation of their numerous complaints, lawsuits, and behaviour (typically quitting after only a few months). Of course it's paternalistic. You're saying they'll have a bad time if they CHOOSE to work for Uber, so to save them from their mistake, you want to deny them the option to make that decision in the first place. It's absolutely paternalistic. >What you are saying is (or requires) that all people and companies are completely free agents with perfect knowledge. No I'm not. I'm saying people have a right to make their own decisions, perfect or not. And don't presume you have more perfect knowledge of a potential Uber driver's best interests than they do. You and your judgements are just as imperfect as theirs, and more so on the matter of their own best interest, as you don't have the benefit of knowing their personal circumstances and options like they do. >People being able to engage in voluntary economic interactions outside of the context of a lawful societal structure leads EXACTLY to economic warlordism. Warlordism is the antithesis of voluntary interaction. 'Warlordism' in this case is just a buzzword to scaremonger people into consenting to giving up their rights to make decisions for their own lives. > Power will rapidly become concentrated in the small group of most unethical players, and they will rule the economy. More baseless appeals to fear to try to close the rational part of people's minds. Like the link I provided above shows, regulatory prohibitions on voluntary economic interaction is very likely the primary cause of growing income disparity. Removing such prohibitions would reduce the artificial and unearned economic rent accruing the higher income subset of the population for whom the fixed costs of regulatory compliance are easier to bear. >See Russia, which is basically ruled by 22 Oligarchs. and this started where every single Russian citizen was given stock certificates for ownership in state enterprises. Yet in only a few short years, only 22 had the power. No one said a market economy is perfect. The transition from a bankrupt and utterly corrupt nation under total control of the state to a marginally market based and slightly less corrupt state was bound to not happen without inequities and friction. Many of the oligarchs had ties to powerful groups under the authoritarian anti-market Soviet system, and were thus well positioned to take advantage of the changes that took place. You can't look at the stock ownership purchases in isolation if you want an accurate picture of what caused the inequality. >And yes, the proper place of the law IS to restrain voluntary economic interactions so as to maintain a balanced marketplace, avoid the Tragedy Of The Commons Voluntary economic interactions don't create a Tragedy of the Commons. There are market failures in externalities, but negative externalities are by definition created by nonvoluntary interactions. Under-production of positive externalities meanwhile is best solved by government provision of public goods. In other words, neither positive nor negative externalities justifies violating people's right to engage in voluntary interactions. >Get your head our of the simplistic Libertarian ideals which you spout (I start with Libertarianism too, but it isn't the end...), and read some history and Systems Dynamics. There is nothing simplistic about the Pareto Efficiency of a free market, and the evolutionary processes that lead to it evolving to configurations that better serve society over time. To bring this down to more concrete terms: you are not smarter or more knowledgeable than would-be Uber drivers. Most knowledge in the economy is diffused across the population as a whole, in the form of knowledge possessed by individuals of local conditions. Macroeconomic knowledge is efficiently transmitted through emergent processes like price signalling. Emergent systems, produced by asynchronous processes, are far more capable of organising an economy than top-down control produced by a serialised and highly simplistic 'public debate'. In your simplistic conceit, you don't understand that.