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Regarding 7, I fail to see how following the law would be "stymieing" them. If they have to break the law in order to be viable, then they're not viable.

• CamperBob2 11y ago
  So your position is that the purpose of the law is largely to protect incumbents? As with matters ranging from racial segregation to the 55 MPH national speed limit, the only way these types of laws ever change is by widespread civil disobedience.
  • mikeash 11y ago
    A lot of counterexamples to that come to mind, such as airline deregulation, trucking deregulation, and telecommunications deregulation. Civil disobedience should be the last thing you try, after all the usual channels fail, not something you just leap into because you don't feel like trying the proper channels first.
    • CamperBob2 11y ago
      It depends on what you call "those types of laws." The ones you mention were imposed top-down, rather than actively encouraged by, say, the taxi companies.
      • mikeash 11y ago
        I'm not sure about that. I'm less sure about trucking and airlines, but telecommunications regulations heavily protected the incumbent for a very long time, and my understanding is that AT&T played a big role in writing them.
        • CamperBob2 11y ago
          That was a bit of a special case, though. The phone company was originally a lot more like the US Postal Service. They were given a guaranteed monopoly, in exchange for accepting the requirement to serve all customers no matter how costly or inconvenient. I don't see a lot in common between a taxi or taxi-like transportation service and a natural monopoly on rights-of-way and wires on poles. If the AT&T monopoly had been preserved to the present day, and/or the Carterfone decision had gone the other way, I think we would be seeing a lot of civil disobedience in the form of people connecting unauthorized devices to the network.
          • mikeash 11y ago
            AT&T accepting regulations in exchange for a guaranteed monopoly sounds a lot like taxi companies accepting regulations in exchange for sharply limited access to the market. I'm sure we'd see civil disobedience of the form you mention if telecoms deregulation hadn't happened. But my point is that it did happen without the need for civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is reasonable and good when you've exhausted all the normal avenues for change and it's not working. But Uber hasn't even tried to get taxi regulations reformed or removed. They've started out by simply ignoring them without ever trying to work within the system.
            • CamperBob2 11y ago
              The key point being, the telco regulation structure was at one time vitally necessary. The taxi regulations were, and are, not. They're just so much nanny-statist nest feathering, local government at its worst. They are a perfect example of something the free market could handle just fine on its own. Of course we've definitely crossed over into matters of opinion now.
              • mikeash 11y ago
                I don't understand how being unnecessary means that it makes sense to skip over trying to change regulations within the system and go straight for civil disobedience. All I'm saying here is that if there are problematic regulations you should try to actually get them reformed or removed before you take the step of just outright violating them, because it can and does work sometimes to make that attempt. I'm surprised this is such a controversial opinion.