Sharing economy, not politicians helps regular folks

I was picked up at Prague airport by a tennis coach driving for Uber recently. It was raining that day. When it rained, he told me, he had to cancel lessons and loose (or rather not make any) money. But also, when it was raining, there was more demand for taxis, so he would always take his car and drive people around the city to compensate for the income loss.
Let that sink in for a minute.
I was moved. That was one of the most beautiful examples of not only Uber’s value for the regular folk, but also the works of an unhampered free market and its unparalleled ability to efficiently allocate resources.
Had it not been for Uber, that guy would have to find presumably more difficult way to improve his well-being. His car would be sitting in his driveway and all natural resources, labor and capital which were put into its production would not be used whole day. And I would have to rely on overpriced and arrogant taxi drivers of a company which corrupted itself to a monopoly on taxi service from the airport.
We had never met before and we might not see each other again, but the free market and simple search for profit opportunity brought about the interaction which made both our lives a bit more pleasent that day. Yet, there is plenty of politicians and regulators who try to persuade us, that the world would be better off without P2P economy and they present full laundry list of the most ridiculous arguments drafted by taxi, hotel, movie or any other industrial lobby which is filling their pockets. I’m not blaming them. They need to do exactly that. Otherwise it would become clear that in fact world would be better off without them, not without likes of Uber or Airbnb.
No amount of brains, computing power and information would be able to design top-down the exchange that happened at that airport. Then and there, P2P economy and free market beat the crap out of central planning and any arguments for its existence.
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Sean B. August 29, 2015 , 3:17 pm Vote0
Lose*
Martin Brock September 2, 2015 , 9:49 pm Vote0
I wholeheartedly agree, and I’ll add a point about (crony) capitalist alienation at the risk of being labeled a Marxist for speaking out of a denominational orthodoxy.
Specialization and trade is certainly a fountain of wealth in a free market, and specialization (the division of labor) is limited by the extent of the market as Smith observed; however, the division of labor can be too specialized or more specialized than free people prefer.
State capitalism with its myriad of monopolies, like taxi medallions in an urban center, limit opportunities not to specialize. These constraints particularly harm a person (like your tennis coach) who would like to offer multiple services because one of these services earns insufficient income. Non-compete clauses in employment contracts can have similar effects, and the list of these constraints is practically endless.
By effectively herding people into highly specialized employment, offered by relatively few employers gaming a complex myriad of statutory barriers to market entry to earn monopoly rents, state capitalism (which is the only “capitalism” that anti-capitalist libertarians oppose) alienates labor by turning it into a commodity effectively owned by a state’s regulatory apparatus and the crony capitalists gaming the state’s regulations.