Uber regulatory risk: Politicians who will never use Uber

by philg

Uber continues to have a tough time with politicians and the government regulators whom those politicians appoint. I’m wondering if part of this difficulty is that politicians are now so segregated from the rest of the population (Marie Antoinette/Louis XVI) that they will never use Uber (and, since Uber is fairly new, never would have used Uber in their pre-success days).

Let’s look at Hillary Clinton, for example. The Daily Caller says that she can’t go anywhere on a plane smaller than a Gulfstream G450 (about $50 million factory-new, depending on how pimped out the interior is). One thing that one does not see is a Gulfstream G450 land at Teterboro and the passengers come out to summon Uber from their phones.

The mayor of a smaller city may not travel around in a G450, of course, but he or she probably gets a car and driver and hence will never have a personal need for Uber.

Readers: What else do politicians regulate that they never have to use personally? And should there be some kind of requirement that regulators also be customers of the industry that is being regulated? Otherwise, why wouldn’t it be trivial for a well-funded lobbyist to get rules established to eliminate competition?

7 thoughts on “Uber regulatory risk: Politicians who will never use Uber”

  3. Male legislators – abortion.

    Really this should not be the standard. FDR grew up wealthy but he had compassion for the downtrodden. Washington believed in noblesse oblige. What we really need is a system of limited government where the government has no power to engage in crony capitalism, but that train left the station at least since the time of the New Deal.

    I wouldn’t say it’s trivial for special interests to get laws passed favoring them but it’s not impossible either. Every time the copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire, Congress lengthens the duration of copyrights.

  4. Izzie L.: I really think the federal government, even of FDR’s time, was much closer to the farmer-taking-his-turn-in-the-House idea of Congress than today, even though the time difference between the founding and FDR is much longer than it is between us and then. I think any semblance of being “in touch with the people” as an ideal in Washington was because people making up government weren’t the insular people they are today.

    Just within the enormous post-war boom — I feel — each position in government has become its own business. Even a “simple” Congressman has a full staff now. Maybe I’m ignorant, but I don’t think it was like that back then. Each Secretary in the Cabinet represents a whole army of people.

    Another problem, in my mind, is that the people making up these staffs are in it for the long haul, through administration after administration. You look at a person like Dick Cheney, who was a wheel in federal government for decades before he was vice president, and it gets really scary when you consider the amount of influence these kinds of people have over the average American’s lives without ever being elected. They’re there, behind the scenes, peddling favors and access, concentrating power for a lifetime, and the average person on the street (and me) has no idea who they are, or what their agenda is.

    Like celebrities, national politicians have an entourage around them 24×7, reinforcing their every thought, and catering to their every whim. Every moment of the day is scheduled, selling more votes and securing more campaign money. The only thing that can break their bubble of self-absorption is a national scandal that their minions can’t pay to shut down. They don’t even know what planet they’re on any more, let alone what an “Uber” is.

    So, no, I think anything that doesn’t involve a truly national-sized business won’t even reach their radar. Until Uber starts playing loose with the campaign contributions at the federal level, they’re going to be under the gun from local and state governments, where their presence is actually felt. But they can learn. Like Microsoft, through the anti-monopoly trial, where they gave something like $16K to politicians, pre-trial, to where they were giving $1M to BOTH sides by the end.

  6. Politicians do not understand anything about parking. It never occurs to them that you may have to drive around for 15 minutes to find a parking space. To them, Boston is just as shown on the television show “Spencer For Hire”: When you need to be somewhere, there is always an empty parking space a few steps from your destination.

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