Politicians trying to stamp out innovation to help monopolies

By David McElroy · July 31, 2013

When governments create problems and shortages, the free market rushes in to try to give people what they need. But in the face of almost every innovation, there are politicians and their corrupt friends in the private sector trying to make sure nobody upsets the status quo.

Do you ever take taxis? I rarely do, but I find the experience unpleasant when I have to. You call a dispatcher — who’s frequently surly and unpleasant — and then wait for a cab driver to show up. You might get a decent driver or you might get a jerk who’s unpleasant to deal with. Then you’re taken to where you want to go, at which point you pay a fee that some government bureaucrat set — very possibly in collusion with the people who own the taxis.

In many cities, there aren’t even cabs to meet the demand. There are set numbers of permits available for taxis and nobody can legally go into business without one of the permits. The people who own the existing permits fight to prevent more permits from being issued, because they don’t want competition. They like a world in which a government agency decides how many people can be in the business. That way, they don’t have to use things such as better services and lower prices to compete for business. (Actually, they’re prohibited from charging lower prices.)

There’s a free market solution to this terrible situation, but politicians and bureaucrats are trying to kill it. There are new smartphone apps — Lyft, Sidecar and Uber — that allow anyone to get a ride from someone who has a car that’s registered with the service. If you need a ride, you tell the app what you need and the app tells you who’s available. You choose your driver (and car) and that person picks you up. At the destination, you’re given a suggested “donation” and you’re allowed to rate the driver.

Nobody is forced to use these services. The people who use them seem very happy with them. The only people who aren’t happy are the people who run the existing taxi services — and the politicians and bureaucrats who are looking out for the people they’ve given a monopoly to. Several cities have looked into banning these services, but officials at the San Francisco airport have started making “citizen’s arrests” of drivers who pick up or drop off people who have arranged the services through one of the apps.

The real question is why this sort of service needs regulation. If the service providers and consumers are happy with their arrangement, why should government have the right (or responsibility) to interfere?

Those who argue for regulation almost always claim that they just want to ensure public safety. Does anyone really believe that? I don’t. I believe there’s a government-created monopoly in place and the regulators and politicians are simply siding with the people in the system they’ve created. Is there corruption involved that makes officials care so much about protecting the gravy train that they’ve created for certain people? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

In many parts of our lives, this sort of petty regulation makes our lives less pleasant and costs us money. Even more than that, though, it deprives us of the right to make our own decisions.

I don’t want a nanny deciding who I can do business with and who I can’t. I don’t want politicians and bureaucrats colluding with private interests to make sure they get my money. I want to make my own decisions.

Until people quit buying the “public safety” lie and start insisting that they be allowed to do business with whoever they want, innovation is going to continue to be crushed — all in the name of political control and monopoly profits.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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