There’s a lot to be said about the risk of a fully deregulated market, and it’s no mystery that *very* rich companies are in favour of one — it’s the Altered Carbon of monopolisation, funnelling profits to the top without even subsistence-level compensation at the bottom — but this is almost certainly not the correct venue for a debate on that. So I’ll just skip defending that standpoint and let people make up their own minds there.

Really, the issue with ridesharing services is the fact that they address the real and major problems with the existing taxi industry:
1) the drivers are anonymised and are not driven to provide meaningful service.
2) the drivers are incentivised to commit petty frauds to try to acquire a greater share of profit.

The anonymity of taxi drivers is a huge problem, because taxi drivers aren’t encouraged to offer good services to their customers and are often nepped/word-of-mouthed into the profession by other drivers, creating cliques that have demonstrably been racialised and exclusive — so much so that massive proportions of city taxi codes are devoted to denying drivers any right to refuse passengers.

The anonymity and fare structure also encourages petty frauds — taking longer to drive to the same destination by taking an alternative route (which taxi codes attempt to address by offering the passenger full veto authority over the route taken, though this doesn’t help tourists against predatory drivers), pretending the credit card machine is offline and demanding cash only (which taxi codes address as “well, free ride then!), etc.

Then of course there’s the sheer robbery — I almost used the word “barbarity” — of taxi licences, where the city can charge upward of 50 to 60% of the car’s total fares just for a single medallion, to say nothing of the fees and taxes they layer on top.

The ridesharing system solves many of these problems, but also creates new ones: the massive cash grab of the higher-ups versus the lower-downs, and the very real danger of having a driver with serious criminal intentions. That latter problem is partially solved by the feedback system, but certainly not solved entirely — taxi drivers certainly aren’t immune to crime themselves, but there is nowhere near parity.

Really, the ideal result is simply a world where rideshare is the operating model, taxi medallions are gone, and employees are given mandatory protections, benefits, and wages in addition to the digital model’s incentives and perquisites for higher performance and surges.

But like every other attempt by the government to reclassify contractors as employees, it really comes down to only two things: (1) the much greater ability of government to enforce collection of taxes/fees (and power) through a few large businesses vs. collecting from a zillion individual contractors/gig workers, and (2) the ability of politically-connected unions to enlist and collect dues (and power) from employees vs. from independent contractors/gig workers — esp. in Dem-controlled states and cities.

[Note that (1) is a lot like what your linked articles refer to with the Cantillon effect and trickle-down aid from the FED during this pandemic, just in reverse. The FED cannot possibly buy bonds from every small business in the US — that is what business/payroll tax cuts are better for, which the Trump administration has also tried to implement. Also, the Fed has to keep its investments safe and stable. So if they are going to help stabilize the economy this way, they have to pump stimulus into big stable companies, who then have more and cheaper capital to invest in smaller businesses they utilize, and/or pass savings to consumers, etc. It often isn’t fair, it is picking winners and losers in a sense, there are some abuses, and it doesn’t help small competitors; but from a practical sense, they have no choice. Ideally, in stable non-pandemic economic times, the FED should interfere very little through such measures. Ideally. We must be vigilant, as always, to watch for government abuses and excesses.]

What does that piece have to do with minimum wage?

https://medium.com/@rafisher/the-space-to-proceed-6ac29c2c7dc7?sk=6d0f4872891c2d3462c040a2369f9d12

About 30 years ago, I was living in Austin, Texas, when we had a freak cold spell just before Christmas. A Canadian will laugh: Austin was not prepared for a week of temperatures below 10 °F (-12 °C). When the thaw came on Christmas Eve, there were burst pipes all over the city. Some apartment blocks had a single water cutoff valve for the whole building, meaning that a burst pipe anywhere forced a water cutoff for everyone.

Needless to say, there was an excess demand for emergency plumbers, and few to be found on Christmas Eve! By luck, my building’s property manager was one of the best in town. They had our water back in the early hours of Christmas morning. I know many people who were without water for weeks. I was very grateful that our HOA had paid for a top quality management company.

How does one re-educate a marketplace to accept and provide for risk, when we now bring people up to expect none?