Uber and the triumph of capitalism

Stand by your principles and be comfortable with confrontation. So few people are, so when the people with the red tape come, it becomes a negotiation.~ CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

~ Ayn Rand

 Writers Kirstan Conley and Carl Campanile wrote an interesting article in the New York Post last week, Cuomo drops bombshell on de Blasio over Uber. This article is about the outrageous acts by the self-named Socialist, Bill de Blasio, who is mayor of New York and his anti-capitalism crusade against Uber, the new, efficient app-based taxi service that is turning the commercial car industry world upside down. Uber launched in San Francisco five years ago this month. At the time, it was a small startup called UberCab. Today, Uber is a global company that could be worth as much as $50 billion.

Tired of de Blasio’s fascist, bullying tactics to keep Uber out of his city, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has come out strongly on behalf of Uber. The governor said it is ridiculous to try to limit the number of licenses granted to the app-based service in New York City, as the Mayor and Council have proposed. “Uber is one of these great inventions, startups, of this new economy, and its taking off like fire to dry grass and it’s offering a great service for people and it’s giving people jobs,” Cuomo said.

I was pleasantly surprise to read about a Democrat-Socialist like Gov. Cuomo come out so openly and reasonably in favor of free-market capitalism; that is very rare. “I don’t think that government should be in the business of trying to restrict job growth, I don’t believe you can restrict job growth,” he said. Since Cuomo and de Blasio has frequently been at odds on the best policies for the Empire State, the Governor also suggested that if the Mayor and City Council continue their assault on Uber and the free market that the state may take aggressive action to resolve the argument. “This gets very complicated, very quickly, and has statewide ramifications,” he said.

Using typical stalling, bureaucratic tactics mastered by the Left, the Democrat Mayor and the Council want to restrict the economic explosion of Uber and comparable car services pending a completion of a traffic congestion study in Manhattan, which officials said would take until April 2016. (How many of de Blasio anti-capitalist Democrats will be part of that “independent traffic congestion study”?) Despite the fact that Gov. Cuomo to date has never used the Uber car service, yet unlike the anti-capitalist de Blasio, Cuomo likes the free-market and thus likes the company and wants to use his executive powers to encourage it to stay in New York. New York State has “worked very hard to create jobs” and Uber is doing just that, he stated. “I think if you try to say we are going to cap your job growth here they’ll go next-door and grow their jobs,” Cuomo continued. “That’s not good for anyone.”

Writer David Spady in a revealing essay, The Uber Free-Market, explained this company’s rapid and phenomenal economic growth: “The story of Uber’s fast-track to success is really a remarkable testament to the benefits of free-market capitalism. Overnight an entrepreneur was able to create a billion dollar company that creates more than 20,000 jobs a month, operates in 53 countries and 250 cities, and supports over 140 million rides per year,” he writes. Before CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick started his company in 2010, this UCLA college dropout and “Hyper-capitalist manchild” saw the taxi service in all of America’s big cities as a pathetic, dirty, corrupt, politicized, inefficient product in the taxi service industry, and using rudimentary technology like apps and his imagination quickly transformed the moribund taxi industry into an economic juggernaut in a market that is genuine, viable, and profitable. The real story of Kalanick’s achievement is only part of the narrative. Uber is demonstrative on how society always wins when there is legitimate competition; where the customer has a multiplicity of choices. Everybody wins when the free-market is unleashed to offer a superior product at a competitive price.

 

Uber drivers protest New York Taxi and Limousine Commission
Uber is a very successful and economically profitable company because it provides a needed taxi service using efficiency logistics which after you download the user-friendly application your Uber account is ready and your driver has all of your information; you have your driver’s name, phone number and location before they arrive. No giving a stranger your credit card, no receipts. Choice is premium for Uber. In New York if you are lucky enough to catch a cab (very difficult for Black men), you only have one choice – a stinky, dirty yellow cab with memorabilia dangling everywhere, driven by someone who can’t speak English. With Uber your car comes to your location within 5 minutes and you can even choose a premium, or larger vehicle.

Of course the Communist-Progressive apparatchiks are threaten by the overwhelming commercial success of Uber, therefore like Saul Alinsky wrote in his 1971 Socialist screed, Rules for Radicals – Rule No. 12 – “Pick the target. Freeze it. Personalize it. Polarize it.” Thus, Uber is the target the Left is trying to polarize and destroy, but why? Progressives aren’t really advocates of progress at all. Their policies, whether Evolution atheism, FDR’s Welfare State, LBJ’s Great Society, Global Warming, Climate Change, Al Gore’s taxes on “Carbon Footprints,” getting rid of air conditioners, fossil fuels, babies, reducing urban sprawl, etc… Every Communist-Progressive policy is always predicated on taking society backwards to a more primitive time; to cause society not to progress, but to regress. That’s why taxi monopolies and government apparatchiks hate the idea of anything that they can’t regulate… for to regulate is to control and to control [under the IRS] is to tax. Chief Justice John Marshall said in a very famous Supreme Court case, McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) that, “The power to tax [control, regulate] is the power to destroy.”

Why is Mayor de Blasio and the Democrat Socialist Party on the rampage against Uber? Easy, if Uber succeeds in this moribund, recession economy of President Obama, then it will make Progressive and Socialist economics look like an unmitigated failure. Also, de Blasio is a self-described Socialist which in today’s rhetoric makes him a Communist, therefore he can’t allow such a shining example of free-market capitalism like Uber to succeed in Progressive Mecca, New York City; that would be sacrilegious. Like all Socialist Democrats, de Blasio is also a slave to the big taxi unions who hate innovation, change and competition and love protectionism and anti-free market policies like capping the number of taxis given licenses in New York to keep Uber out. On meeting with New York regulators, Kalanick said, “Some city-council people are really awesome, but most are uninspired. I meet with them as little as possible.”

The Communist-Progressive Left is on the rampage against Uber who is merely a symbol of the triumph of capitalism over communism and crony fascism. Books are already being published by little Socialist apparatchiks like Steven Hill whose new book, Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in October 2015. When Hill writes that “Every worker should have access to a safety net,” he shows how utterly ignorant he is of what free-market capitalism is all about – the triumph of the best ideas, the most efficient services and innovative companies battling it out fairly in the marketplace of ideas. In her 1943 classic book on Objectivism philosophy, The Fountainhead, Any Rand defined it this way: “Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”

Free-market capitalism is not slavishly bowing down to some arrogant, political apparatchik like Mayor de Blasio (or Obama) and allow them to pick winners and losers – the taxi Mafia over Uber because the former contributed to his corrupt mayoral campaign. That’s not capitalism, that’s crony fascism and it must end in America if our economy will ever again recover during the Age of Obama. Conservative philosopher, Ayn Rand saw no difference between Socialism and Communism: “There is no difference between communism and socialism, excerpt in the way of achieving the same ultimate goal: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism by voting. It’s the same difference between murder and suicide.”

 

CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick
“As this $18.2 billion dollar commercial industry continues to grow, more government bodies will have to adapt to the demand of Uber in the cities they govern. Take San Francisco for instance, where Uber has attracted more than 16,000 drivers and led to a 65% decline in cab usage. Those statistics speak for themselves,” Spady writes. That Uber has come so far in such a short period of time both nationally and internationally is truly remarkable, yet daily Uber faces growing and constant harassment, criticism and hatred from the Socialist-controlled monopoly of the Democrat Socialist Party. This is demonstrative of the fact that especially since the end of World War II (1945), virtually the entire world has embraced the economic, political and societal genocide of Cultural Marxism – the continuing process of abolishing all religions, traditions, governments, individuality, borders, languages, cultures, family, law and reality in order to restructure society in the future as a Communist utopia.

This Communist-Progressive political worldview is an existential curse on society for economic progress should know no political affiliation. Uber CEO said regarding his political views, “My politics are: I’m a trustbuster. Very focused. And yeah, I’m pro-efficiency. I want the most economic activity at the lowest price possible. It’s good for everybody, it’s not red [Republican] or blue [Democrat].” Indeed, what is the political entity according to Kalanick? – “What we maybe should’ve realized sooner was that we are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber.”