The Hot War in the City

I’m sitting in the car with my Uber driver and he points to some construction on the road. We are driving through the clogged streets of downtown Manhattan.
“See that construction? It’s been that way for 10 years,” he notes, pointing to a big mess of blockages and torn up asphalt that is causing traffic to crawl. “Every day, 100 guys show up, drinking coffee, talking on their phones, having fun, and two guys, two Mexicans, are working on something. But nothing ever changes. The construction is never finished. It’s a mafia, I tell you.”
His English was broken but he continued on to explain to me how the New York taxi monopoly works. It’s a scam, just like the road-work scam. Politicians get paid by private industry and, in exchange, they pass laws that benefit them. They stop competition. They stop progress. They stop the future.
Then he pointed to the cameras on the streets that take pictures of cars going over the speed limit or turning left on a yellow light. He explained that New York City is not navigable without breaking the law. This gives the city endless excuses to pillage drivers to pay for things like that other construction boondoggle that’s been going on for 10 years.
“It’s all about the money. Take from some, give to others. Rob us and give to them. That’s all government does in this city. It’s all a scam.”
The Not-So-Quiet Revolution
Well, you know, it’s hard to disagree with that. But in the midst of it all, there is a beautiful revolution taking place, and transportation is battle zone, the most obvious sign of the breakdown of the old order and the beginning of a new one.
Passengers all over the city are fed up with the Yellow Cab taxi monopoly — the city’s most conspicuous symbol of insider corruption. People are pulling out their cell phones and summoning Uber and Lyft drivers — and neither company can keep up with the demand. The first time I’ve had issues with a driver not showing up was this trip. The demand is too intense and the call signals are coming in every few minutes for every one of them.
Also roaming the streets looking for passengers are drivers from another outmoded form of taxi: the Black Car. These were once reserved for the well-to-do. You made a reservation in advance, mostly on the phone, and they came to you — at a high price.
Now these cars are driving around the city without passengers, since, as it turns out, the rich are using Uber instead. So they pull up to stranded people and offer their services — charging even less than Uber.
The Yellow Cabs are suffering too, with drivers quitting by the day, leaving medallion holders in the lurch. Many of these holders owe huge debts because they bought million-dollar medallions on leverage. Now they are under water, same as many houses in 2008. How long before we see them abandoned on the side of the road?
It’s a spectacular thing to see and experience. It is coming about by two factors: technology and consumer demand. Mobile applications are allowing consumers and producers to trade directly. And these consumers are expressing their wishes for better services at lower prices.
Just two weeks ago, I was in Uber’s headquarters, touring the space and seeing what the programmers and managers have to do to keep this company’s explosive growth on track without going off the rails. Now I found myself in Manhattan, the most important and fastest changing landscape for on-the-group upheaval. If market forces can bust up this monopoly, it can do anything.
Two Vocabulary Words
There are two vocabulary words to understand in order to see the underlying dynamic: disintermediation and equipotency.
Disintermediation means to find a way around the administrative agencies that block consumers and producers from making their own deals. If a trade is intermediated, it means that producers must be permissioned into the system, and the consumers must approach the providers only through official channels. To disintermediate is to discover a technology that allows people to make deals directly. Mobile applications are powered by this peer-to-peer technology.
Disintermediation is clarifying. It reveals a truth we had not seen previously. It leads to better service and lower prices because it unleashes market competition where it had previously been suppressed by regulation and imposition. No one using ride sharing services would deny learning that transportation can be convenient, affordable, humane, and wonderful. Who knew?
Equipotency means that the power to be a producer or consumer is widely dispersed, not invested in a centralized and monopolized system. Anyone who meets the terms of use for Uber or Lyft can drive. Once you are enabled, you make your own schedule. You can choose whom to pick up and whom to forgo, depending on reputation. Anyone, even those who are driving Yellow Cabs, can join. And these same people can be consumers as well.
Put them together and you have a system of service provision that eschews monopoly in favor of market forces. It allows people to trade value for value, and be creative about doing it. The resulting dynamic is so powerful that it can melt away even the most ancient and entrenched systems of command and control.
It’s thrilling to see this dynamic working itself out in real time, right on the streets on the world’s most exciting city. It’s about the gradual triumph of human agency over every attempt to control and direct it. As the cars buzz here and there, and the data from the mobile apps do an invisible dance all over the city, you get a sense of what it looks like when freedom itself finally makes a break for it.
And it’s not only about transportation. It’s happening in every area of life: accommodations, food, services, goods, employment, and elsewhere. New York City is changing — not thanks to any political movement but due to revolutionary technological and entrepreneurial shifts.
In 10 more years, the crew of layabouts might still be repairing that road, but the rest of the world will have moved on.
Beautiful Anarchy
The Economics of Life Itself : Beautiful Anarchy is the writing platform of Jeffrey Tucker, in which he covers economics, art, popular culture, and politics from a pro-liberty, anti-state point of view.
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Tyrone Johnson October 14, 2015 , 2:38 pm Vote1
Decentralisation is the key to a great many forms of happiness. So many things that are centrally managed aren’t working well. The greatest argument for gun ownership it seems to me is that you cannot ever plan when you encounter violent people, nor where. So you want to have vital tools, like those needed for defence, distributed as widely as possible. That way when violent people come along, they can be met by effective counter force.
The same is clearly true of monetary policy. Having the issue power of money in the hands of an elite group of central bankers isn’t working. Indeed, the whole scam of “scientific management” of the economy and of human affairs cannot work because central planning is, at best, linear, and the world is non-linear. Chaos theory denies the possibility of a managed economy.
Good news on the equipotency front: Anyone determined to do so can issue a currency today. People are free to choose what to accept as money. Bitcoin was only a beginning.
David Montgomery October 14, 2015 , 2:50 pm Vote1
“As the cars buzz here and there, and the data from the mobile apps do an invisible dance all over the city, you get a sense of what it looks like when freedom itself finally makes a break for it.” Warm fuzzies. 🙂
At-last... October 14, 2015 , 3:20 pm
Bravo!!
It is gratifying on many levels to read and apply and LOVE and LIVE intellectually and viscerally what is alive in me and makes my life better:
There are two vocabulary words to understand in order to see the underlying DYNAMIC: disintermediation and equipotency.
I relate them to Secession and Association and to the following:
THIS excerpt of the THIRD precept of the Covenant Of Unanimous Consent would seem to apply to here:
Association and Secession
THIRD, that we shall hold inviolable those Relationships among Individuals which are **totally voluntary**, but conversely, any Relationship not thus **mutuall agreeable** shall be considered empty and invalid;
http://tinyurl.com/Covenant-and-Galts-Oath
Galt’s Oath and the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle (NAP/ZAP)
are moral/ethical principles.
The Covenant of Unanimous Consent is a political statement of interpersonal relationships explicitly derived from the Non-Aggression Principle, which is a Moral statement.
For an explanation of WHAT a political statement is–and WHY it is needed–go to
http://tinyurl.com/Political-Statement
To live together peacefully and productively:
Follow the Precepts of the Covenant and no “government” will be necessary;
Violate the Precepts of the Covenant and no amount of government will be sufficient.
LOL Those Uber barbarians went Injun didn’t they?
I like “Indomitus” as a word for “not part of your system.” Or “not enslaved.” It is Latin for “savage” but it carries these other meanings.
So I make the connection of BraveHeart’s Indomitus and Uber.
I can observe in my minds eye, millions of individual Uber producers and consumers as Brave Heart’s protagonist William Wallace being described as a barbarian by Latin-speaking advisor to the Princess of Wales [equivalents such as Yellow cab ] during the opening of negotiations.
Wallace replies in Latin that he is a barbarian, “Sed ego sum homo INDOMITUS,” and speaks proudly of it.
Doing so shows that he is not intimidated by ancient languages nor confused by the early 14th Century concepts of education and enlightenment.
Idiomatically, the phrase “sum homo INDOMITUS” may be translated as “I am subject to no ruler,” or “I am unruled man,” or “I am outside the system.”
Indeed, it is this notion of self-rule that is at the heart of the concept of Individual Sovereignty – Cooperation with the principles of the free market, respect for private property and individual liberty, without external coercion…
There is another libertarian Revolution quietly going on as it relates to Methodological Individualism, Spontaneous Order, so called Human Ignorance, Libertarianism AND
1. Polyamory and small trading groups
https://connect.liberty.me/natural-monopoly/
AND
Polyamory Is Next, And I’m One Reason Why. Here’s how libertarianism has led me…
https://connect.liberty.me/polyamory-is-next-and-im-one-reason-why-heres-how-libertarianism-has-led-me
2. And the issue On CUC & The Secular Reactionary Anarcho-Capitalist Revolutionary at Cantwell–recently sums up that there are those who still continue with variations on the theme that the following is necessary to withdraw and move on [Vote with one’s feet]
“The State must be stopped, and if it will not stop on the basis of well reasoned demands, then it must be stopped by force.”
Dennis Lee Wilson Signatory: Covenant of Unanimous Consent–responds:
You have overlooked other ALTERNATIVES.
Another alternative is best summed up by R. Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
The Covenant of Unanimous Consent offers such a model–and a peaceful one at that. When the Imperial Roman Empire finally died, many people had ALREADY abandoned Roman Law and worked out agreements or “covenants” with other people for mutual protection and trade–i.e. they had already built a new model that did NOT require a central government, and in fact, the model was to serve well for 1,000 years.
What can we learn from that example?
And how might we improve on it?
Much can be learned from the current Amish and Mennonite colonies within the USA boundries.
I add here: What are the people like in this new town? What were the people like where you came from?
What is This Town Like? How settlers VIEWED their past relations was their SCOPE for their FUTURE ones until Fuller, Mises, Mcelroy, Tucker came along.
One school of thought leads to what Jeffrey Tucker and I are pointing to, which is those who want to fight the existing system seem unaware of what is at their feet?
https://lifeloveliberty.liberty.me/gun-control-and-why-we-cant-talk-like-adults-anymore/#comment-3
3. And now I can add disintermediation and equipotency and https://tucker.liberty.me/the-hot-war-in-the-city/
Tucker YOU ARE An INDOMITUS!
ME too!! AtlasAikido, You barbarian you!
Thankyou
PS NB and help request. Re: Bleeding Edge: I am opening up another Technical Support ticket. This comment did not translate to my nor social feed. Anyone reading this is welcome to email or message me as this has been going on a few days now. I purged my browser cookies and cache and am using a different browser to no avail
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