Your feelings don't match reality. The licensed taxis I've ridden in were nasty, far worse than the unlicensed Uber cars I've ridden in. Taxi: 20-year-old P-O-S Crown Victoria. Uber: 2-year-old Mercedes

There's also plenty of rat-trap motels out there that are properly licensed. I live a couple of miles from one; people have even put videos on YouTube about how awful it is there. There's plenty of really nice hotels too, but that's because people are willing to pay double the price of the rat-trap, and those hotel chains are nation-wide and want to maintain their reputations, not because of any regulations. The only thing regulations are good for is making sure places don't burn down. And even that's iffy; generally places just burn down anyway and then someone gets punished afterwards.

There are terrible motels and good motels; same with hostels. I've stayed in many hostels that were far Superior and better value than hotels. I've been in some that had mold infestations everywhere.

Regulations play a part, and the are an important part of equality. Do people game the system, bend the rules and lobby to pass their own laws that benefit them over the customers and employees. Of course.

But it's all a very complicated system. You need to do a lot of surveys, research and have a good set of controls to say "regulations might correlate with x, y and z," and you'd need people to replicate your work before you can even start addressing causality.

A claim was made that "I feel that regulation makes things clean and safe". I pointed out that that claim is utterly false using actual examples. I don't have to prove that regulation doesn't work anywhere, I only have to prove that it doesn't work somewhere. And in the places I've used taxis (NJ, AZ), they're awful. I have used them in NYC too, and those are OK (though to be fair, I'm not black, which I've read is a big problem there). You're right: it depends on the city, etc. Regulations and regulators are different in different places. But to make the broad claim that "regulation is wonderful!!" is blatantly false, and easily disproven by showing only one example of a place where it doesn't work right. Now, if you want to make the claim that "regulation works really well in location X", that's a defensible claim, and only disproven by showing that things are actually bad in location X (and not other locations).

This seems to be the problem with this whole regulation vs. anti-regulation argument WRT taxis and hotels: the pro-regulation people cherry-pick a few places where things seem to be OK. The anti-regulation point out that their experiences in other places are entirely different. The pro-regulation people them stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to believe that there's places where regulations don't work well. Maybe regulation really does work well in those cherry-picked places, but that doesn't help the places where the regulation is bad and the regulators are corrupt.

To reiterate coldpie's point, "regulations don't come about because some lawmakers got bored, they come about in answer to a problem". Before going full anti-regulatory based on personal experience, one would be good to consider the relative impact on all places.

Sure, if you consider the desire of incumbent businesses to lock out competition and artificially inflate their profits to be a "problem".

I merely have the position that regulation is not the panacea that the pro-regulation people seem to think it is. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, then instead of harassing the people who work around broken regulations which just support rent-seeking by cronies, maybe we should look at fixing the political system and eliminating the corruption and bad regulation and bad regulators instead. But that's never proposed as a solution, probably because 1) it's too hard, and 2) the pro-regulation people don't like to admit to the existence of corruption.

You have very little evidence that this is true.

And anecdotal data suggests that explicit "social ranking" introduces a whole host of other problems. See: the kerfuffle about AirBnB and renting to minorities.

Congratulations. You just invented "zoning laws".

As well, maybe it takes a while before the true societal risks are understood, AitBNB regulations may be too weak for some reason, but until we discover that, perhaps we've "unfairly" put some marginal hotels out of business that would have survived under the impending new legislation. (Hope that makes sense?)

As I touched on a above, the thing about restricted markets is that price is able to rise artificially due to the unnaturally constrained supply. This ends up being a government subsidy; one that is disproportionally paid for by the poorest people. If you are already comfortable with subsidizing licensed businesses, why not continue to subsidize the marginal ones? Perhaps even in a way that is less impactful to the poorest people?

My issue would be buying a house or condo with the neighbors across the hall or across the street changing daily. It's not an issue of the quality of the hotel. It's an issue of respecting zoning laws.

somebody would like to spend less, be in more welcoming/cozy/more spacious environment, have a kitchen at hand and so on? well there is now an option for those too.

I don't see where the problem lies. just don't take perks from the other 'side' as granted.

People get scammed by shady taxi drivers and landlords all the time. Regulations don't work. Haven't you heard about all the taxi drivers who don't take credit cards because "the card reader is broken"? I've had this happen many times, and I don't even use taxis very much.

I had look at places that needed roommates, but the good ones filled up by the time I called back and the others were not places I wanted to live. I ended up paying a premium for having my own place.

http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/

Looking back, I didn't want to share after spending much of that time in hostels and shared spaces. But months later, I realize the benefits I've lost. I have too much stuff once again and am desperately trying to cut down. I'm in a city that's filled with cold an unfriendly people, and thanks to having my own place, allows me to be more of a hermit.

I plan on buying a car again at some point and downsizing to less than a car full of stuff. Big salaries are a kind of death trap. It can get people addicted and justify jobs that many of us hate. I'd rather have the small salary and only have enough stuff that I only take up one room; where I could easily pack up and leave.

I'm not sure whether the ability to do this truly empowered them, whether the life with it is better than the alternative. Clearly they judge it to be.

On the other hand was a chap renting out his spare room who loved being a host, chatting to the people he met etc etc. He was definitely happier with it.

Now suppose we divide old units of accommodation priced £ in two (halve the slope of the supply curve). The price of a new unit will be close to £. But an old unit then costs nearly 2£. So you have a choice between slum housing and coughing up double the rent.

I have nothing against AirBnb itself, I was generally talking about the bigger and bigger disconnect that has formed between the middle classes (who have seen their real wages stagnating for the last 10-15 years in the Western world) and the holders of capital, presumably because the latter have accumulated more and more wealth also because of those stagnating wages for the middle classes.

We both know that without VC money (which in the end comes from holders of big capital) companies like AirBnb and Uber wouldn't be where they are right now.