I'd like to agree with your position but in the current environment I can't. Uber is a shitty company, I can get on that bandwagon and ride it to the other end of the continent. But in my country, America, this sort of service is immensely valuable to the elderly community and yet there is a dire shortage of acceptably priced choices to provide for those peoples' needs. If Uber's service is priced better than the entrenched players then I'll sign that pact with blood.

Allowing bad behaviour in order to get something cheaper is IMHO the wrong way to do things. If you want to look at why everything is so expensive, look at capitalism and all of the for-profit layers people add to cost structures - extracting value from society and adding a constant negative pressure to the quality of everyone's lives; whether the amount of extracted is reasonable or not is what needs to be looked at in each case. A certain minimum of transportation should likely be a right.

> A certain minimum of transportation should likely be a right.

What sort of transportation? Are you talking about based on income level? Age? Could you clarify?

I agree with your point about minimum transportation as a right. I'd support that ballot. But I don't think it's fair to blame capitalism in an environment where there's only a handful of entrenched players. When I was helping care for my grandfather there were only four services in our area that could take him to doctor appointments if we couldn't and they were all generally expensive unless we used the volunteer service which was free but extremely unreliable because of the sheer number of people they were trying to service.

Obviously my experience is anecdotal, so I'd be interested to see if similar patterns are true elsewhere. But when there are so few companies competing with each other it seems a lot more likely that there's some sort of regulatory burden or capture in play rather than simple greed. Capitalism might explain why a service with few competitors is expensive but it doesn't explain why there are so few competitors to begin with.

>But I don't think it's fair to blame capitalism in an environment where there's only a handful of entrenched players.

This is literally the endpoint of Capitalism without regulation to prevent monopolies and a floor of public goods. You absolutely should blame it and those who fail to either check or dismantle its power.

Throughout American history, corporations have explicitly undermined and destroyed public transportation so they can profit from it. That’s why things are so bad. First they did it to sell individual cars and now to sell taxi services. Uber’s express ambition is to become the transportation monopoly you decry.

>First they did it to sell individual cars

No, they've been doing this since at least railroads, the OG monopolies

Good point!

I think you're right that I was too general but I still disagree in this context. I agree with your premise that free market capitalism is vulnerable to monopolies. But healthcare services in the U.S. are so heavily regulated that it's difficult to see how capitalism could be the factor limiting competition in this context and not the regulatory environment. That doesn't mean that the environment needs to be removed, but I do think it could be better optimized.

We're quickly derailing from my initial point though, that however things got here I think Ubera new service has the potential to relieve a lot of people in a market which I believe is inadequately served at the moment.