> And if you don't like that rides cost more in poor neighborhoods then the government could subsidize it explicitly
OK, how does that work? How do you write such a law such that it can't be exploited? Are there any examples of this kind of regulation you can point to from other markets or other legal regimes or nations or whatever?
I mean, this seems crazy to me, but it's also an opportunity to get you to engage on a genuine issue of social justice (c.f. "it shouldn't cost money to be poor"), so I'm willing to make the effort.
Calculating the amount is finicky because the subsidy itself is going to affect the market pricing. But in the end, as long as there is a competitive market for both drivers and ride share companies, you know whether the subsidy is too high or too low because the subsidized cost of a ride there will be more or less than it is in other places (rather than exactly the same as you're trying to make it).
Because if the subsidy was too high then there would be "too many" drivers and the subsidized price would fall below what's required, and if the subsidy was too low then the opposite.
That often even stays the case when the mail service gets privatized.
I’ve never heard of such services to originally be privatized, though, or of the service to be privatized to multiple providers (say with one company serving the large cities and another the countryside, or one doing half the country, and another doing the other half)
Also: are you sure this is libertarianism? I would think subsidies can’t exist in a libertarian world because the government doesn’t exist there.
This is a relatively new model, although makes a lot of sense (lower cost and more flexibility to operate uber pools vs empty buses late at night). It is not a stretch to assume you could get income based "discount cards" for uber usage.
Well no, it's just the opposite. When everyone is a "contractor" you can get a ride in a poor neighborhood, you just have to pay the market rate for getting a ride there.
When you try to legislate it, then you get avoidance. The driver gets assigned and then suddenly has "car trouble" or becomes ill. You summon a ride but it doesn't show up for 45 minutes because all of the drivers avoid being anywhere near that area if it means they could be forced to go there.
Whereas if you just pay the market rate then a driver shows up right away because they're getting paid extra to do it. And if you don't like that rides cost more in poor neighborhoods then the government could subsidize it explicitly, instead of creating all of these perverse incentives by trying to force people to do something they otherwise wouldn't be willing to do for that amount of money.
Which also puts a dollar value on the subsidy and makes it explicit, so that we can see how much we're paying in order to get it, instead of sweeping it under the rug by making the cost implicit even though it's still there.