The state is morally responsible for folks who cannot work, however, they don't have to achieve this responsibility by creating below-market-rate or otherwise crap jobs. They can achieve this responsibility through, for instance, basic income, unemployment benefits or a social safety net.
The moral responsibility of a state is not to make people work at all costs. It's to look after its citizens and to your point make sure they don't die. Americans tend to conflate the two but they are distinct.
Combining the two creates a weird world where the state needs to stay out of the way of individuals getting any job at all no matter how bad or underpaid, and that's not really the mission statement.
If you're talking about "killing people" because of drunk driving, I would suggest that there are plenty of other ways for folks to get home, between public transit, a designated driver, or yes, a taxi. I enjoy drinking as much as the next guy, but not having Uber isn't going to cause me to die. At some point personal responsibility comes in to play when the goal is to optimize for the greater good. I do think having Uber or Lyft is strictly better.
Drunk drivers tend not to only kill themselves. I'd also like to point out that your argument for 'personal responsibility' has a lot of similarities with the 'abortions would stop if people just exercised abstinence' argument. The flaw is the same: people don't act responsibly[0] and others suffer for it[1].
>They can achieve this responsibility through, for instance, basic income, unemployment benefits or a social safety net.
Those would be reasonable approaches but instead CA seems more interested in hacking a massively useful service into unprofitably. It's akin to pushing mass transit by bulldozing highways instead of building subways.
[0] A lot can be written about why people don't, but its demonstrable that lowering the barrier to alternatives decreases irresponsible behavior.
[1] If you consider abortion and/or drunk driving to be social ills.
I will very much give you this one, and that's the first thought I had as I was writing up my post. Still not entirely sure how to reconcile that tbh, and I tried to encapsulate that in "I do think having Uber or Lyft is strictly better."
It's a weak argument if you move from "people will die, to say nothing of the impact to the economy" — presumably, of using a different taxi app?
The strict adhesion to economics you're proposing would say a new marketing clearing price would be reached, not start making alarmist overstatements about what higher prices could imply
- If it can be achieved via such a simple change, then why wasn't it?
- Medallions and gig economy have vastly different incentive models, which tie very deeply with coverage and supply volume
- What of the countless anecdotes of taxi no-shows even after rideshare became prevalent?
- In most markets, it took a multinational giant burning through billions of dollars to get competitors to start playing catch up technology-wise
- etc
I'm not sure to what extent we can infer a correlation between the app-based aspect and DUIs there.
Though to be clear, I do think the app-based aspect plays a role. It's just that when I say "rideshare", I assume we are talking about the whole package as it exists in reality, as opposed to dissecting what aspects of Uber affect what types of statistics.
[0]Effectively banning Uber will literally kill people, for starters. To say nothing of the increased economic friction going back to the cab system.