Uber vs Taxis, or should I say ‘Regulators vs the People’, is one of the most clear-cut cases I’ve ever seen of how industries and government’s collude together to screw consumers.

Think about it, when the Taxi industry is regulated and they buy their ‘licences’, they’re not paying for the right to operate a taxi, they’re paying for the government to keep their competition out. It’s a perfect ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ scenario. The government gets paid stupid amounts of money for ‘permission’ to do something that was perfectly legal before the government banned it, and those willing to pay the price of entry get a protected marketplace to make a killing off helpless consumers with no cost effective option.

Enter Uber… the upstarts who refused to play by the rules and *gasp* started helping people without the governments permission. The Taxi Lobby used its leverage to ensure the government declared war. Police and other ‘authorities’ harassed Uber drivers every chance they got, and of course, legal proceedings soon followed. And at first, things went well for the Taxi Lobby and their money hungry government partners.

But things have suddenly changed with this decision. Of course the show isn’t over yet, and the Victorian Government may yet appeal this decision, but make no mistake, this decision is a significant moment.

But I don’t want to get bogged down in the particulars of this decision, or even the Uber vs Taxis debate… I want to focus on the bigger picture here, that the Government and Industry are working together to use Regulation as a weapon against Consumers for the enrichment of the Government and Industry. This sort of behaviour, if engaged in by anyone other than the government, would be criminal. Whether classified as Racketeering, Collusion, Price Fixing, or Extortion, no matter what name you give it, you and I wouldn’t get away with it. So why do they?

People who believe in government regulation believe that regulators keep ‘big business’ in check. In reality, big business pays off regulators, in the form of ‘licencing’ or other fees and taxes, so the regulators do their dirty work for them and eliminate their competition. Regulators are a tool of the very people they’re supposedly ‘protecting’ the consumer from.

This is one of many many reasons I’m so anti regulations. No matter what the intentions may have been, the end result of regulation is the consumers lose. Let’s hope that this court decision stands and Consumers can finally be ‘legalised’ as they choose the best available options for themselves.

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