Fair Competition Illegal in Auburn, AL

When surveyed, 100% of Americans think fair competition is good for the economy (give or take a few communists). So when is it a crime for a competitive business to even attempt to operate in the land of opportunity? When government has chosen the winner before the fight.

Witness: Uber in Alabama

CULLMAN, Ala. – If Auburn residents are driving for Uber, as company officials claim, they risk arrest like their counterparts in Tuscaloosa.

“Yes, we’re operating in Auburn,” spokesman Taylor Bennett wrote in an email to Watchdog.org on Thursday.

However, no Auburn residents have applied recently for a vehicle-for-hire business license, meaning if anyone is driving for Uber there they’re doing so illegally, City Manager Charlie Duggan told Watchdog.

This notion that you must be licensed and bonded by the city in order to do something as simple as drive a car and pick up passengers ALMOST sounds reasonable from a legal perspective (towns covering their butts to avoid liability, right?), but it’s a ploy in most towns that have this rule, because the process of getting licenses involves insane compliance to standards frequently only accessible to the government-favored cartel, such as:

requiring background checks on drivers, adequate liability insurance and a business license

The last feature is key since the state provides businesses licenses at its discretion. If you read on you find that noncompliance poses the risk of a $500 fine and up to six months in jail (!) – a bit harsh for participating in an enterprise which chooses to have different standards than those foisted on the industry by local and state authorities. Of course, this is only in the city of Auburn and the laws surround Uber differ from state to state. The uber laws in texas, for example, seem to mainly focus on what to do if there is an accident, rather than trying to restrict their usage.

I’ll be talking about this issue in more depth another time, complete with a brief history of the taxi business in most American cities. For now, it suffices to say that Uber is a private sector competitor to the traditional public-private partnership that is the cab cartel. The company features innovations centered around the customers and their needs. Those innovations include an app for your mobile device that lets you reserve a ride, see where your car is currently located, and gives an ETA for its arrival, a way to pay for the ride in advance, and roomier, nicer vehicles, all at competitive prices. Urban cab services are stuck in the bygone era of street-side and phone arranged reservations, payment upon arrival, and aging cabs, complete with no ability to plan your trip on your terms. But the cities love this older model because they are able to obtain revenue from it, and their model is designed to protect both that revenue and the drivers (who are often unionized).

I’ll build on this in later posts, but I’ll leave with this parting thought: Uber and the cab cartels perfectly summarize the capacity of the private sector to service the customer and the capacity of big government to service itself and the worker at the expense of the customer and all of our rights to pursue happiness by building a better business.