Original:
Uber’s licence in London not extended
The mainstream media (MM), to which this blog is an antidote, loves to hone in on and sensationalize any story it can that promotes the idea that without the State all our worlds would descend into an unmanageable, unworkable cauldron of inefficiency, inconvenience and danger.
If it wasn’t for the fact that we are all forced at gunpoint to pay tribune to our masters, the argument goes, we’d all be raping, pillaging and cheating our way through life in such a way that the quality of life for us all would degenerate beyond repair.
Put simply, we need to be told what’s good for us, by people who know better (politicians compete to convince us that they are, indeed, that person).
If the appeals fail in 21 days the lives of tens of thousands of people in London will change for the worse. No matter how good/bad the actual Uber experience is in London everyone had a choice, based on their own personal assessment of their own circumstances and their tolerance for risk.
As choices get snuffed out so does freedom. Real freedom, the freedom that actually affects the day to day lives of real people. Not the abstract claptrap of campaigning windbags who end up being controlled by the experienced professional mandarins in the background.
The format that’s usually employed in these circumstances is for isolated cases of unpleasant/criminal incidents to be consistently highlighted in the MM until the ‘something must be done’ crowd gives the mandarins all the excuses they believe they need to snuff out freedom once again. In this instance such cases are notable by their absence (although I accept they may well exist). This is possible because the ‘something must be done’ crowd only ever believes that something can be done via the State. This is an understandable but highly regrettable state of affairs. It’s understandable because we are all conditioned from birth to appeal to a ‘higher authority’ to have any impact on the wider world. It’s highly regrettable because every time it’s done it re-enforces the idea that the only way that anything can ever be managed and improved is via the instruments and institutions of the State.
The State itself has no incentive to actually improve anything (which is very different to being forced to manage it’s PR – it has to give the impression it does ‘good’ stuff). The State is only incentivized to extend it’s own power, control and funding sources (in this instance fines for ‘unlicensed’ cab drivers).
I empathize with all those people who, sooner or later, are going to wake up one day to one less option for transport. More sacrifices in countless different ways as a sacrifice to the ‘greater good’. Whilst that may mean that people are physically and mentally more drained doing some mundane thing they previously did more easily and conveniently,
the real damage has been done at the political level. Despite all the blustering about how important ‘ordinary people’ are to the politicians and the sense they convey that ‘you matter’, the reality is that your opinions, your choices, don’t matter at all. The decision has been taken out of your hands. Your only hope is to enter the political election circus where you’ll be encouraged to rubber stamp the process that will work against your real interests no matter what the blustering windbags pretend (or even actually do) believe in.
This is why voting is one thing that should not be done. Not because there aren’t many things, like transportation, that urgently need to be addressed and fixed but because fixing them depends on you, not the State.
When you voluntarily decide to pay for a service that gives you value for money you contribute, in your own small way, to the broader provisioning of that service. If it works for you, maybe it works for others as well. You don’t know. You don’t need to know. You couldn’t possibly know if you wanted to. You probably don’t pretend to know either. But then we’re not politicians, just ‘ordinary’ people, trying to bring some order to our lives. The State doesn’t like that. Fear, confusion and exhaustion are it’s playbook. Please consider that on your next delayed rush hour Tube trip.
Nomad Agorist 