Writing in Hypervocal in March, Havas Media’s Tom Goodwin opened with a jarring observation. “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles,” he wrote. “Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.” The old ways that are not already dead are dying. Those organisms that thrived in a bygone period must evolve or go extinct. But rather than go gentle, those who were for so long coddled by a state that insulated them from life’s harsher realities have opted to rage violently in response to their suddenly suboptimal circumstances.
The West Bank of the Seine more closely resembled the West Bank of the Jordan this week when hundreds of masked protesters took the streets of Paris intent on engaging in violence. Rioters burned tires, flipped over cars, attacked passersby, and barricaded roads leading to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Those cars that remained in the roads were pelted from overpasses with potentially deadly projectiles. “[T]hey’ve ambushed our car and are holding our driver hostage. They’re beating the cars with metal bats,” Tweeted a distraught Courtney Love who was caught up in the chaos. “[T]his is France?? I’m safer in Baghdad.”
Surely, these were members of the disaffected underclass raging against imperialism, inequality, institutional racism, or any of the other phantoms that haunt the left’s collective imagination? Not quite. These were taxi drivers, members of the Collectif des Taxis Parisiens union, in fact. They were reacting with violence to the entry of Uber Technologies vehicles into a marketplace in which they had once enjoyed a monopoly. What’s more, their grievance was not with a government that is unduly accommodating toward Uber. President Francois Hollande’s administration has gone out of its way to limit Uber’s freedom of action in France by making it harder for non-union drivers to operate a taxi service. They were rioting because the government has not banned the service outright.
“The government will never accept the law of the jungle,” Hollande told his fellow Frenchman in a televised address on Thursday night. But, of course, the jungle won out in the end. The country’s interior minister soon banned the use of the driving service inside Paris city limits. “France ordered a nationwide clampdown on UberPOP [the mobile application’s European version] on Thursday, siding with taxi drivers who blockaded major transport hubs in angry protests against the popular online ride-sharing service, Reuters reported. “[Hollande] also ordered local police chiefs and prosecutors to clamp down on what he said was a failure by Uber to pay social and tax charges in France.”
The mob’s veto once again carried the day, although the French president’s refusal to banish the service from his country entirely will continue to agitate the aspiring totalitarians terrorizing Parisian streets.
“The escalating fight in France comes as Uber is facing regulatory opposition in markets across the world,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Courts in Spain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands have banned UberPOP. Earlier this week, Indonesian police said they had opened an investigation into the firm.”
Such a childish outburst of violence from modernity’s losers might seem unthinkable in the United States, but there are those in positions of authority here who are equally indebted to unions and would forestall the unpleasant effects of consumers’ choices on their privileged constituents. In May, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, the self-styled champion of all that represents progress, moved to block Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc., and other firms that would steal business from the city’s livery union and car-for-hire companies from innovating at their current pace. His proposal would force these firms to request and obtain city approval each time they update their mobile applications, and to pay the city $1,000 for the privilege each time they do so.
In an Orwellian twist, Ira Goldstein, executive director of the Black Car Assistance Corp., told Bloomberg News that the proposed rule would “help level the playing field” against the upstart competitor that has only secured roughly 20 percent of hired driver business in New York City.
“We now have a clear choice as to how our future will look: Will it resemble the taxi commissions and the labor unions and the government departments that were founded in the 1930s, or will it resemble Silicon Valley?” National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke asked last month. The choice is, unfortunately, far more stark. The Uber genie can no more be put back in the bottle than can the splitting of the atom. Uber’s business model, as well as that of firms like Alibaba, Facebook, and Airbnb, is self-evidently viable; it cannot be done away with but through state-sponsored coercion or the invention of the better mousetrap. The latter is anathema to the Parisian rioters and their sympathizers, so it must be the former. But history suggests that innovation in a free society can only be temporarily contained. In Paris, two incompatible creatures are competing with one another over the same space, and one is far more adapted to the present environment than the other. The ultimate outcome of this brutal Darwinian arithmetic can only be forestalled for so long.
Even in nations like France, where cradle-to-grave entitlements and freedom from laborious exertion is perceived as a birthright, this clash could not be prevented forever. The choice ahead of Americans might not be between Silicon Valley or the Tennessee Valley but civilization and Paris.
