Has Uber now become an issue in Election 2016? It shouldn’t be. In a well-run democratic republic with a small and reasonable government; the conditions under which I hire or am hired to perform work would be an MP, not a YP. America has increasingly become a nation of busy-bodies expecting a benevolent government to protect them from all consequences resulting from poor decision-making. Thus, a familiar HRC quote could sum up the importance of individual initiative in her ideal economy. “What difference does it make?” Her aversion to individual initiative and free thought was clearly exposed in her rhetorical hostility towards the sharing economy.

It seems that she now intends to become the Human Rights Personnel Manager for an entire nation. You see Uber, Airbnb, Amazon.com and numerous other “sharing economy” stalwarts are fraudulently misclassifying workers and committing wage theft. She bloviates below.

In her speech, Clinton said that “this on-demand or so-called gig economy is creating exciting opportunities and unleashing innovation. But it’s also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future”. She “vows to crack down on employers who misclassify workers as independent contractors”, which she says is “wage theft”. Clinton also said that benefits, paid sick leave, and maternity leave are essential to strengthening the middle class. Those are things independent contractors don’t get..(HT: Tech Crunch)

First of all, people that work for any of these firms get sent a contract that details the status of their relationship therewith in writing. This empowers the ones who attended private schools or who were homeschooled to then read over the contract and decide whether those conditions are favorable. Nobody can be enslaved in the US. The 13th Amendment expressly points that out. The wages and benefits you work for are exactly the ones you sign up for.

I’m not sure Hillary Rodham Clinton could crack down on this via any other policy avenue than the ones pursued in Venezuela by Hugo Chavez and Jose Madura. Contracts entered into by consenting private parties are either a) Legally binding, or b) Only legally binding if the reigning Monarch sings off on the deal. Hillary seems to conveniently forget the lack of a reigning monarch in the United States Constitution. Somehow that surprises me not in the slightest bit.

In the end, the last thing people like Hillary want to see happen is for business enterprises to revolutionize how physical assets are leveraged and how employers and employees interrelate. The ability to enforce control over these aspects of corporate governance is the ability to insinuate control over increasingly large swaths of the economy. To allow such innovation and free thinking to run around loose is to let a few extra Shekels slip through the greedy fingers of the grasping hand.