Who is the Bandit?

William Rouse, of Los Angeles Yellow Cab, is a liar.

I have values which I would change for no one. The first immovable value is to have immovable values. Cornell West identifies the passion youth have for him and Ron Paul, two outliers of the philosophical spectrum, as being rooted in constancy and integrity. Both West and Paul have moral codes that they strive to apply consistently to sundry issues they speak about. Kudos. There are unjust and just views when it comes to politics. Not all dogs go to heaven. I won't spite you for holding an unjust view, if you are putting in rigorous effort to apply it consistently.* Lies however, are inexcusable. If it smells like a duck, quacks like a duck, and a panel of scientists identify it as a duck, I'm going to call it a duck.

William Duck, uh... William Rouse is a liar.

I don't have enough fingers and toes to count how many industries the State invades at each level of its  cleptocratic hierarchy. Let's zoom in to the State's branch in Los Angeles, CA. Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar want to serve consumers looking for alternatives to the taxi cabs granted the State privileges of licenses, bureaucratic guidelines, and monopoly. These companies dared to help consumers with the State's privileges intact. God bless them. In response, William Rouse and his ilk, are calling for the State to prevent these companies from helping consumers. Unfortunately for these companies and their consumers, the State has more goons and more guns.

This is a small taste of what the State does every moment of its existence. It cannot exist without feeding. It feeds on funds collected at gun point, it feeds on the desires of groups seeking State privilege, and it feeds on invading the voluntary exchanges of humans. I have known this for awhile. And yet, I still get ornery when I read the words of a man beseeching the State to steal accusing his victims of theft.

William Rouse is a liar.

He says

Not only are these high-tech bandit cabs unsafe, they are breaking regulatory standards and disenfranchising safe, legal drivers.  

I won't lose sleep if you see the State as omnibenevolent, and think it should be the sole provider of taxi permits. I won't lose sleep if you deem Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar unsafe. I won't lose sleep if you feel suburban security in the State privileged taxi cabs. I won't lose sleep if regulatory standards titillate you to the point of losing sleep and standing on street corners passing them out for free, so that we the people can read them. But, a thief calling a victim a thief is an injustice worth opening the window and screaming for.

Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar are NOT bandits. They don't use guns to coerce consumers to purchase their services. Their consumers volunteer their funds in exchange for these companies' services. William Rouse, and anyone like him or with him, is a bandit. He asks people with guns to threaten producers into halting production of their services. Why? He has a monopoly, and monopolists hate free competition. Free competition decimates oversized, overcharging, hierarchical corporations. Free competition favors decentralized and localized production, because the costs of production gets reduced. Small businesses would chomp the State-made big businesses in a freed market.

William Rouse is a liar and a bandit.

Furthermore, we must end the State.


Post Scriptum:
here is the article from which LA Weekly exposed this to me

shoutout to my fellow Rugger and Libertarian Amir for showing me this article

*On this point, I would like to direct you to one of my favorite quotes by the late revisionist historian, Austrian Economist, and State iconoclast Murray Rothbard.

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.