No Clear Mandate, and Uber Survives (For Now)

Wednesday, November 04, 2020

As I did four years ago, I spent the entire night viewing the election results through the backs of my eyelids.

That was a good decision: I am well-rested and, besides, most things remain as clear as mud anyway. That is good news: There will be no clear national mandate from this election. Actually, this is both good news and bad news, because neither big government, rights-trampling "side" deserves one.

... and Democrats bite. (Image by eggbank, via Unsplash license.)
Even the best, most solid news I could find -- that California seems to have passed Proposition 22 -- is both highly qualified and contingent.

That ballot measure, while not an outright repeal of that state's ill-conceived AB-5 contracting ban, does somewhat preserve the contracting model that Uber and Lyft pioneered. AB-5 created numerous unanticipated immediate effects on existing jobs in long-established industries -- as witness its "mile long" list of exemptions added after passage -- and severe ramifications even for other, longer-established business models, such as franchising.

To my eye, AB-5 looked more and more like it was specifically designed to kill Lyft and Uber, damn the consequences. The people it was supposedly designed to help begged for exemptions or repeal, and yet the legislature refused the latter. Perhaps the law is effectively dead in California.

But the candidacy of Biden and Harris -- who both want a national version of this law -- remains alive as does the possibility of them having both houses of Congress controlled by their party.

Today may end with the best news being that perhaps Democrats will be blamed for the mess they will not be able to resist creating. But, as I noted yesterday, I am not sure the knowledge will remain actionable, even if that sinks in.

-- CAV

4 comments:

Snedcat said...

You, Gus: Well, that's over. I knew I'd have buyer's remorse whichever way I voted, and all I'll say on that score is I wish for the days when I'd have been voting for James Madison. The wife is of course on tenterhooks hoping Trump wins, but this being California, I mostly wanted to have an impact on the propositions. There I'm pleased; the vote went my way on all but one (the one about parolee voting). Of course, the woman I voted for for the House only managed the best of her chances as a snowball in Death Valley and, natch, lost creditably, and I still have no idea if any of the people I voted for in the local elections won--I do hope the self-described "teacher/musician" and "preschool director/linguist" went down in flames, but in this area they're as feted as they are fetid.

Gus Van Horn said...

Florida's ballot initiatives were not as good as California's. We will now have a $15/hr minimum wage by 2026 and a change to require TWO votes in separate elections to make changes to the constitution failed.

Snedcat said...

I will say this for the election: It's given my wife, who's currently studying the American constitutional system, a vivid example of the workings of the system.

Gus Van Horn said...

So we should hope: Control of the Senate may depend on two runoff elections in Georgia.