HorsesAss.Org

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.

Stephen gets batshit serious about migrant kids.

Sam Seder: Rick Perry visions of being Jewish.

Ed: Gov. Bobby Jindal calls for a rebellion with a hostile takeover of Washington.

Young Turks: Here’s the Republican scandal machine in 10 easy steps.

Liberal Viewer: FAUX News, “Girls more likely to have hateful little minds” ???

ONN: The Onion Week in Review.

The Return of the Neocon and Wingnut War Criminals:

• Mark Fiore: The Neocon reunion tour!.
• #Dicklovers speak out:

• Pap and Cliff Schecter: War chickenhawks coming home to roost
• Maddow: John McCain, ‘Blah blah blah arm the rebels’.
• Jon: Republican warfare queens
• Thom: The return of the neocons.
• Jimmy Dore: Digging a deeper hole.
• Pap and Sam Seder: The King of Iraqi blood and oil, Part I.
• Pap and Sam Seder: The King of Iraqi blood and oil, Part II.

Dark Snow 2014: Why we are here.

Young Turks: FAUX News’s Soccerghazi!!!!!!11!1!!

David Pakman: Looney Toon Rick Santorum says Christians should fight war against gay marriage.

Thom: GOP is the pro-death party.

Daily Show: College sexual assault.

Some historical iced tea for the 4th.

Young Turks: Michele Bachmann’s latest insanity turns Neil Cavuto reasonable?!?

Sam Seder: Election fraud is real, and rich white Republicans are doing it.

Thom and Pap: Gov. Walker’s (R-WI) “Criminal Scheme”.

Sam Seder: Christie builds another bridge to jail.

White House: West Wing Week.

Young Turks: California’s historic vote to get money out of politics.

WaPo: 44 years of Charles Rangel, in one minute.

David Pakman: Benghazi has become an epic Republican embarrassment.

Boehner’s Silly Lawsuit:

• Obama: Boehner wants to sue me for doing my job
• Sharpton: The GOP’s absurd lawsuit
• Pap and Sam Seder: Boehner’s asinine lawsuit stunt.
• David Pakman: Republicons sue Obama over fewer executive orders than Shrub.
• Alex Wagner: Obama disses Republicans.

Liberal Viewer: Is ISIS the #1 threat to the U.S.?

Factivists: The GOP’s Immigration Inaction.

Ed: Herman Cain thinks Obama voters are “stupid”.

Bill Mahar’s guest draws comparison between Teabaggers and Nazis.

Supremes Greenlight Harassment at Abortion Clinics:

• Sam Seder: Supreme court greenlights harassing women at abortion clinics.
• Maddow: Hypocritical SCOTUS has buffer zone, but doesn’t think abortion clinics need buffer zone.

Young Turks: Syria hands over their chemical weapons…THANKS OBAMA!

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

This week the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision ruled that there is a free speech right guaranteed in the Constitution to shove pregnant women. What after all are the buffer zones for except against harassment of doctors and patients. After all, the law was enacted in “response to a history of harassment and violence at abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a shooting rampage at two facilities in 1994.”

We know the ruling will lead to more pushing and shoving of pregnant women who want health care. We know it will lead to doctors being less safe. We know that it will mean more violence, because violent groups with a history of violence attempting to do violence to women (and there’s no other way to call forcing them to remain pregnant against their will).

Freedom!

As Voltaire would have said about this ruling, “I may not agree with your shoving a pregnant woman, but I will defend to death your right to do it.”

We all know Seattle area rents are going through the roof. There’s no surprise there. But what really jumped out at me from the latest statistics was this:

Apartments in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood saw the biggest increase in rents. The average asking rent was 12.3 percent higher over the quarter, rising to $1,628.

But Ballard also had a vacancy rate of 8.6 percent, the highest in Seattle. And when new apartments that just opened are included, the vacancy rate shoots up to 18 percent.

The apartment boom in Ballard has led to a doubling of the inventory over the past six years, said Tom Cain, head of Apartment Insights Washington. When the units now being built are complete, Ballard’s inventory will have quadrupled.

New units rent for a premium, and they’re part of what’s driving up market rents, Cain said.

Listen to the free market folks and you’d think the solution to Seattle’s worsening affordable housing crisis is simple: get out of the way of developers and let them build more units faster! And that somewhat makes sense. Supply and demand and all that. And yet the neighborhood with highest vacancy rate and one of the biggest booms in new construction, is also the neighborhood with the fastest rising rents. How does that work?

The problem is that the market incentivizes developers to focus on meeting the demand of high-end renters to the detriment of middle and low income households. The cost of borrowing and the cost of land remains the same no matter what you choose to build. Given these and other fixed costs, there’s just more profit to squeeze out of any given lot by catering to the highest end of the market the neighborhood will support. And so that’s what developers tend to do.

Thus if we rely on the market to address affordability in Seattle, it will necessarily constrain the growth in luxury housing prices first, before saturation at the high end of the market ultimately forces developers to target their product further down the income scale.

Yes, rents of older housing stock rise more slowly than rents of new, and all this expensive new housing will eventually be old. But as these units age, unless their rents increase more slowly than growth in median income, these apartments will never become more affordable.

Affordability is not just a product of how much we build, but of what we build. And private developers simply aren’t focused on meeting the demand for low and middle income housing.

Yes, the city should always strive to make the permitting process faster, cheaper, and more efficient. And we certainly need to let go of our nimbyist fetish with building heights. Seattle must become a taller, denser city. But simply getting out of the way of developers won’t solve our problem. If we can’t find a way to effectively incentivize developers to meet the demand for low and middle income housing, then the city is going to have to find a way to tap into its own access to capital markets to build more low and middle income housing itself.

Swim at your own risk?

The family of a man who drowned a year ago in the swimming pool at the Quality Inn & Suites Seattle Center has filed a wrongful-death suit against the owners of the hotel, claiming poor maintenance made the water unusually murky and contributed to a botched rescue operation by firefighters.

[…] The hotel operators, Seattle Hospitality Inc., last Friday filed a third-party complaint seeking to draw the city of Seattle into the suit as a second defendant, claiming the Seattle Fire Department failed to conduct an adequate water rescue and didn’t find Deboch in the pool after firefighters were summoned to the hotel.

Except it’s hard to perform an adequate water rescue when the water is so filthy that you can’t see the victim.

[…] Seattle firefighters arrived within 2½ minutes of the call, according to Fire Department records. They searched the pool using a rescue hook and thermal-imaging camera but found no sign of Deboch.

A Fire Department report states that firefighters “believed they were visually able to confirm that no victim was in the pool” and thought they could see the pool’s bottom.

A civilian also got in the pool to search for Deboch, but no firefighters entered the water, according to the report.

I worked three summers as a lifeguard (i.e. pool boy) at swimming pools at four different residential apartment buildings in Philadelphia, and I can tell you that we would’ve been fired had we allowed the water to get anywhere near that sort of condition. We checked chlorine and pH levels throughout the day, and would clear swimmers out of the pool if the chemicals ever got out of whack. Murkiness wasn’t even an option.

“There were more than a dozen people allowed back in the pool to swim,” Micah LeBank, the attorney representing Deboch’s family, said in an interview this week. “The hotel let people get back into that murky water and swim around, unable to see the body.”

That’s disgusting.

When Deboch still wasn’t found, his friends searched the pool again.

Tom Fleming, a 51-year-old off-duty firefighter vacationing at the hotel, joined in the search and cleared the pool of swimmers, according to the Fire Department report.

The Seattle Times reported last year that after about a 10-minute search Fleming felt something in the center of the deep end of the pool. He asked the hotel to turn off the pump and was able to pull up Deboch’s body.

“You could not see him until you got him 18 inches to the surface,” Fleming told The Times last year. “I was fishing around and even though he was at the very bottom, he was not always in the same spot. Finding a victim in a pool in that condition is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Granted, water clarity at indoor pools is more difficult to maintain due to the lack of natural oxidation from sunlight, but that’s no excuse. The hotel was clearly negligent.* And their effort to make taxpayers liable by pulling the fire department into the lawsuit is offensive.

Given the time that had already elapsed, firefighters might have been able to pull the victim from the pool without permanent neurological damage, had they been able to immediately locate the body. But the cloudy water made a timely rescue—about a 10 minute window—all but impossible. From the facts presented in the press, there is no question that improper pool maintenance impeded firefighters’ ability to do their job.

Swimming pools are potential public health hazards, both due to the drowning risk and the spread of disease causing organisms like Cryptosporidium, Giardia, and E. coli. That’s why they’re so heavily regulated. So if a hotel is going to seek a competitive edge by offering guests the amenity of an indoor pool, then the hotel has both a moral and legal obligation to properly secure and maintain it.

The hotel should settle with the victim’s family and leave Seattle taxpayers out of it.

* My former editors at The Stranger never would have allowed me to use such direct language, for fear that the use of such a legalistic term like “negligence” might leave the paper vulnerable to a defamation suit. But my own personal experience as a former pool maintenance professional leaves zero question in my mind that it is negligent to allow guests into water so cloudy that they could swim for three hours without noticing the dead body at the bottom of the pool. And as a blogger, I feel that it would be negligent of me to shy away from bluntly speaking the truth.

After 37 years, longtime Ballard staple Louie’s Cuisine of China is closing, and I blame Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage! Although probably, its closure had something more to do with this:

The property was sold last month for $2.49 million, property records show.

In fact, restaurants and other businesses close all the time, and for all kinds of reasons:

Louie’s expected closure comes three months after the landmark Frontier Room, around since 1954, closed in Belltown. Last year the legendary Alki Tavern closed, and Funhouse music club was closed in 2012 to make way for a seven-story building near Seattle Center. Claire’s Pantry, a Lake City staple since 1974, closed in February 2013, and Piecora’s Pizza on Capitol Hill closed in April after 33 years.

In March 2010, the first restaurant in the Red Robin chain closed in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood.

Brace yourselves. In the coming years we’re going to hear all kinds of stories about businesses closing because they can’t afford to pay Seattle’s minimum wage. If $15 was already in effect, we’d be hearing it about some of the businesses above. But correlation is not causation, so you can cast all these anecdotes aside.

It will take a decade or more to truly suss out the impact of Seattle’s minimum wage by comparing local economic trends to both historical data, and to economic trends in other locations. But that won’t stop the scare stories from coming.

This is a decision that can only lead to violence:

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Massachusetts law that barred protests near abortion clinics.

The law, enacted in 2007, created 35-foot buffer zones around entrances to abortion clinics. State officials said the law was a response to a history of harassment and violence at abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a shooting rampage at two facilities in 1994.

So here’s the kind of scenario that will eventually happen. A man is escorting a woman (wife, girlfriend, whatever) to an abortion clinic when the harassment begins, and as men sometimes do, he feels bound to defend her honor. Yelling escalates into shoving, shoving into punches. And then maybe somebody in the tussle decides to stand their ground, and pulls out a gun and starts shooting. Because if you don’t think that the kind of person who would stand outside a Planned Parenthood clinic and yell “whore” or “baby killer” at teen-age girls seeking health care, is also the kind of person who shows up armed, then you don’t know human nature. Because pro-life!

The whole point of blockading an abortion clinic is the threat of violence. It is an act of intimidation. And anti-choice extremists will rightly understand this decision as an invitation to intimidation.

– Murray’s anti-crime and police accountability proposals seem mostly to the good.

– No matter how many states enact marriage equality, those pictures of the newlyweds always get to me. Congrats Hoosiers.

– Walmart awesome, says Walmart.

– I’m glad that the Catholic Church in Western Washington seems to be taking the child abuse seriously. But this still feels like not enough.

– Sometimes papers (or whatever the P-I is) looking for a local angle on something just crack me up.

– I don’t necessarily want to oversell this, but it’s probably the best invention in pooping history (I’m honestly not sure if that’s overselling it or not).

Don’t invest in seaside roller coasters, warn the authors of Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States

By now you’ve all probably heard about the terrifying new climate report from a bipartisan group of ex-cabinet officials that outlines the impending economic horrors associated with climate change, on top of the usual environmental ones. For example, due to rising sea levels, as much as $681 billion worth of Florida real estate could be underwater by the end of the century. Literally under water, not the metaphorical you-owe-more-on-your-mortgage-than-your-home-is-worth thing. Although as a consequence, that too, no doubt.

Extreme heat, rising sea levels, intensified storms, and shifting rain patterns could cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives nationally. But it’s interesting to note that here in Cascadia, not so much:

The Northwest is among the least exposed to climate-driven agricultural, mortality, energy, and labor productivity impacts; however, the region is likely to experience an increase of 3 to 8 times the number of hot days per year by the end of the century.

I hate the heat, so shifting from our current average of 5 days a year of 95 degree weather or warmer to an additional 18 to 41 such days a year by the end of the century would really suck. But it’s all relative. In the same time frame, the Southwest could be suffering as many as 110 extreme heat days a year, and the Southeast as many as 138!

As for sea level, the Northwest might actually see it fall a bit over the next few decades, or rise only slightly, thanks to the reduced gravitational pull from Alaska’s shrinking glaciers! (Really. I’m not making that up.)

Yeah, our own snowpack is predicted to decline as more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow, but if we start planning now, that’s something we can manage. There’s plenty of opportunity for conservation, and a few more reservoirs could help even out the dry periods. Also, we could always tap in to the oft criticized Brightwater sewage treatment plant’s impressive greywater capacity (99.9 percent clean!) to help further reduce demands on potable water. (Thanks for planning ahead, Ron Sims!)

So compared to the rest of the country, we won’t have it so bad. And while it may sound cold-hearted to say so, that means global warming could give Seattle a competitive economic advantage.

Think about it. Where would you rather live or start a business? Relatively temperate 22nd century Seattle with our mild winters and mere three or four weeks of 95-plus-degree days? Or storm-battered, steadily-sinking Florida with its four and a half months a year of oppressive heat and equally oppressive humidity? And then there’s the arid Southwest, where summer temperatures already routinely exceed 110 degrees. Phoenix area boosters have long pitched their region as “the next Silicon Valley”—crank up the heat much further and they could achieve that vision quite literally as the surrounding desert melts into glass.

Look, I’m not making light of climate change. It’s a fucking disaster. But if you don’t think people are going to want to move to the Pacific Northwest to escape the brutal heat elsewhere in the country, you’re crazy. Rain or shine, Seattle’s weather is going to become one of its major selling points over the next half century. So if you think housing costs and traffic congestion are at crisis levels now, just wait and see how bad things get with a few million more people packed into the region.

Or rather, let’s not wait. Let’s plan.

So there’s this secluded little park, right on Lake Washington, an idyllic in-city location for a warm summer’s night barbecue. And you just leave your garbage for others to pick up?

Who the fuck does that?

I’m okay with the beer drinking, even though alcohol is banned in Seattle parks, as long as it’s done in moderation. And I’m even okay with the illegal fire you lit on the beach, though you could’ve cleaned that up too. But what kind of asshole enjoys a beautifully maintained public park and then just leaves empty beer cans and raw chicken packaging and the rest of their garbage behind? How does one walk away from this mess, past empty trash cans, without feeling totally ashamed of oneself?

Sure, life can be tough in the urban hellhole. And often unfair. But not in this place, at this time. You’ve just enjoyed one of the most pastoral public amenities a big city has to offer, and you trash it for your neighbors who follow? What the fuck?

Over at Slog, Brendan has been covering the farmed shrimp slavery scandal. The latest revelation? This statement from British supermarket giant Tesco: “Every retailer that sources farmed prawns from Thailand must now consider it likely that slavery exists in its supply chain.”

But me, I buy shrimp totally guilt free. Because I haven’t purchased farmed shrimp in years. In fact, with few exceptions (for example, locally farmed shellfish), I won’t knowingly eat farm-raised seafood at all.

What I learned from my extensive coverage of the melamine-spiked pet food scandal back in 2007 turned me off of farm-raised seafood for good. As I explained during the midst of the crisis, 81 percent of America’s seafood is imported, and about 40-percent of that is farmed, largely in China, which accounts for about 70-percent of global aquaculture production. And yet, despite the lack of adequate regulatory controls abroad, the US inspects less than 1 percent of imported food.

Environmental and human rights issues aside, much of the world’s farmed seafood is raised in squalid and unsanitary conditions. And there is a long and documented history of adulterated fish feed. I’m just not convinced that it’s safe.

So given the choice, I try to eat only wild seafood, preferably from the reasonably well-regulated (and thus hopefully sustainable) Alaska fishery. That means I don’t eat shrimp nearly as often as I used to back when I purchased the cheap imported farm-raised stuff at the local Asian market. Because I can’t afford to.

But at least when I do purchase shrimp, I don’t have to worry about who I’m hurting, not the least of whom, myself.

– Designing Streets for Safety [h/t]

– I’m not sure if Sawant would have voted against Kathleen O’Toole if she was the deciding vote (maybe, but it wasn’t the vote she needed to take). But it’s nice to know there will still be some pull to the left on police issues.

– The problem Burk faces however is that the Genesis texts don’t mention genitals or chromosomes as markers of gender, nor do the Genesis texts have a notion of what is essentially mid-nineteenth century biological essentialism. Burk has taken an ancient Israelite mythopoem and has attempted to force onto it a rather vague construct of “biology,” thus obfuscating what would otherwise be a theologically rich text. Like creationists, Burk has attempted to treat the biblical narratives as a science textbook, having assumed that the biblical authors are able to speak biological truths across different times and different cultures. I would recommend Burk actually research gender, biology, and sociology, and how various societies construct their notions of gender, before he writes definitively about it.

– Why does anyone still listen to Donald Trump?

– World Bicycle Relief Red-Bell 100

– If a puppet government falls in the desert and the whole world is around to witness it, does it make a sound?

– I think the HA comment threads are worth at least two or three leaf boats.

As I suggested this morning, Port of Seattle commissioner Courtney Gregoire proposed at today’s meeting a “total compensation” minimum wage for Sea-Tac Airport employees. Minimum total compensation would start at 13.72 an hour in 2015, with a minimum cash wage of $11.22, and rise to $15.50 an hour in 2017, with a minimum cash wage of $13.  In addition, airport workers would be guaranteed a minimum of 1 hour of paid leave for every 40 hours worked.

How does that compare to Seattle’s minimum wage? Well, it depends on who you work for:

The commissioners’ proposal gets airport workers to higher wage and minimum compensation levels faster than Seattle workers at businesses with 500 or fewer employees. But in the long run it pays airport workers less than they would earn at a minimum wage job in Seattle. It’s also not clear whether this proposal applies to the concession workers in the restaurant and retail areas of the airport, or only those working in secure areas. (Update: only those with access to restricted areas are covered.)

Interestingly, much of the stated justification for raising wage standards at Sea-Tac Airport was couched in security concerns. Sea-Tac managing director Mark Reis stated that less experienced workers have twice the number of security violations as more experienced workers, making the airport’s current high job turnover rate—particularly among entry level workers—a security concern in itself. About 6,000 airport workers have direct access to secure areas.

San Francisco International Airport had similar job turnover issues before it instituted its highest in the nation airport minimum wage. It has since reduced its turnover rate from 110 percent a year to just 25 percent a year, says Reis.

After the presentations, the five port commissioners all congratulated each other on a job well done, so it looks like official approval of the proposal will be just a formality. “People who are working behind security lines in permanent positions deserve to earn a family wage job,” emphasized business-friendly commissioner Bill Bryant.

But whether or not it’s too little, too late, remains to be seen. On Thursday the Washington State Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the appeal of a lower court’s ruling that SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage law does not apply to airport workers. If the court overturns the lower court ruling, not only will the workers immediately receive $15 an hour cash straight up, airport employers may be liable for millions of dollars in back pay.

UPDATE: Heather Weiner from Yes for SeaTac responds:

SeaTac voters have already spoken on this issue. The State Attorney General agrees that the City, not the Port, has jurisdiction on setting wage standards for people working inside their city limits. We’re looking forward to the hearing on Thursday.

So there.

UPDATE, UPDATE: For your reading pleasure, a copy of the commission’s draft resolution (pdf). Note that it’s in the form of an addendum to the appellate case being heard on Thursday, which supports the conclusion that this resolution may be more a legal maneuver than anything else.

Also of note is that the resolution only covers employees working in secure “Air Operations Areas” (so sorry, terminal concessions workers, not you), and that total compensation includes wages, tips, health insurance premiums, retirement contributions, and taxable educational expenses.

The Port of Seattle Commission meets at noon today, and while there’s no related item on the published agenda (pdf), a birdie tells me that commissioner Courtney Gregoire had been attempting to forge a majority in support of imposing a $15 “total compensation” minimum wage at Sea-Tac Airport and other port properties.

It would mark a dramatic of turn-around for the port, which for years had denied that it has any legal authority to regulate wages at the airport, before embracing the exact opposite legal claim in the immediate wake of the passage of SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage initiative. Last December, King County Superior Court Judge Andrea Darvas upheld most of SeaTac’s minimum wage law, but ruled that state law grants the Port of Seattle exclusive authority over wages on port property. Under this ruling, about 4,700 low-wage employees of contractors, concessionaires, and car rental companies on airport property are currently exempt from SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage ordinance.

Judge Darvas’s ruling is currently being appealed, and Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson has filed a very clever amicus brief explaining why the lower court’s interpretation of the law is wrong. Attorneys defending the initiative say they are confident they will win on appeal. But attorneys often claim they are confident. We’ll see.

If the port commissioners were to pass a minimum wage proposal today, the timing would be curious, coming just two days before the Washington State Supreme Court is to hear oral arguments in the SeaTac case. Could it be a move to reassure elected justices that airport workers won’t be left untouched by the $15 wave sweeping through the region? Does Gregoire, an attorney, sense a weakness in the port’s current legal position? Is it an attempt by port commissioners to get out ahead of an issue that has clearly left them behind? Or is it a policy decision, pure and simple?

Gregoire did not respond to my emails, so I have no idea.

Either way, a $15 total compensation minimum wage is clearly not the victory the SeaTac initiative backers are hoping for. It would be better than nothing, particularly for part-time workers who might ultimately take home $15 an hour in cash. But no doubt such a proposal wouldn’t include the many other workplace protections included in the SeaTac initiative. And of course, a benefit whose cost is deducted from one’s paycheck is no longer a benefit. It’s an expense. So it’s not really $15 an hour.

Still, the fact that commissioners would even consider imposing a $15 minimum wage, in any form, illustrates just how much and how quickly the political landscape has changed.

It’s an election Tuesday! No…not in Washington or Seattle, but there are primaries in Colorado (where we might witness the return of former presidential and gubernatorial fringe candidate Tom Tancredo), Maryland, New York (federal offices only), Oklahoma, and Utah. And there are runoff races in Mississippi and South Carolina. It could be entertaining…one never knows when the next “Cantor” will happen. Please join us Tuesday night for an evening of electoral politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet this and every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks show up before that for dinner and east coast returns.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state DL over the next week. They’re everywhere! The Tri-Cities chapter also meets this and every Tuesday night. On Wednesday, the Bellingham and Burien chapters meet. And on Thursday, the Woodinville chapter meets.

With 207 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.

I suppose I’ve had a hard time articulating exactly why I’m so irritated at the way Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar have been allowed to bully their way into the Seattle market. But fortunately, economist Dean Baker does a much better job:

If Uber and Lyft force a re-examination and modernization of taxi regulation in San Francisco and elsewhere, they will have provided a valuable public service. However it can’t possibly make sense to have a stringent set of regulations for traditional cabs, while allowing Uber and Lyft to ignore them just because customers order these services on the Internet.

If we go the route of ending the requirement that taxies need medallions, there is also the question of what we do about the sunk costs for people like my cab driver, who is currently out $250,000 from buying a medallion. On the current path, these medallion owners will just be out of luck. Their life savings will be made worthless by young kids who are better at evading regulations than immigrant cab drivers; so much for the American Dream.

It is worth considering this issue in light of the larger issue of the growing inequality we have seen over the last three decades. Uber, like Amazon, has allowed a small number of people to become extremely rich by evading regulations and/or taxes that apply to their middle class competitors. Amazon and other Internet-based retailers have used their tax advantage to put tens of thousands brick and mortar stores out of business.

This is a pretty simple story. In a country where rules are enforced or not enforced to benefit the rich and screw the middle class, you will have increasing inequality and a middle class that is seeing few of the benefits of economic growth.

What we are witnessing is a giant transfer of wealth from tens of thousands of mostly middle class medallion owners nationwide into the pockets of a handful of clever, law-evading entrepreneurs and their venture capitalists. Uber’s gambit that local governments would not crack down on its illegal operations has paid off handsomely—it now enjoys an implicit market capitalization of $17 billion.

“This is not supposed to happen in a market economy,” says Baker:

To encourage efficiency, we would want a proper set of regulations and taxes and have them apply equally to everyone. The point is to encourage people to make profits by providing better products or lower cost services, not to get rich by finding clever ways to evade regulations.

There’s much more to Baker’s piece, and you really should read the whole thing.