It’s hard not to revel in the delicious irony of Hillary Clinton’s skepticism toward Uber. On one side is a hip on-demand, app-operated, cab-sharing service that solves the problems of hailing a taxi in rush hour and paying cartelized prices; on the other is the self-described “progressive” candidate wary about this newfangled “sharing economy” and eager to shore up the unions that are working so assiduously to crush it. The ads write themselves.
But this particular rhetorical blade is double-edged. Writing at Commentary, Noah Rothman rightly takes Clinton to task for her economic platform — but his explanations have an all-too-familiar ring: “Rarely . . . has the contrast between conservatism’s support for modernism and progressivism’s retreat from it been as unambiguous as it is in regards to the advent of the sharing economy,” he writes. At another point: “The left stands athwart history, yelling ‘stop.’” And he accuses progressives of coopting the power of the state to “compel the tides of history to recede.”
I’ve usually no trouble with commandeering the language of the Left to conservative purposes. But it can’t be done here, because the ideas contained in this rhetoric are not conservative ones. The “tides of history” is not a conservative cadence. It’s a “progressive” one.
We’ve been through this recently, in a different context. When President Obama declared that the Islamic State “has no place in the twenty-first century,” and when John Kerry whined that Russia had “behave[d] in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country,” they were channeling the progressive view of moral history: upward, onward, inevitably, toward justice and peace. They were rightly mocked by conservatives; the arc of history, we said, does not necessarily bend toward justice.
But the sort of thinking that we oppose when the subject is geopolitics or the normalization of the Left’s sexual morality we often endorse in the realm of economics: This product, that trend, is the “wave of the future — get with it.” That is Rothman’s implicit vision of the “sharing economy”: it is part of “modernism,” an independently operational historical force that has arrived, and which it would be wrong to reject.
But just as evolutionary theory has been misapplied in the realm of ethics, it is here misapplied in the realm of economics. Economies grow and shrink, and get better or worse at supplying the needs and wants of individuals, but they have no natural trajectory. Economies don’t naturally tend toward Apple.
The reason to defend Uber — and AirBnB and TaskRabbit and the rest — is not that they are the culmination of economic forces, but that they are (to put it sweepingly) expanding economic liberty. A service is being provided more cheaply, and workers are working for better pay at more flexible hours. In general, more people are prospering because they have access to more and better means by which to meet their desired ends.
That, not an evaluation of the direction of “History,” should be the measure of whether an economic scheme is worth supporting. And, in the American tradition, liberty, not fate, has typically been the more attractive argument.