This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021 on Caleb Brown.

We sadly must accept that regulators gonna regulate, but local governments ought to tread more

lightly.

Greg Brooks of the Better Cities Project argues that lawmakers aren't typically

interested in adapting to new and popular ways of using existing resources. They're more interested in satisfying constituencies,

and that often means trying to quash new tech-enabled business before it can bear fruit.

A few years ago, I went to Austin, Texas for an event and land at the

airport. I walk outside and pull up my phone and you know what I'm going to say. I pulled up Uber, maybe it was

Lyft, I don't recall, and it just said, no I don't, not here, thank you.

Please go to the cab stand.

And I thought, well, that's a fine, how do you do?

Welcome to our city, here are your limited options.

That's right.

And I just walked outside and thought well that's that's not very

welcoming to a guy who wants to learn about the city and man there's no better way to

learn about a city than talking to a local who drives a lot around in that city and that was an option wasn't available to me.

And so to the extent that cities have the discretion to either allow or disallow a lot of these kinds of innovations.

What how do they think about it?

Well the short answer is they don't think about it enough, and then they try and play

whack-a-mole as new innovations come into the market, right? And the problem with

approaching regulation, particularly regulation around innovations that way,

is that it's almost always 100% reactive.

...