POWER TO THE PEOPLE EACH PERSON: The case of Uber vs. San Antonio.

We are at a very interesting historical tipping point. The willingness of states and political agencies to boss people and businesses around and to seize resources for the use of the political class has not abated, but their ability to do so is being challenged. San Antonio is a left-leaning city; its attitude toward business is far from Singaporean. The city authorities would love to be able to dictate terms to Uber — but they can’t. Nationally, we’re starting to figure out that you can’t really regulate marijuana; you can try to, and pretend to, but you can’t really do it. Trying to ban guns in an age when anybody with a 3-D printer can produce a dozen of them in his bedroom is absurd. In twenty years, when anybody with enough money to buy something equivalent in cost to a refrigerator today is going to be able to 3-D print tissue and molecules, the regulatory enterprise is going to be very dicey indeed. It’s not going to be much fun to be the tax man when real financial privacy, enabled by cryptocurrencies and other financial technologies, is available to almost everybody.