If you try and change law in the United States, any group of 41 senators can stop you, and so could half of the House of Representatives. If you try and replace the members of the House of Representatives, the state governments have already stopped you by gerrymandering the seats. If you try and replace the Senators, you have to wait up to six years and deal with literally everything else that can happen within that timespan.
Let's say you manage to make your way through all of that. Or at least you get close enough that you can actually pass legislation. But you can't get the legislation all the way through without making some small compromises, at which point your elected officials are going to be branded as "neoliberal sellouts" and primaried by extremists. Then you have to start all over again.
That's something that you can try and do. That's also something that literally everyone else tries and does all the time, and at least half of those everyone else are working directly against you.
Or you could solve the problem through some other mechanism. That seems hard, but solving the problem through American politics is really hard, probably harder in a lot of cases. What happened first: did political activists literally lobby local governments to drop taxicab medallions, or did startups circumvent that problem by introducing ridesharing?
We must still be willing to try. While cute to attempt to hack around politics by breaking the law, it is not a long term strategy to affect change at scale.
We can appreciate the inroads Uber and Lyft have made in disrupting transportation networks that will last well after they've both exhausted their runways, but a sustainable system will need to exist in the future that does not rely on VCs burning piles of capital in dumpsters.
A lot of that is going to have to be the higher-order work of getting rid of gerrymandering, fixing campaign finance, improving voter access, and so forth. Even setting aside the philosophical question of whether government is a good way to solve problems, it’s not going to be one in practice if it can’t even function.
Let's say you manage to make your way through all of that. Or at least you get close enough that you can actually pass legislation. But you can't get the legislation all the way through without making some small compromises, at which point your elected officials are going to be branded as "neoliberal sellouts" and primaried by extremists. Then you have to start all over again.
That's something that you can try and do. That's also something that literally everyone else tries and does all the time, and at least half of those everyone else are working directly against you.
Or you could solve the problem through some other mechanism. That seems hard, but solving the problem through American politics is really hard, probably harder in a lot of cases. What happened first: did political activists literally lobby local governments to drop taxicab medallions, or did startups circumvent that problem by introducing ridesharing?