What Marco Rubio gets disastrously wrong about the 'sharing economy'

To keep it from becoming a predator, Uber must be regulated

Marco Rubio
(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

With Scott Walker out of the 2016 race and Jeb Bush flailing around like an ether-drunk bison, Marco Rubio has been positioning himself as the Republican establishment candidate who can win. He's smart-sounding, not particularly gaffe-prone, not named Bush, psychotically belligerent on foreign policy, and wants to shovel uncountable sums into the capacious maw of the 1 percent.

Sounds great! But he still sounds uncomfortably like George W. Bush (on account of having all the same policies), so he's been casting around for some signature issues he can use to build his brand. One of these is apparently the "sharing economy" sector, meaning businesses like Uber and Airbnb, the subject of a recent Rubio address. He all but promised to hand the federal bureaucracy over to Silicon Valley innovators and their glorious spirit of innovation, calling the sector a "miracle."

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.