Smartest Headline of the Day: "No, regulatory evasion isn’t ‘disruptive innovation’"

Sometimes it's really, really important to call a spade a "AA 59337:1998 Intrenching tool, hand, folding, lightweight [supersedes ARMY MIL-I-43684 B]

From FT Alphaville:

Felix Salmon at Reuters sums up the problem with a lot of “disruptive” innovation these days.
It’s not really all that innovative — but rather focused on finding ever cleverer and more subtle ways of dodging established regulations, which, as he also points out, exist for a reason.

Should it therefore be surprising that the likes of Airbnb, Uber and even Bitcoin are more cost effective than established competitors when they’re either cutting out the taxman or costs of compliance altogether? How can regulated industry possibly hope to compete?

Which also confuses, if not exploits, the ethos of the sharing economy in and of itself.

Home swapping, for example, is the sharing economy. It works because two parties partake in an exchange in kind. The exchange maximises and expands the reach and utility of an existing asset, to the owner’s direct benefit.

Renting out a spare room for money, which might have been too costly to market before, is partaking in the hotelier industry, and means expanding the reach of your asset to a third party.
The morale of the story being it’s only really a peer-to-peer innovation if no money is swapped at any given time, even a minimal sum. Everything else is tantamount to exploiting collective organisation for the purpose of rent extraction, regulatory evasion or tax dodging. Hence why it lends itself so well to Silicon Valley libertarian ideals.

Salmon, in any case, sums it up really well here:

From the point of view of Silicon Valley libertarians, the idea that they’re disrupting a long-established flow of public monies is a feature, not a bug. If you threaten their disruptive business models, you’re threatening their freedom! That’s the message being sent quite explicitly by the mild-mannered Fred Wilson; his west-coast counterparts, like Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, have a tendency to go even further.

In finance, regulation is very important indeed — if you want to prevent everything from terrorist finance to global financial meltdown, central authorities need to be able to keep tabs on all financial flows....MORE

Somebody's got to be the kid who says "The Emperor is without raiment".
Thank you to Izabella for the link. Clear speech for clear thinking. And possibly the Latin name for the Roman battle shovel to boot.