California Dreamin'...Of A Slush Fund For Uber

Regulatory capture could be the grandest scam ever and California is the wild west.

Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode on Apple on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

California is known as a bastion of blue state values, but when you start to look at how the state’s legislative sausage gets made, you notice how completely borked America’s most populous regulatory state has become. Today on the show, we have Jamie Court, a consumer advocate and president and chairman of Consumer Watchdog, to break down California’s weirdness and some of his organization’s recent work.

First, we discuss how industries like insurance and ridesharing have captured so much of the state legislature, before honing in on how Uber specifically is running laps around its own regulators, with a fresh, bonus slush fund to boot. Then we discuss robotaxis and the role of the California insurance commissioner, currently held by the embattled Ricardo Lara, and how future commissioners might help untangle this morass. Finally, they get into why gas prices are so much higher in California than elsewhere in the United States. And no, gas taxes aren’t the whole story.

Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.