Letter | Columnist Issac Bailey needs lesson on Uber and free enterprise

Your views on the news and editorials in your newspaper are welcomed.

ECONOMY

Beware ‘power of free enterprise’

Bravo Issac Bailey and free enterprise. He either doesn’t care or doesn’t understand that we regulate things like public transportation for good reason. And furthermore, screw the taxi and limo drivers who have gone to all the trouble of obtaining a commercial drivers license, pay for commercial grade insurance, et al to support themselves and their families. Let’s just add millions more to the unemployment roles. After all this is a land where free enterprise reigns supreme and they can just find other jobs.

This shouldn’t create any long-term hardship and suffering, however, if we just push Bailey’s free enterprise reasoning to its next logical step. Because the next bunch of freeloaders we can get rid of are paid newspaper columnists. This is a free enterprise sundae topped with the cherry of First Amendment protected free speech.

Why should we actually pay people like Bailey just to publish their personal, and sometimes ridiculous, opinions?

I am retired and I’m sure that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of other retirees here. We have lots of time and we have opinions on everything under the sun. We, by definition, have 5 decades or more of life experiences as source material. We are fully capable of sitting down for a few hours a day or week and presenting that knowledge and those opinions for publication.

In addition, we will have all those out of work taxi-limo drivers who now need new livelihoods. And who, other than barbers and hairdressers, know more about local goings on than they do? Furthermore, we’ll all do it for considerably less than whatever they’re paying Bailey.

Heck, we do it for nothing now.

Many of us have college degrees and some even have graduate degrees. At the very worst, we are capable of running state of the art grammar and spelling checkers to enhance the quality of our work.

Of course, I don’t see any level of credentialing being a problem. This is, after all, free enterprise and if we don’t require credentials for public safety workers, why should we need them for journalists?

We can have everybody, including Bailey, submit his work and have the editors select what will be published every day, topically or by some other democratic means.

If Bailey’s name gets pulled out of the hat that day, then he gets published and paid just like the rest of us. Of course, if he can’t make ends meet this way he can just sign up to be a Uber driver in his free time.

God bless America and free enterprise.

William J. Livezey

North Myrtle Beach

This story was originally published March 30, 2015 at 1:40 PM with the headline "Letter | Columnist Issac Bailey needs lesson on Uber and free enterprise."