Now, rarely enough, we’re seeing a second unified front among some dissimilar editorial boards at large state newspapers. The issue: lightly disguised attempts to manipulate the regulatory process to kill or severely damage Uber, Lyft and other innovative companies that use smart phones and individual drivers to create transportation networks that often are cheaper and easier to use than taxis, limos or other alternatives.

Here are excerpts from three editorials in the last week.

L.A. Times: Driving away innovation

Just as Silicon Valley is a hotbed for innovation, Sacramento is a hotbed for regulation. Those two impulses are clashing now over a new generation of tech companies that uses smartphone apps to connect ride-seekers with drivers. If lawmakers aren’t careful, the regulations they’re poised to impose could snuff innovation across the sharing economy.

At issue is whether the Legislature will impose a second layer of rules on companies such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar in addition to the ones the state Public Utilities Commission has been setting over the past year. To its credit, the commission recognized that these “transportation network companies” are fundamentally different from taxi companies, despite similarities in the services offered. The commission’s rules for driver and vehicle safety recognized the risks to passengers, but also that the drivers were freelancers using their own vehicles on a part-time basis, not full-time employees using cars dedicated to carrying passengers.

Nevertheless, some lawmakers allied with the taxi industry are now arguing that what’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. With little or no evidence to show that the ride-sharing services are as risky as traditional taxis, they nevertheless are pushing to make the former comply with several of the regulations that apply to the latter — or even more stringent ones.

The current version of one bill, AB 2293, proposes that ride-sharing companies carry more coverage when their drivers have no passengers than cab companies in L.A. are required to carry when their taxis are full.

Read the online version here.

The O.C. Register: Saddling rideshare services with uber-insurance

Cheering the bill is a coalition of special interests. Taxi drivers and companies, who are rapidly losing business to ridesharing companies, welcome the chance to impose higher costs on their competitors. The industry complains about regulatory disparities, yet it seeks to raise protectionist regulations on others, rather than lower its own regulations, which would open taxis up to more competition. …

There was a time when Microsoft and other tech companies were loath to stoop to lobbying the government. They were naïve enough to think that they should invest their hard-earned revenue in developing new technologies and finding better ways to serve their customers and stay ahead of their competition, rather than courting politicians. Then reality hit when the government cracked down with costly regulations and bogus antitrust charges. Now the ridesharing companies are learning this lesson.

Read the online version here.

U-T San Diego: Ridesharing bill: The stench in Sacramento

Under the bill, ridesharing companies wouldn’t just have to meet the state edict that they have $1 million commercial insurance coverage while a passenger is in their cars; they would have to have such coverage “from the moment a driver logs on to the application” linking them with a ridesharing network.

This mandate has no nexus with passenger or driver safety. Hitting a button on a smartphone and glancing at a screen while driving is an extremely common thing for drivers to do. If it were truly dangerous, our morgues would be overflowing.

That’s why it’s not the American Automobile Association or public-health lobbyists pushing AB 2293. It’s taxi and limousine companies that don’t want competition — with a huge assist from insurance companies, which love the idea of costlier coverage mandates, and trial lawyers, who expect to win bigger settlements from those required to have more expansive coverage.

I wrote the U-T editorial. Read the full thing, with the show-offy “Jungle” reference, here.

Residents of Los Angeles know that “medical” marijuana shops are not the only gray-market business that’s experienced a recent boom. In a city with a taste for pleasure and an enterprising working class, “massage” parlors are apt to have a significant presence — and L.A. is no exception.

To an even greater degree than pot shops, massage parlors offer policymakers a challenge: how to let legitimate legal businesses flourish, without also turning a blind eye to the unlicensed and unregulated sale of sexual encounters. Statewide, the issue is receiving renewed attention, thanks to the expiration this year of a 2008 law intended to solve the puzzle.

As Californians consider how to move forward, they’re coming to realize just how inadequate and ineffective the expired rules quickly became. Even more important, however, is that they — and all Americans — grasp why the ’08 law failed. Though massage law may not strike most people as a perfect example of the perils of bad governance, California’s return to the regulatory drawing board reveals that it is.

As The Sacramento Bee reports, the League of California Cities is pushing Sacramento lawmakers to return to an approach the 2008 law rejected — one in which local regulators had the authority to apply their own varying ordinances to the massage parlor business. Frustrated municipalities “say the 2008 law has left them ill-equipped to handle” the spread of massage parlors that’s growing across the state.

Failure of universal standards was predictable

How did the soon-to-expire law fail so badly to meet expectations? The answer closely fits a pattern that critics of bad legislation have long argued against. Especially in California, policymakers’ conventional wisdom adopts the same posture to any regulatory opportunity: first, sweep in with new, universal standards; second, create a new official body given full control over their enforcement and administration. Then, the logic goes, policymakers can sit back and watch the new regime efficiently work its magic.

With the massage industry, as any other, the result of this kind of policymaking is decidedly less than magical. To be sure, it works like a charm — just not in the virtuous way legislators had hoped.

Policymaking at the national level shows time and again how big business interests in any industry lobby hard to secure and protect centralized regulatory standards, which are easier to navigate, “capture,” and, in some circumstances, work around. As is now par for the legislative course, California’s massage industry came out strongly in favor of universal rules controlled by a single government entity. Sure enough, under the 2008 law, local ordinances were replaced by a “state nonprofit” called the California Massage Therapy Council, which oversaw workers’ education, screening and certification.

But instead of ushering in a new era of clear, strong and judicious enforcement, the rules laid down by the 2008 law favored the massage industry. On the one hand, standardized permitting helps prevent rogue masseurs or masseuses from skipping from one town to the next. On the other, since the permitting system applies to individual workers, parlor proprietors who violate the law can repeatedly avoid punishment.

Massage parlors not like other businesses

The current law’s taste for uniformity, meanwhile, has stuck localities with a mandate to treat massage parlors the same way as any other businesses, despite the fact that so few other businesses are breeding grounds for illegal sexual commerce. That helps violators continue the very kinds of practices that centrally enforced standards were supposed to do away with.

That’s why California cities like San Gabriel are already getting started on new municipal regulations that would replace the misbegotten statewide regime.

Of course, if cities and counties manage to wrest regulatory control back from Sacramento, controversy is inevitable. There will always be some activists for whom a city may come down too hard or too soft on massage parlors. For a few, the ultimate solution to the challenge is to legalize prostitution.

In the meanwhile, however, California’s circuitous path back to diversity in local regulation has plenty to teach Americans about the limitations of standardized, top-down regulations. From Oregon to Ohio, massage law is making headlines. In an era when the Internet is creating a new realm of possibility for consensual sexual transactions, the use and abuse of massage parlors is a case study in the false promise of laws forged by big industries and big-government regulators.

“The CEOs who have long ranked California as the least-business-friendly state do so more over excessive regulations than high taxes.

“This regulatory zealotry takes many shapes, afflicting both unlucky individuals and California in general.

“The staff of the Coastal Commission, created by state voters in 1972, doesn’t just throw its weight around by blocking development well inland. It often reflects the contempt for constitutional property rights displayed by Peter Douglas, the self-described “radical pagan heretic” who was the agency’s executive director from 1985 to 2010. …

“But it is the recklessness of the California Air Resources Board that has been most consequential. Instead of using cost-benefit analyses to gauge the impact and appropriateness of regulations, the air board now is hostile to the idea that regulations even have an economic downside. This is especially so since Mary Nichols began her second stint as executive director in 2007. … The history of AB 32, the state’s landmark anti-global warming law, couldn’t be more instructive.

“The first-in-the-nation 2006 legislation — which forces a gradual shift to cleaner-but-costlier types of energy — contains a provision allowing a governor to suspend the law in case it is hurting the California economy. This was included because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, lawmakers of both parties, economists and business interests were worried that if AB 32 didn’t inspire the rest of the world to follow California’s lead, the state would be left with uniquely high energy costs that would make it difficult to compete economically with rival states and nations.

“But when the rest of the world didn’t follow the Golden State, extremist defenders of the law rewrote history by depicting it as a job-creation measure designed to be an engine of economic growth. The air board assisted the campaign with an upbeat 2008 economic forecast of AB 32’s likely effects that was scorned as unrealistic and misleading by Harvard’s Robert Stavins, the world’s leading environmental economist. … .”

The air-board ‘scientist’ who ‘studied’ under a fugitive pedophile

The essay also gave me the chance to bring up the still-incredible story of Hien Tran, who to this day works at a high-paying job at the air board.

“In late 2008 and early 2009, the U-T editorial page documented that costly, far-reaching air board rules to sharply reduce diesel emissions were tainted by academic fraud. They had been overseen by Hien Tran, a staffer who lied about his academic background and then later offered as evidence of his qualifications a Ph.D. from a diploma mill associated with a fugitive pedophile.

“But Nichols refused to fire Tran — only suspending him without pay for two months. She knew of Tran’s deception when her agency’s governing board voted to approve Tran’s diesel rules but chose not to tell most board members about it until 11 months after they voted to approve the rules.

“Soon afterward, the concerns about a lying researcher playing a key role in crafting onerous regulations turned out to be amply justified. In April 2010, several California news organizations reported that emission rules the air board adopted in 2007 for off-road diesel vehicles were based on computer models that grossly exaggerated the emissions. Tran was a primary author of a 2006 study that encouraged the board’s 2007 regulatory decisions.

“He still wasn’t fired. He remains on the air board staff, making $91,500 annually as an air pollution specialist.”

Hien Tran, you need to understand, is doing his bosses’ bidding. That his Ph.D. was from Thornhill, aka FPU (Fugitive Pedophile University)? That’s a minor detail.

SB 254 by Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, and Sen. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana, would mandate mattress manufacturers to pay the entire cost of mattress recycling — a cost which would undoubtedly be tacked on to the price of a new mattress. It  has already been passed by the Senate and will be heard in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee on Monday.

The bill would require mattress manufacturers to organize, operate and pay for all mattress recycling in the state. “Illegally dumped mattresses are a terrible blight on our communities,” Hancock said in a press release.  “They not only deface a neighborhood but they can become a health hazard and a breeding ground for mold and pests. Cash-strapped cities are forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars collecting and disposing of abandoned mattresses.  That’s money that could be better spent on police and other vital services for the community.”

But it’s already illegal to dump a mattress, isn’t it? Yes it is.

I asked Shelly Sullivan, the spokeswoman for Californians for Mattress Recycling, what this program will cost the state. Sullivan said the newly created organization would reimburse the state for appropriate oversight costs.

Mattress recycling organization would be non-profit

If enacted, SB 254 would create a non-profit mattress recycling organization made up of retailers and manufacturers whose duty would be to plan, implement, and administer a state system to collect discarded used mattresses, dismantle them and recycle their materials for use in new products.

SB 254 would require mattress manufacturers to submit a recovery and recycling plan to CalRecycle by April 1, 2015. Consistent with existing state policy, the plans would have a goal of recycling at least 75 percent of used mattresses in California by Jan. 1, 2020.