The claim (or rather the joke) isn’t that Uber was operating in unregulated free market capitalism, but that Uber is unregulated free market capitalism. A more accurate (and a non-joke) way to describe this is to observe that Uber’s only innovation was to find a way to operate in an unregulated marked while all their competitors remained regulated.
eh.. so long as Uber (or any other privately owned & operated vehicle) is getting free land & pavement, they are effectively operating in a collectivized, regulated market.
Yes ofc, on one specific aspect of regulation - the total qty of cars allowed - they did an end-run. But regulating the total # of taxis was always just a way of trying to limit land consumption by cars, rendered ineffective by only applying to cars used as taxis instead of all cars, all vehicles. So yeah, they benefited from a titch less regulation, but land in cities is so valuable that to give it away for free dwarfs the value gained from skirting any other regulation, so IMO it's still largely a collective non-market endeavour, just organized for the benefit of ppl in cars, rather than the public at large.
