Well, that's certainly the obvious slant of the article, but it's also not necessarily what the man said about market pressures. They quoted him on one word, 'unintentional,' and made up the rest.

You can call this market failure but it's not. The article is extremely biased and it's very obvious from the start. It's not reporting, it's editorial.

An example, "Many drivers thought they were paying into their truck like a mortgage. Instead, when they lost their job, they discovered they also lost their truck, along with everything they’d paid toward it."

Why did they think this? They certainly talk to each other. They certainly signed the documentation that put them into the agreement. If I buy a car with a loan, or a lease, I should know the difference. But the article portrays this as if the companies stole money from them. If you have a lease, you don't get the equity. You're paying for the depreciation

I did the math. If I made a 1600 payment on a 5 year loan, even with 3% financing for 60 months, I can afford a $83,000 truck. A new truck like California requires STARTS at $150,000. So these guys were paying depreciation, which is what a lease does.

There are tons of examples in the article where these people are working for little to no money. Why? That's not a market failure, that's a failure on their part for their willingness to participate. You could work at McDonald's for fewer hours, come home every night, and still make more money.

Another example: "In October 2008, that changed dramatically in southern California, home of the nation’s busiest ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach. State officials, fed up with deadly diesel fumes from 16,000 outdated trucks, ordered the entire fleet replaced with new, cleaner rigs. Suddenly, this obscure but critical collection of trucking companies faced a $2.5 billion crossroads unlike anything experienced at other U.S. ports."

So California introduced a huge and immediate new cost into the trucking industry during one of the worst economic downturns in American history which gravely affected retail and thereby the trucking industry. And the trucking companies had to get really creative about how they could even afford those trucks. Which is to say, they couldn't. So if they wanted trucking in any sort to continue to exist, they had to start leasing trucks. Or, of course, they could have stopped working for shady companies and become independent contractors.

The article even mentioned that some of these guys owned their own truck and gave it up to the company as a down payment? On what fucking planet is that a good idea? Those trucks are extremely valauble. House valuable. As in, you could literally quit, sell it, and live off of the money for two years valuable. And they just gave them away as a down payment? Again, not a market failure, that's stupid to the point where I'm incredulous that it even happened like they're reporting.

This article is garbage and is only getting shared because it agrees with Hubski's preconceived notions that capitalism is the bane of the working man.

Critical thinking starts to expose this article as very biased.