WINNING THE WAR ON WAGES:

It's natural for conservatives to side with a business fighting regulators, but the inclination to highlight this particular business has a lot to do with political demographics. Republican voters tend to be older and more rural than Democrats. Uber has a young and disproportionately urban customer base. If Republicans can turn Uber into a salient example of government regulation, it could broaden the GOP's demographic appeal without compromising on conservative principles.

Best of all for Republicans, Uber makes a great wedge issue. Some liberals dislike Uber on ideological grounds, but others -- especially in the media, politics, and technology centers of New York, Washington, and San Francisco -- are regular Uber customers.

On one side of this debate are old-school liberals with strong ties to the labor movement and urban political machines. For them, Uber is a conventional story about worker and consumer rights. Labor unions believe Uber is flouting the law by classifying workers as independent contractors rather than employees. And they would love to unionize Uber's fast-growing workforce.

More broadly, conventional liberals are suspicious of claims that deregulation and innovation will benefit workers and consumers in the long run. They view Uber's "gig economy" as part of a broader trend toward declining worker power. They blame decades of deregulation -- under both Republicans and centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton -- for this trend, and believe stricter regulation of Uber could be part of a larger trend toward stricter regulation of labor markets more generally.

In his campaign against Uber this week, Bill de Blasio primarily focused on congestion concerns, but he also mentioned workers' rights as a major concern.

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