Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.
They were speculators in a bubble market. It didn't matter what percentage of their life savings they used. If you feel sorry for someone who purchased a $300k taxi medallion which had an intrinsic value (the total value a medallion can be used for rental to taxi drivers over X years) which is far less, you are enabling such behavior.
You also have to remember that the more distorted the medallion market, the more the average taxi driver suffers. Taxi drivers, by and large, rent time in a taxi or own a car and rent the medallion. They haven't been able to afford their own medallions for decades, if ever.
Taxis had a "monopoly" on unplanned fares, but "black car" and limo service was competition (and, therefore a price ceiling). The more distorted that the medallion market, the more the other competing services would chip away at their business, diluting the value of the medallions. I'm glad that a product like Uber/Lyft was able to destroy the price floor of medallions.
I'm somewhat saddened that taxi drivers are losing that means of making a living, but it benefits far more people in the US to have a cheaper means of transportation. "Concentrated costs but diffuse benefits." It's similar to the way US textiles, steel, cheap manufacturing have suffered under globalization to benefit the average US consumer household, which saves for more than $2000/year after China joined the WTO.
NPR's Planet Money did at least one episode[1] on "The Taxi King", a guy who built a house of cards by leveraging the equity in some of his NYC taxi medallions to get loans for others. After Uber started to erode their monopoly, the medallion market popped and he's begging the state and federal governments for a "bail out". I could care less about this human piece of trash. Obviously, "the average" taxi medallion owner probably didn't own dozens of them, but I still can't find much sympathy for someone who invests in a bubble product created by a government-mandated monopoly that should have been disrupted decades before it was.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/31/428157211/episo...
Dude.
Feeling sorry for someone else makes you a human, not an enabler.
What if it was the web devs requesting assistance, due to thousands being laid off when said bubble popped - would they be actual people made of refuse then?
You don't sound the least bit saddened, quite the opposite.
Paired with taxi companies taking advantage of people in these situations, you're completely minimizing a complex problem. You should be focusing your aggression to them, NOT the drivers.
Granted I don't believe for a second that's the actual rate and I'm confident the driver was trying to take advantage of me. But with ride sharing I don't need to haggle over price and I know the algorithms are ripping me off less than the taxi driver.
Aren't taxi fares set specifically by regulators in both places?
Had taxi company owners not used those medallions as an excuse to provide absolutely horrendous customer service, they wouldn't have ever had to worry about uber/lyft/whatever in the first place. I've never taken uber or lyft because it's cheaper, I've taken it because I get a clean, comfortable ride, with a driver who isn't a complete jerk. I've mentioned it here before, but also why I won't take uber anymore unless it's my last option - their CEO has the same attitude I saw in those taxi drivers and I'm not about to give monetary support to "that guy".
NOTHING the government did has EVER prevented cab companies from providing the same service these startups provide.
This is the wrong analogy, for trivially obvious reasons. As I'm sure you're aware, the drop in value of taxi medallions wasn't contingent on the owner being a bad driver. Put plainly, even a driver who went above and beyond to provide honest, high-quality service was affected by the drop in values. To put it yet _another_ way, the fact that many taxi drivers provided shitty service couldn't be less relevant.
Your analogy would only make sense if it was talking about an entire apt block got condemned due to multiple slumlords, including the apt owned by the guy who kept his property up to code and livable.
Neither this nor the fact that the regulatory regime was horribly flawed change the fact that many drivers got screwed through no fault of their own because gov't policy was incompetent enough to create bad policy and fail to sustain it.
Economic ownership of real estate as property is pretty bad economic policy too (cf Georgism) but that wouldn't change the fact that suddenly implementing a 100% LVT would 1) be infinitely better policy and 2) screw over an awful lot of people playing by the rules of the previous system, through no fault of their own.
There's an important clarification here: Taxi drivers did not get screwed. It's medallion owners that got screwed. Yes, some of the drivers actually own their medallion, but many (most?) do not. Those who do not own their medallion didn't really get screwed, not more than anyone who gets laid off or has to change industries anyway. Many of them are simply driving for ridesharing companies now.
The medallion owners who got screwed do partially have themselves to blame, because they saw the outrageously inflated prices for medallions and chose to pay them anyway. It's like the mortgage crisis; at least some of the blame goes on the people who saw the absurd prices and chose to pay them anyway, and then got left holding the bag when the collapse hit.
> Taxi drivers did not get screwed. It's medallion owners that got screwed
Right, good catch, I wasn't thinking about that fact. That's not central to my point but it is a good point to clarify.
> The medallion owners who got screwed do partially have themselves to blame, because they saw the outrageously inflated prices for medallions and chose to pay them anyway.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. What is the "true" value of a taxi medallion, in a regulatory context where the government is setting the supply? If we implement [insert optimal healthcare policy] and (hypothetically), doctor salaries drop precipitously, are doctors to blame for seeing how "outrageously inflated" med school tuition was and choosing to pay it anyway? Should they have stayed out of the field entirely until healthcare policy in this country is perfectly optimal?
For the life of me, I'll never understand the lack of empathy required to see someone get screwed by unstable rules and conclude "well, it's your own damn fault: you should have been born one of the X-Men, with the ability to predict the future perfectly and realize that this particular inefficient policy regime was going to be disavowed at this exact time". Providing a stable legal framework is one of the most basic and most important jobs of a gov't, and making changes like suddenly deciding to stop enforcement of policy that the industry has been dealing with for decades is what legal scholars call "a dick move".
Here's another example which might be more directly relatable: if you buy a house in California and Prop 13 gets repealed or if you own real estate anywhere and our idiotic policy regime around real estate gets fixed: you'd suddenly lose a huge portion of your life savings, but you'd have yourself to blame because "you saw the outrageously inflated prices and chose to pay them anyway"?
Bear in mind that even if you were intellectually consistent here and agreed that those homeowners are to blame, that would be terrible advice for the literally centuries' worth of landowners/homeowners in whose lifetimes real estate policy wasn't made efficient or fair, and real estate value growth accrued to arbitrary people through rent-seeking.
[1] Not that that's a bad thing necessarily
You can compute the present value of the total profit you can expect to earn (average fares less expenses including the medallion) and if it's less than what the medallion costs, the medallion is overpriced.
This isn't what we're talking about here. That's the equilibrium market price of the medallion, but the person I was responding to was saying that the overinflation due to supply restriction through gov't policy (i.e. medallions) was what was causing market value to diverge from "true" value. The fact that his goal is basically unreachable is sort of my point: his definition of "true" involves an ideal world in which taxis are optimally regulated.
The lack of empathy stems from the behaviour of medallion owners. They're right up there with patent trolls in their unlikeability. They purchase access to a government-granted virtual monopoly and use it to extract rent from hard-working people. They form industry associations and use their profits to lobby the issuing municipalities for rate hikes and other laws that help them squeeze the drivers for more money. They produce nothing and the capital they own has zero intrinsic value.
Frankly, I struggle to see what there is to like about them.
I can guarantee you there are plenty of things you do, from not worrying too much about the sweatshops you ultimately buy from to being complicit in the torture of millions of animals that many other people would consider unethical. Arguing that people don't deserve empathy if they aren't fully aware and fully conforming to your code of ethics isn't enlightened, it's just the same old gross "I want to be shitty to people I disagree with" under a thin veneer.
[1] FWIW, I agree with your assessment of how the industry works.
OK - prior to Uber breaking onto the scene, which cab company in Chicago: 1. Provided universally clean cabs.
2. Provided an app that allowed me to easily acquire a cab without having to jump through hoops, as well as gave me real-time info on where the cab was at.
3. Provided an easy method for me to provide feedback on my driver so that they could weed out troublesome drivers.
4. allowed me to pay them without having to go through the trouble of carrying cash.
You know, all the reasons the new services are winning. The fact medallion owners provided a shitty experience is ENTIRELY RELEVANT. There NEVER WOULD'VE BEEN A MARKET FOR UBER, if the taxi companies were holding up their end of the bargain. Beginning and end of story.
I like Uber, I'm a heavy user, and I'm glad they exist. None of that changes the fact that the gov't had bad policy for twenty years and then screwed over the people who decided to operate within the policy regime. I've provided ample examples above: you can't decide that every taxi operator and medallion-holder deserves getting screwed by dishonest gov't without deciding that the same is true of every doctor and homeowner in the country. Hell, you'd be hard-pressed to find an industry _is_ run fully optimally, so you're basically throwing the entire concept of a stable regulatory environment out the window, which is just ludicrous.