"When obsolete government practices persist, they tend to be pretty sinister."
How might you propose to compensate people who, in good faith, bought taxi medallions (a legal practice)? (Or do you feel that's not necessary?)
How might you propose to compensate people who, in good faith, bought taxi medallions (a legal practice)? (Or do you feel that's not necessary?)
I'm sure the following question was asked many times to abolitionists:
How might you propose to compensate people who, in good faith, bought other people
This was suggested many times during the lead-up to the Civil War, but (I think rightly) Lincoln as well as the more hard-core abolitionists viewed this strategy as contradicting their position that Slavery was a crime against Natural Law.
Lincoln himself was well aware of the costs that would be imposed by war, but chose this course of action due to the absurdly perverse nature of slavery.
Seriously? You're making that comparison?
You had pointed out (rightly) that purchasing and holding medallions is legal, and those who bought them did so with the understanding that they would profit. At the same time, they must have observed that the very existence of the medallion system limited the freedom of others. Some might have even genuinely viewed this as altruistic.
All that was true of slaveowners and slaves.
Your argument is that requiring medallions to drive a taxi (which I agree has become an inefficient and slightly corrupt situation) is in any way comparable to slavery is an insult to anybody who's ever read any history.
The problem here isn't some people "driving taxis", its that these people, and organizations associated with them, lobbied for and bought into a system that prevents, by force of government, anyone else from driving taxis.
And of course, even that is not a crime against humanity. If it was, I'd be advocating the use of military intervention if it was serious enough, such as in the case of mass slavery or genocide. All I'm saying is that if/when we get rid of this system, we don't need to compensate medallion owners.
But if you interlaced every other word with 'fuck' and questioning the sexuality of other posters, you couldn't expect to be judged on the merits of your argument. Personally (others may disagree), I see totally unnecessary comparisons to slavery the same way.
But it makes no difference to the validity of the argument presented.
But there's a difference between lousy analogies that further debate through clarification and lousy analogies that lead to everyone telling each other fuck you.
The poster was concerned about potential losses incurred by existing medallion owners if the law changed. The comparison was made to point out that laws are often wrong, sometimes more seriously wrong (as with slavery or genocide), sometimes less wrong, but wrong nonetheless.
Individuals or classes who benefit from bad laws should not get an affirmative right to recover losses incurred when these laws are changed. In the most serious cases like slavery or genocide, they may even be punished ex post facto for following such laws. I'm obviously not advocating that here, only that the law be changed through the democratic process, despite the potential effects on existing medallion owners.
>So, medallion holders speculated in holding a government asset and lost. Some of these people are also taxi drivers or operators of taxi dispatch companies. Like Greek bondholders, they gambled and lost big.
Don't agree with that at all that is what the article says. (It doesn't match up with my definition either based on my years of business experience either.)
Definition of "speculation" from investopedia:
"The act of trading in an asset, or conducting a financial transaction, that has a significant risk of losing most or all of the initial outlay, in expectation of a substantial gain."
Based on history there is no reason to believe that the purchase of a taxi medallion could result reasonably in losing "most or all" of the initial outlay. (Unless of course you decided to buy one while ignoring the current events going on of course).
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/speculation.asp
Of course you can make any investment or purchase speculative depending on how much of a chance you want to take.
If you decide to get in on an up and coming area in real estate (a run down area that you hope will change over the course of many years) that could easily be seen as speculation. Otoh, buying a condo in a well established neighborhood that has a history would not be seen as speculation which is not the same as saying that you bought because you felt that the value could double and if that doesn't happen you may feel you have "lost" something (the high gain you expected).
Even in the case of eminent domain taking of property for public good the property owners are compensated somewhat fairly for the loss of value of their property. The government doesn't come along and say "hey we need this area for a road sorry guys to bad it happened to you".
I would go further to say that these medallion owners would band together and at least attempt to do whatever they could legally to find a way to prevent something like this from happening if they could. Why? There is enough money involved to pay lawyers to muck up the process or delay it (just like with eminent domain, people even if there is compensation, will do that.)
The best comparison I can think of involving real property would be owning a private tract of land in a valuable area that's almost all owned and unused by the government. One day, the government decides to sell its land. The value of your land plummets. It's still valuable due to whatever intrinsic wealth it has, but the new glut of supply makes it much less valuable. Is the government obligated to compensate you for that loss of value when they sell their land? I'd think not.
This is always the case before an asset loses value for the first time.
Based on recent history no. But maybe based on longer history? Imagine a pandemic that wipes our a large # of population, now taxi medallions for whatever reason are not that important so they drop in value.
Medallion system is sustain by the laws. Laws can change. The bet is that the laws own't change drastically but that is just a "speculation".
Government is nice enough to offer a compensation in eminent domain, but they don't have to. What if they don't? What would you do? Sue them? You can't. Gather a militia and march towards the White House or the Senate building?
If you had asked someone 20-30 years or so ago. "Do you imagine government one day will be able to store and read all your communications, telephone, mail?" Most people would have bet it would never happen because of Free Speech and it was just something we made fun of other corrupt and evil countries of doing. Yet here we are today. If you'd somehow made a financial bet against it, it would be a losing bet.
I wrote an article about a New Jersey city which offered $49,000 for a three-bedroom rowhome, and when residents wouldn't take it, ripped up sidewalks and stopped collecting trash. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/01/new-jersey-developm...
Outright seizure gets headlines, but the government can harm your property through regulatory takings as well. So crazy zoning can make your property value decline, and it's not well-established practice to compensate you for your loss. See Richard Epstein's work on this.
The Supreme Court will decide this year on a potentially really important case, Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District. A landowner wanted to develop some property, but the local water protection agency denied the permit because he wouldn't pay for mitigation that was totally offsite. This stuff can be borderline extortion.
I would expect that the profit stream off a medallion is effectively greater than that of any other risk-limited or risk-free investment in a government asset (bonds and such) or they wouldn't be in such great demand even at their vastly inflated prices.
So is, perhaps, the decades of extra profit not compensation enough? Maybe recent buyers have some claim to have had the value of the instrument disrupted, but anyone who's been leaching this system for decades should frankly be happy that the government (and by extension society as a whole) propped them up for so long.
At any rate I expect there would be a gradual expansion of the number of medallions on the market until it was an unrestricted license just like any other, at which point trading or transferring them would become illegal. This would provide some ability for holders to get some of their value back as it lowered.
The IRS rules http://www.irs.gov/publications/p535/ch08.html state you have to amortize/depreciate the license over 15 years (180 months). So, any licenses that are 16 or more years old, have already been written off in full, so, a lesser amount would be needed to compensate the owners.