> Taxi cabs in most major cities run on a Medallion system, its an artificial limit on the number of cabs that can exist in the city(sometimes done because of lobbying by the existing cab owners, sometimes to reduce the number of cabs in the city). This restriction causes the price of Medallion to be artificially higher than it should be. For instance in NYC, Medallions are now sold for upto $1 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/nyregion/1-million-medalli....
The medallion program in NYC was recently expanded with the introduction of green cabs that are official NYC cabs that service outer boroughs. The Bloomberg administration fought a court battle over the medallion expansion and won. Medallion systems are not inherently bad, but they can be used as a way to stifle better service (just like anything).
> Why do people pay $1 million to own a cab? Because this is the aggregated value they estimate to be, based on the number of years they will operate the cab for(and the profit they will make from it). This is precisely why most cab owners in the NYC are immigrants who can barely speak English, because only they have the savings to own and operate a cab.
Prior to the medallion expansion, most medallions were actually owned by firms and not individual cabbies. The reason why most cabbies are immigrants is not because they are loaded and can buy a million dollars of value outright. Also, most cabbies do speak English to some capacity.
> Imagine you having spent $1 million to acquire a cab medallion, would you support any measure to increase the number of cabs in the city? Nope! That's precisely why all measures against increasing this number is heavily resisted by the cab owners.
This is true, firms worried about value loss of their medallions when more would be issued. However, it is important that cab MEDALLION HOLDERS, not cabbies, were most opposed to the change as they had the most to lose. In NYC, cabbies were also opposed, but mostly because they worried the terms of their medallion access would get worse and leave them poorer.
> You'd think that they would be ok with bringing Uber under the same medallion system but that position would be completely contradictory to their economic interest. They have, in past resisted increase in number of medallions, so that makes no sense for them to even remotely support bringing Uber under the same licensing system.
In the case of NYC, Uber would most certainly want to avoid being a part of the medallion system as that would effectively regulate their business and drivers. Uber seeks to avoid regulation while providing private cab service, not to be integrated into regulated cab systems.
> This is also the reason why the slave owners of the south resisted abolition of slavery. A slave stops being a 'labor' input in your profit and loss calculation, and becomes a capital asset. Its value is derived from the total earnings anticipated to be made in the lifetime of the slave. Consider it like this, if you are a programmer who can make $100K a year, and has a working life of 20 years, then a slave owner would be willing to pay you upto $100K*20 = $20M to posses you, of course he wouldn't wanna pay $20M, because then he would make no profit, plus there is a risk potential involved, running away or death, so like $10M. Now if a slave owner pays $10M to acquire you then there is no way he would wanna set you free until he at least recuperates that cost.
Please don't reduce people who were slaves to value objects, this is extremely problematic and dehumanizing.