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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3400 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Riots in Paris as Uber Undercuts Taxis

I recently read an article about New York medallions and their concomitant financing. Basically, rich people buy a medallion in an auction with money borrowed from medallion financing banks (really, banks just to finance these medallions), and then lease out the medallion. For the few drivers that actually own their medallion, it's the most valuable thing they own.

It's a strange perversion of capitalism. In the standard case the owner of capital resources pays people to add value to raw materials and so on.

But in this case, the owner of the capital was the driver. Then the drivers got together and convinced the city to adopt a law which made it much more difficult to use capital which a lot of people own (a car) in order to make it more profitable for themselves. But now it's become so expensive to get into that club of 'allowed' operators that being a capital owner still forces you to borrow against years of earnings just to use that capital legally and the car owners are forced to borrow for years on something that they won't own. They've created an entirely new capital in order to serve themselves as drivers, but incidentally turned themselves into indentured servants to the medallion cost.





paxprose  ·  3400 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Its a weird thing when a vehicle appears that completely bypasses a large majority of existing bureaucracy. Suddenly, all the made up middle-manning that has caused prices to artificially inflate so someone can get their a cut is exposed for what it is: unnecessary bullshit. Services begin to run more efficiently, participants flock to the new framework, abandoning the systemic issues that have developed over decades that; while perhaps was created with the best interest of the industry, merely inhibits the actual flow of goods and services to the public.

Regulation that protects middle men and their peddling interests ultimately hurt consumers. They need to have the foundations of their business model ripped up beneath them because it isn't sturdy enough to support competition.