A couple of days ago, Dubner posted a challenge: think about activities that are legal when done for free but become illegal when they are done for money. Despite my recent post on the injustice of the taxi medallion system, not one of the 100+ responders to Dubner’s appeal mentioned that the simple act of driving passengers around is a crime — when it is done for cash.
Granted, you can get special government dispensation to do this, but this often doesn’t come cheap. Government not only requires permission to operate a taxi but often enforces draconian limits on cabs’ numbers. Hence the right to carry passengers for cash is often outlandishly expensive though the identical activity is perfectly legal and quite harmless, as long as a couple of pieces of paper don’t change hands.
This doesn’t seem quite fair to me, though I guess the tepid reader response shows that taxi regulation is not quite the pulse-pounding roller-coaster ride of an issue I thought it was. But even if it won’t be eliciting sit-ins and hunger strikes any time soon, I still think the medallion system deserves a serious second look.
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It might not be fair to hard working cabbies, but how else to you keep the streets from being flooded with cabs? It’s packed enough already in NY, imagine what it would be like if anybody could be a cab. You would have congestion of the commons an order of magnitude worse than it is.
Whether it’s right or wrong, if you can scrape together $750,000, it sure it one heck of an investment that has beat every other investment class I have ever seen over any time interval (stocks, bonds, real estate, gold, forever stamps, etc). I was thinking of starting a hedge fund. Anyone else interested?
can’t you make this argument for every occupation that is somehow regulated by government? selling/giving alcohol, selling/giving medical care, selling/giving hot dogs on the street…
Why would the cost of the medallion exceed the cost to regulate it? I can see why a city would want to make sure that taxi drivers have a valid driver’s liscence. Perhaps it’s also worthwhile to do a background check, and to do some inspection of the cabs to make sure they are following pricing regulations. But isn’t it in the city’s interest to make cabs plentiful? There seem to be numerous benefits to cabs. Less drunk driving, smaller parking lots since fewer people own cars, great for tourists/business people who flew into town, etc. I can’t see why cities would charge more than it costs to implement basic regulation of the cabs.
Yea, I second nate. Government regulation can’t count otherwise almost every act qualifies. In fact it would probably be more of a challenge to think of things that don’t become regulated when they are done for money rather than for free.
In Dubai it is illegal to car pool. The law is enforced selectively, profiling non Arab Asians most likely to be carpooling to get around using taxis. Did I say the Dubai taxis are a government run enterprise?
Another factoid. The adjoining city of Sharjah, another emirate with its own royal family, serves as a bedroom community for Dubai. Dubai and Sharjah do not allow taxis from one emirate to pick up passengers. Thus taxis return empty. The result is further congestion on already highly congested roadways.
Maybe none of the responders mentioned “taxis” per se, but I saw a number of comments that talked about charging people for a ride. Same thing.
It’s not strictly true that none of the commenters pointed this out.
I just read the first handful of comments, but somebody pointed out that any task that requires a gov’t license meets the criteria. I believe their example was cutting hair or serving booze, but driving a taxi certainly falls into their general categorization of “stuff that requires a gov’t license”.
I’m with nate (#2). This makes for a weak example because the act of accepting money for a ride isn’t illegal, per se (neither is it negatively stigmatized), just regulated.