[cletus]

The government has sold taxi licensed/medallions for the right to provide this service. If this were real estate eminent domain would apply and the owners would be compensated. It seems consistent to compensate existing license holders.

[victorhooi]

Well, not really.

It's not like the government took away the rights of taxi drivers to drive people around. It's just that there's a new entrant now, and they actually need to compete.

In fact, taxi medallion prices went down post-2011 (before Uber) because the government released more, because consumers (i.e. everyday people) complained about crazy prices. You don't see the government compensating people there.

It would be like if the government handed out licenses to build 1000 apartments.

Then, they realised, jeez, house prices are crazy, we better issue more licenses. Or we better re-zone to allow super-high density apartments, or allow people to sub-let apartment (cause in this make-believe world, that wasn't possibly before).

Would the original 1000 apartment owners be clamoring for government handouts?

[notatoad]

But the whole selling point of a taxi medallion is that the government will limit supply. If a developer was sold the rights to build 1000 apartments under an agreement that the government would limit future development in the region and they later opened the market, the developer they made that promise to would be right to expect some compensation.

The problem isn't the compensation. The problem is that the government promised artificial scarcity to the taxi companies in the first place.

[wycx]

Does the legislation specifically state artificial scarcity will be enforced, or just that supply will be regulated by the govt?

[nsxwolf]

Yeah, but the new entrant decided to not play by the same rules as everyone else. They just started breaking the law, and they just get to win for some reason. If you're just going to let that happen, you should compensate the people that played by the rules but got screwed over by your failure to enforce those rules.

[sanswork]

The government sold taxis the right to pick up people from the side of the road without previous contact. They still have that and uber doesn't. They haven't lost anything but business to a better service that doesn't need that right.

If this were real estate it would be the government paying a slumlord money to make up for the fact that they approved a new apartment building next door which is nicer with lower rent.