| >He praises the fact that medallions and price controls cause artificial shortages and blames Uber for devaluing the medallions through their competition. I didn't read the text as 'praise' for taxi companies or government regulation, just a statement of facts about them. Reread that part of the text from a neutral place. "Next, it’s time to understand the legal difference between what Uber is doing and what taxi companies are doing. The taxi industry is highly regulated and each cab must have a medallion, which is basically a licence to operate a car as a taxi. With prices over $300,000, these medallions can be valued as highly as a home. Since Uber has shown up, those prices have plummeted. Why go through the hassle of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a taxi driver when you can just download an app and become an Uber driver for free? Taxi companies, which are regulated by the government, cannot compete." It's stating that the playing field is unfair and that becoming a taxi driver isn't a career path anymore. >Apparently we are at whim of a "single private company" controlling our transportation, but somehow being at the whim of state governments is not an issue at all. This article focuses around Uber's role in our lives, not the government. There's enough hatred to go around though and we're allowed to dislike two types of monopolies. >And of course, the ultimate irony: complaining about monopolization and cartelization while praising unions. I'm not opposed to unions, but they are demand-side bargaining cartels and to be in denial over this makes you look disingenuous. It depends on how you perceive unionization. I perceive it to be as a means for workers to make certain they have fair working conditions and fair pay for their work as a base. Everything else is all part of a layer of bureaucracy that comes later and/or is corrupted by corrupt actors. |
Of course it's unfair. You have an artificially constrained supply.
I perceive it to be as a means for workers to make certain they have fair working conditions and fair pay for their work as a base.
In the same way, a business cartel is a means for firms to coordinate operations in a manner to mutually benefit in terms of profitability by vertically integrating stages of production or through more brute price gouging arrangements.
Of course, they have a high incentive to break down as a result of disobeying to exploit new opportunities from the leveling that has been done.
Unions serve the same function, but on the demand side (more specifically wage laborers). You can't support one without also allowing for the other.