The medallions were an economic tool, instituted during the Great Depression, to regulate a spiraling industry. Whether or not they “should” be valuable is a nonsense framing: they were introduced to enforce scarcity, which makes them valuable. Neither of us has to like them to recognize their outsized value and function in the welfare of a large number of peoples’ lives.

But to the larger point: medallions made NYC yellowcabs more expensive than the market demands, and they’re still cheaper than ridesharing.