In the capital of Turkey, Ankara, the islamist mayor cut all the public transport after 00:00, making late evening events(concerts or simply socializing in bars and clubs) inaccessible to younger people from poorer backgrounds because the taxis were expensive and abusive(the taxi lobby was protected by the same government).
This caused divides between the youth and hindered the arts and entertainment scene for many many years.
Some stuff is essential services. Like the airlines, they must be available and accessible even when it’s not profitable. It often needs to be subsidized, the subsidy can come from the central government or the users of the service can share the cost of the unprofitable operations.
When you fail in that, the whole society and economy crumbles.
By mandating that taxis are available we are saying that the cost of off peek taxis should be paid by people that use taxis. If I never go to a town big enough to have a taxi service, or if I drive my own car everywhere, then I never share the cost for subsidising off peek taxis.
Which is more fair, everyone pays or only taxi uses pay?
I would even go so far as to say if the government is mandating something, then the costs should be distributed amongst that government’s tax base (can be progressively distributed, but across the whole tax base nonetheless).
e.g.:
* making polluters responsible for cleanup costs
* making investors responsible for the costs of overseeing the markets they profit from
* making bad drivers responsible for paying for the consequences of their actions
I'd say it's more fair to say that we could distribute costs to society when it's a public service that generally benefits everyone, or the disadvantaged. But I don't think we would want to distribute societal costs incurred by the rich or reckless.
The second example I see no problem distributing amongst society, if functioning markets are providing a benefit to society.
There are corruption risks with making government functions dependent upon the thing they are policing.
Is it just public transportation? Are airlines and trains public transportation? Is it other critical infrastructure? Utilities? Energy? Healthcare? Communication? Other societal necessities like food/housing/shelter?
Also, whatever is prohibitively expensive to duplicate, such as water/sewage/gas pipes, electrical/fiber wires, etc. Or public transport like underground train systems.
Taxes, tariffs, subsidies, affect market pricing quite a bit and are extremely common. Some consumer protection laws place very loose pricing rules on businesses that are literally price controls, but in practice allow pricing to fluctuate with market rates. Some other industries have segments which are price controlled, and other segments that are not, i.e. healthcare, insurance.
For example, give people access to higher education. Okay, have the government operate the higher education institutions. Or give the students cash to pay for the higher education institutions.
But do not obfuscate costs by guaranteeing all student loans with zero underwriting. (The more politically popular method since it keeps taxes low now and lets politicians say they helped people). Of course, this price obfuscation rears its ugly head in 20 to 30 years once tuition is now $50k+ per year.
Do you mean 'obfuscated' or 'inflated'?
I'm not sure how prices are obfuscated in US higher education... prices are published and you sign several pieces of paper with the price on it before you walk into class for the first time. Guaranteed loans don't obfuscate prices (in fact, DoE loans have more paperwork than private loans), they enable schools to inflate prices because it gives more buying power to their students. This isn't something that would be fixed by handing out cash instead, in fact, grants/scholarships are another factor that have enabled schools to inflate costs. If you shift the demand curve up and to the right, the equilibrium price goes up -- it doesn't really matter what shifted it.
A prudent lender would not lend a teenager tens of thousands of dollars to study something the society does not want (indicated by high probability of low paying careers as a result of that education).
Grants/scholarships/subsidized tuition might push demand and hence prices higher, but because grants impact taxpayers’ wallets today, there would be a built in check on spending. Not so with lending the money to teenagers.
The government can defect spend, and raise taxes later. That's even more of an obfuscated price than an ill-advised loan. Either mechanism of surprise costs is a bad thing.
The root of the higher-ed problem is social. We're forcing kids to make career decisions before they're ready, and we're forcing them into paths based upon 1970s stereotypes about the workplace. 50% of counselors and secondary-teachers are clueless about the broader workplace, and the other 50% would be politically chastised by parents if they told the truth.
We'd solve 80% of our student loan crisis if it was politically okay to tell kids:
1. If you don't have an interest in higher learning, don't want to go to college, or "just want a job" you shouldn't go to college. Don't go to college because your mother is pressuring you to do it, because she finds it 'unfashionable' or 'embarrassing' if you don't.
2. Just because you can do something doesn't mean someone will pay you to do it. How many job openings are in that career path, how many people are competing for that job, and how do you rank against them?
3. Academic talent is 50% of what employers care about. Nobody is going to care about your GPA if you don't have social, professional, and self-marketing skills.
In the case of Taxi service, I find to be more appropriate users of the local service sharing the cost of the low hours. Central government paying for local services tends to be very inefficient.
By restricting the distribution of costs over only people who use taxis, then people who use taxis are unfairly shouldering a burden that society benefits from as a whole.
I definitely sympathise with your main point - there's a tendency to see a problem and go looking for a nearby business to soak rather than funding it through general taxation. But assuming we accept that there should be a fleet of taxis that operate overnight to provide this socially-mandated service (and whether that fleet is directly owned and operated by the government or is something that private operators provide as part of a mutually agreed bundle of rights and obligations is immaterial IMO), for private industry to undercut the profitable segment of that service would be a both direct social loss (money out of the government's account) and a waste of real value (those expensive taxis sitting in the daytime).
Instead of the government acting as either entirely public or entirely private, why shouldn’t it act instead as a mediator between the public and the private? This seems to be the most logical decision for me compared to either full socialism or full libertarianism.
This is an enormous assumption (frequently wrong), and precisely why the costs of a government mandate should not be implicitly laid on a select population.
It actually results in attempts to cheat and incentivize corruption. For example, NYC had or has a problem with cabs not taking people to poorer neighborhoods. The government can mandate it all day long, but they did not stop cab drivers from discriminating. The correct solution in this case, would be to pay the cab drivers the market price for going to the poorer neighborhoods.
The payment obviously would have to come from the government, either given directly to the poorer person or can be given directly to the cab driver. But either way the incentivizes would be properly aligned, increasing supply of cab drivers willing to drive to the poorer neighborhoods.
Where this falls apart is that it requires increase in government spending, meaning increase in taxes for rich people. And obviously, they are going to oppose this wealth transfer. It is much easier and cheaper to simply require cab drivers to go to poorer neighborhoods under threat of fines or whatnot, and sit back and let the status quo continue.
It depends on the context of mediation. In one sense, government-as-mediator is completely compatible with a libertarian nightwatchman state so long as such mediation is impartial and does not infringe on public and private rights of either party.
But I don't think such a distinction helps here, as the functional differences between taxis and Uber amount to little more than legal fiction.
“Oooo sorry Jim, there’s no money to be made in cancer patients.
The government has an interest in people having access taxi services 24/7 because it prevents DUIs and licensure/regulations is the means to ensure that.
“Well the government should provide that transportation then.” — They are via this regulation.
They should not, unless hospitals have the power to tax. Or the hospital is getting reimbursed by the government.
>“Well the government should provide that transportation then.” — They are via this regulation.
Politicians like to do it via mandates for businesses because they can avoid being responsible for problems and have a convenient third party to blame. It also avoids them having to increase taxes.
The important thing is the price for a hospital being able to provide highly qualified team of workers and equipment 24/7 to treat patients should not be obfuscated. It is valuable information for how many more hospitals/doctors/research/ whatever is needed and which kind of work society should incentivize people to do.
My guess is that governments have interest in making sure services are safe and reliable. Hence licenses. And rules for those licenses.
With a private pilots license you can't fly for money, but you can take your friends and family with you.
With a commercial pilots license you can fly for money.
Neither of these are capped, a commercial pilots license just requires slightly more education and experience. Why should licensing for taxis be any different?
For small private planes? Slots are hardly ever the limiting factor.
Taxis are more like private jets than Airbuses carrying hundreds of pax.
While taxis aren't as good for society as buses, they still reduce the total amount of car infrastructure required. The slot comparison doesn't seem apt.
No they don't. They choke up the most costly piece of car infrastructure - road space in the very centre of cities.
If I drive myself to somewhere in the centre, my car will sit there using up space while I'm doing my thing. If I use a taxi, the same car that delivered me will serve other people while I'm doing my thing.
Of course it would be even better if I used public transport, but I'm not going to do that because public transport is uncomfortable at best.
In the absence of terrible laws, it'll be stored somewhere that's more space-efficient (e.g. in a multistory car-park) compared to a taxi cruising around the main streets looking for fares.
But uber ignored all that anyway.
Just like you'd get in trouble for driving a car with a motorcycle license.
But that same agency didn't do shit to Uber for operation of a taxi service without meeting the requirements.
Going after the little people is easy, but give up when the target has a bunch of VC money and lawyers.
We have a similar problem with our courier drivers. Everyone is "totally not an employee, they run their own independent business".
Why should this enforcement be outsourced to Uber?
Not to mention that the smartphone online model plus flexible work is inherently more efficient.
Uber ignored all that and just took the profitable peek times. Plus they ignored employment law and paid drivers less than minimum wage.
They "disrupted" our taxi industry by illegally taking the easy profit and ignoring the costs of being a business.
I hate that it seems like every government in the world treats companies that blatantly break the law with kid gloves instead of coming down on them like a ton of bricks.