The bursting of some “bubbles” you can see coming a mile off. One such is the “medallion” system in use in New York City for their taxis. There were a limited number of “Medallions,” basically city licenses to operate taxis, and as they were sold on their price skyrocketed. A million dollars for the right to operate a taxi seems like an insane prospect… and it is. Especially in a world with Lyft and Uber, greatly expanding the number of taxi-like vehicles while reducing the cost. How anyone thought they could reasonably make a profit with a taxi with an initial funding requirement of a *million* dollars with no guarantee that they would necessarily be able to sell that medallion later on for equal or greater money, is beyond me. It’s like going deep into student load debt to get a degree in gender studies, it’s just a monumentally financially foolish idea. And now the price of these ridiculous “medallions” has collapsed, and *of* *course* the taxi drives are protesting and demanding that the government Do Something.

NYC Yellow Taxi Medallion Crisis, Explained

The article calls it a “crisis.” I call it “an opportunity for the free market system to replace the overly regulated and corrupt system that the city had installed.” The article is actually pretty funny in a dark way… the medallions reached a peak of over a million in 2014, and have now collapsed to around $80,000 (still a ridiculous sum for a license to operate a small business). Many of the taxi drivers, which the author goes to pains to point out are largely immigrants, owe $600,000 or so. The number of medallions, and thus taxis, was capped at 13,500; the number of rideshares is over 120,000. This is A BAD BUSINESS MODEL.

This shady scheme was instituted in 1937 and amplified by Mayor Bloomberg in 2004, and by 2014 had raised $855 *million* for the city coffers. There’s no grift like a government grift.