My original point in this line of argument was that one of the main reasons cabs don't contribute to congestion in the city is because the number of cabs allowed in is capped.
Even if the number of cabs increases by 5x (i.e., customers are underserved by a factor of 5x), it will still be a small number.
As for the distributional benefits, yes. I'm willing to harm the wages of a middle class cabbie if it helps a poor unemployed person. I'm kinda progressive that way.
You're taking the savings from the medallion and labor costs that you posited above and assuming they'd be passed directly to the consumer, but that's overly simplistic.
I don't think so. Consumers pay the average taxi $90,000/year. I'm proposing a change in which consumers would only pay that taxi $66,000/year.
By the way, I think we should reverse your argument. You seem to favor creating artificial shortages in low skill fields to drive up wages. Since this is presumably good policy, perhaps we should expand it. How about waiter licenses for high end restaurants (which primarily serve the rich)?
(I ask about expanding this policy to other sectors because I think status quo bias is the main reason you support the status quo.)
How about waiter licenses for high end restaurants (which primarily serve the rich)?
High-end waitservice is hardly a low-skill field. Good waiters are well compensated, and restaurants compete for them almost like technology companies compete for programmers. And restaurants themselves are completely different businesses than taxis. Each additional taxi added to the city is more or less identical to the taxis that were there before, whereas restaurants are highly differentiated from each other. You can't predict the marginal payout of an additional restaurant.
But with that said, restaurants are regulated through zoning and health ordinances. You can't just start a restaurant out of your apartment or set up a table wherever you please to start serving people.
You are ducking the question by picking holes in my specific example (which might have been poorly chosen), so I'll phrase it in the abstract.
Consider any low skill job which serves rich customers. Under what conditions should we pass a law restricting supply, making an unlucky subset of those workers unemployed but raising wages for the remainder? All commodity services (including, but not limited to landscaping, taxis and maid service)?
Should we only do it in cases where we already do it? (I.e., should we simply maintain the status quo?)
Even if the number of cabs increases by 5x (i.e., customers are underserved by a factor of 5x), it will still be a small number.
As for the distributional benefits, yes. I'm willing to harm the wages of a middle class cabbie if it helps a poor unemployed person. I'm kinda progressive that way.
You're taking the savings from the medallion and labor costs that you posited above and assuming they'd be passed directly to the consumer, but that's overly simplistic.
I don't think so. Consumers pay the average taxi $90,000/year. I'm proposing a change in which consumers would only pay that taxi $66,000/year.
By the way, I think we should reverse your argument. You seem to favor creating artificial shortages in low skill fields to drive up wages. Since this is presumably good policy, perhaps we should expand it. How about waiter licenses for high end restaurants (which primarily serve the rich)?
(I ask about expanding this policy to other sectors because I think status quo bias is the main reason you support the status quo.)