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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?)




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