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Or you could stop pretending the government can legitimately criminalize a harmless business activity at the behest of a rent-seeking cartel. I agree with you,
by buyx 15y ago
Or you could stop pretending the government can legitimately criminalize a harmless business activity at the behest of a rent-seeking cartel.
I agree with you, to some extent. However, some level of regulation is necessary, otherwise "harmless" can quickly become "harmful". The case of South Africa is instructive.
In South Africa, the Apartheid government entirely deregulated the minibus taxi industry in the late 1980's. It was to be a cheap source of transport for the black population, since public transport links, particularly in newly established "white flight" areas were very poor (whites tended to have cars, blacks didn't). Also the idea was that individual taxi owner/drivers would help foster black entrepreneurship.
The best description of what happened next I've read is "the miracle of the 1980's turned into the nightmare of the 1990's". Instead of one-man one taxi, we got one owner, with many taxis. Taxi owners formed cartels, and violence in competition for routes led to murderous street warfare ("taxi wars").
The weakened state (1990-1996) was unable to intervene. Starting with the Mandela administration, attempts were made to re-regulate taxi operations, but were consistently stymied by the taxi organisations. Even as recently as the last 2 years, taxi owners, through road blockades (and a fatal shooting) managed to strong-arm the government into giving them control of a new Johannesburg bus system.
In any town and city in South Africa, overloaded, barely roadworthy taxis blast through intersections disregarding traffic rules, stopping dangerously, their drivers desperate to increase their takings, menacing their own passengers and other motorists with their aggression. Fatalities are not uncommon.
- uvdiv 15y agoIt goes without saying that every policy is contingent on a functioning government capable of protecting its residents from violence. You'd hardly expect the United States to have the same problems as violence-ridden South Africa, regardless of policy. That said, I don't understand your reasoning. You claim that free-enterprise taxis are responsible for violence in SA. But if that government, according to your account, can't even maintain basic road safety, how could they possibly enforce a taxi monopoly? If they tried to set one up, they'd simply create a black market of cabs, which they'd have no control over. If anything that should be worse; "illegal" cabs would evade police and would not undergo whatever licensing/safety checks ordinary cabs get. (On a tangent, a state-enforced cartel is quite analogous to the dystopia you describe. Instead of private businesses using mob violence to "defend" "their" turf, the police enforces it for them. Same crime, only institutionalized, sanitized, and socially acceptable.)
- buyx 15y agoYes, they lost control of road traffic enforcement as well, but not to the extent that they lost control of the taxi industry. Having some form of regulation would have kept the taxi operators busy evading the state rather than acting with criminal impunity (maybe even behaving better to not arouse suspicion), a better result than what actually happened. And the state is stronger now than it was in the past, but the legacy of deregulation lives on - getting the genie back into the bottle is harder than letting it out. Same crime, only institutionalized, sanitized, and socially acceptable. "Sanitized and socially acceptable"...sounds good to me.