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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is, why are they allowed to sell the medallions at all? The problems with the medallion system stems from the fact that due to supply/demand problem, their prices skyrocketed. But they should quite simply be non-transferable.

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If you made medallions nontransferrable then you would see each medallion be owned by its own individual corporation, then the corporation would be sold instead of the medallion.

A fixed term license would be a better idea.

If I remember correctly from this[1] Planet Money podcast about a man who owns many medallions, the guy does have separate company names for each medallion.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/31/428157211/episo...

If the government only hands out new ones that cannot be sold to humans that problem cannot occur.

I think they should be transferable, but they should only last for 5 years or some other reasonable fixed term. Make it long enough that there is some stability; but not so long that it becomes something that is like a real estate or mineral rights investment. Let the city auction the fraction of them that come up for renewal each year; so that instead of a private entity making money off a scarce city resource the city would.

It seems like they should have either used the medallion or returned it to the government. How do we fix it now though? Does the government get rid of medallions? Does someone refund the people who bought them? It's pretty clear people prefer the uber model but the cabs do have at least on reason to be mad, the medallions they bought to comply with regulations.

Why should taxpayers bail them out? They bought into a monopoly and that's like paying the teacher a bribe so you can take other kids' lunch money. This is a perfect example of corporatism, and should not be rewarded with a soft landing when it fails.

We don't have too. We could just say "you must have a medallion to operate a cab". They secondary market drove up the prices so I guess it doesn't make sense to have the gov reimburse them. If there was no secondary market then it might.

In kleptocracies like Philly, there's similar game called "pay to play," where anyone wanting to bid on a city contract has to make some administrator happy in some personalized way. City admins routinely go to jail for this.

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