I’ve decided that we should have a business with a limited number of licenses to conduct the business. All the people who got their licenses for free previously will, of course, be allowed to keep them. But now they can sell them as well. When we (very rarely) make more licenses available, we will sell them at public auction because, as we all know, auctions put the scarce resource in the hands of those who will use it for its highest, best use.” Letting people simply have free access would lead to wastefulness, inefficiency and devalue the resource.
Besides, by limiting the number of licenses and auctioning them off, we the government can make a lot of money without raising taxes. True, you can argue that by artificially limiting the number of licenses to make them valuable we are essentially creating a tax on the ability to do the business — we just collect it all up front. But we don’t like that argument so we will ignore it because “auctions put the resource to its highest best use” and if it is valuable, people ought to pay for it.
No, I’m not talking about spectrum. I’m talking about taxi cabs. State and local governments license taxi cabs. This creates an artificial scarcity. As a result, as anyone who owns a Taxi medallion will tell you, they are extremely valuable. And, as one might expect, the taxi cabs that benefit from this scarcity (and the states and localities that benefit from this scarcity) are less than happy at the thought of a new competitor, like Uber or Lyft, offering a competing service. It is a windfall to these guys to allow them to offer for free what we need to acquire — either at auction or in the secondary market — for money. If they want to compete, say the taxi cabs who have medallions, let the new entrants get medallions like us. When they become available.
OK, I was talking about taxi cabs, but y’all see where this is going right?
More below . . .