Comment by yonran

10 months ago

To make beneficiaries whole is perhaps the worst reason to keep a monopolistic system. In the case of taxi medallions in San Francisco, they are technically still owned by the city and the medallion should never have had any private value to begin with; Mayor Gavin Newsom should have leased them to the drivers instead of creating a $250,000 transfer program to give windfalls to retirees. In the case of zoning, ideally we would tax much of the land rent to reduce the incentive to exclude and increase the incentive to create capital. Rents from a government-created monopoly should not be anyone’s ticket to retirement.