Caveat Emptor

I had a chat to a taxi driver at the weekend about Uber.

He thinks that, as Uber disintermediates the taxi industry, the government should reimburse all those people that have invested hundreds of thousands into taxi plates and stand to lose their money.

I said that any investment includes the acceptance of risk and in the case of the artificially high and increasing value of taxi plates the risk was always a change in government regulations or some technology disruption.

The fact that some buyers didn’t understand this risk doesn’t for me excuse the concept of socialising the losses but keeping the profits private.

But, I said, good luck to them if they can extract some sort of compensation.

I wanted to say to him “The most expensive cabs in the world; smelly old rattly Ford Falcons with lost drivers and Alan Jones playing on the radio. We happily fucked over the music and movie industries because they ripped us off for decades and you expect our support?”