And so -- after years of delays caused by the way Nevada allows prospective competitors to intervene and drag out the proceedings -- the 1998 lawsuit by independent taxi and limousine drivers seeking a chance to compete in Las Vegas finally rolled out in the court of District Judge Ron Parraguirre Tuesday.
The state Transportation Services Authority -- and the intervening cab and limo firms who benefit from the protection racket run by that agency -- argue the plaintiff drivers are scofflaws who simply refused to subject themselves to the reasonable procedures required to obtain Nevada licenses.
But Clark Neily, staff attorney for the Washington-based Institute for Justice, which is representing the independent drivers, characterized that licensing process as a mockery.
Even the Authority's own commissioners have described the application process as "onerous, arduous, burdensome and expensive," Neily told the court in his opening remarks. The drivers didn't bother frittering away any more time and money on that process because the procedure routinely denies licenses to anyone held by existing firms to represent "potentially harmful competition."
Indeed, this is the underlying absurdity of the existing licensing law -- which the court should indeed throw out.
Deputy Attorney General Brent Michaels , representing the TSA, shrilled that the plaintiffs are attempting to challenge a bedrock constitutional principle -- a state's right to regulate its highways.
In fact, courts have widely held the states do indeed enjoy power to license and regulate commercial, for-profit activities on the tax-funded roads. (It's the "public safety" justification for states to run lucrative revenue programs collectin "license" and "registration" fees from private citizens who engage in no such commercial activities, merely "travelling" on roads they've already bought and maintained with their excise taxes, that would be well worth some further Ninth Amendment study.)
But the limo drivers are not arguing they should be allowed to operate without drivers licenses, registration plates, or even some minimum level of liability insurance coverage. They merely oppose a protection racket which allows existing firms to veto new applications on the mere assertion that licensing a new operator will hurt their bottom line.
Of course it will. That's the idea. If some hypothetical state or county "Hamburger Services Authority" had allowed McDonald's to veto the licensing of any fast-food operator whose presence might damage the McDonald's bottom line, what are the chances this valley would ever have seen its first Burger King, Wendy's, or Jack-in-the-Box?
If Las Vegas ended up with "too many taxis," so what? W clearly have "too many" pizza places, since new ones keep opening and closing all the time. But somehow, customers keep the best ones in business, and the resulting competition guarantees us that those who try to charge too much for a lesser product will soon bite the dust.
Besides which, if members of the Nevada Transportation Services Authority -- or Deputy Attorney General Brent Michaels, for that matter -- think this valley has "too many" taxi cabs, let them emerge from any restaurant more than three miles from the Strip at 9 p.m. next Saturday night, find their cars won't start, and start telephoning the dispatchers of this city's major taxi and limo firms. Assuming they don't give up and walk home after 10 minutes of listening to "music on hold," when they finally do reach a dispatcher and report they need a cab for the two-mile run back home, what do you suppose they'll be told?
Unless they lie outright, claiming to represent a backfield full of big-spending bachelors out for a night's tour of the city's more brightly-lit girlie attractions, they'll be told, "No way."
Try it.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 1475 Terminal Way, Suite E for Easy, Reno, NV 89502. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224, or via web site www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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