Taxi/cab drivers are looking for city officials to put a choke-hold on Uber, while city officials have a choke-hold on cab drivers with regulations, fees, penalties, taxes, and red tape.
It doesn’t appear that city officials embrace the concept of a free-market enterprise system, allowing for business to flourish when the first thing they think of doing is adding more and more regulations.
Watch and listen as taxi/cab driver George Brunk states his case to the Naperville city council:
I get it. It’s not easy for taxi/cab drivers to compete against Uber, but that doesn’t mean the city council should create more obstacles for Uber. On the contrary, if city officials want to help cab drivers, why not lessen the over-reach of regulations, fees, taxes, and red tape the city loads onto the shoulders of cab companies. In other words, don’t make it more difficult for a business to flourish, make it easier.
Naperville city officials need to get out of the business of playing favoritism with free-market enterprise. If Jewel wants to stop Mariano’s from encroaching on their business, will they lobby the city council for favoritism. Will Starbucks Coffee want city officials to put the squeeze on Naperville’s downtown retail tea store by taxing the tea sold. How good that work in 1773.
When I was young, and dirt was new, I had a supervisor tell me that the job of the employee was to make the boss look good by exceeding expectations and getting the job done right, and it was the job of the boss to remove obstacles that the employee might encounter while getting the job done right. It made sense then, and it makes sense now.
City officials don’t need to make things more difficult for residents and business, they need to make it easier and more efficient. By removing those obstacles, it makes the city and city officials look better and more inviting.
Additionally, taxi/cab drivers need to adapt and innovate, or ‘perish’ as the stage coach did when the railroad (Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy) came through Naperville in 1864. Uber won’t be stopped. As former councilman Bob Fieseler said, “Uber is very well-staffed and lawyered-up to pursue this free-market enterprise.” Naperville was able to divert the Galena and Chicago Union railroad in 1851 to Wheaton, but ultimately in 1864 the railroad was accepted in Naperville, and the rest is history.
As for the stagecoach industry, it perished in 1915.
