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If so, we should get over it. In the first place, some licence-holders did pay that for the privilege of charging us sky-high taxi fees. Any new system involving free entry will drive the value of their licence to zero. The effect would be akin to losing your house to a fire — without fire insurance. We presumably don’t want policies to have the same effect on people as mad arsonists would.

True, nobody forced anyone to spend so much on a taxi licence. Moreover, some licence-holders may have got theirs free when they were handed out at a price of zero in the 1970s, though presumably most such people sold out long ago at a nice profit. And, of course, licensees’ motives were far from pure. The reason the licences were so valuable was that they permitted their holders to legally bilk us taxi users with the well-above-market prices that taxi regulators enforced and that Uber is so effectively undermining.

That they were, wanted to be, and maybe even enjoyed being legal monopolists doesn’t change the fact, however, that many licence-holders will suffer a big capital loss when competition arrives. As good human beings, we may well sympathize with them for that, even as we free ourselves from their extortive prices. But even if we don’t bubble over with fellow feeling for them — they never did for us, as we paid their high prices year after year — we should recognize the political reality that they have leverage over the deregulation.

They may exercise it in ham-handed ways by blocking traffic, as they did in Montreal Wednesday and apparently plan to do in Toronto during the NBA’s All-Star weekend, or by mawkishly exaggerating their distress. One sign seen during Montreal drivers’ protests this week was “Je suis taxi,” a cringe-inducing attempt to establish equivalency between service providers protecting their privileged economic status and innocent satirists gunned down by terrorists. Every self-proclaimed victim is a “je suis” these days. Personally, je suis fed up with all theje suises.

The fact remains, however, that they do have leverage and seem willing to exercise it. Compensation may not persuade them they’re being treated fairly. But it may well persuade sympathizers in the general public that deregulation is being done fairly. Politically, that may prove crucial.

Australians seem to have figured out that open competition should be the norm in all industries and that if compensation helps make that happen, then temporary taxes to finance it are an acceptable vehicle. What’s wrong with us that we can’t figure that out, too?