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The point of letting cars out for hire is not to set their drivers up with pensions, but to get people from point A to point B as quickly, safely and cheaply as possible.

In Johannesburg, South Africa, metered drivers staged an illegal demonstration in front of the company’s offices. In Hong Kong, more than 100 taxi drivers protested the company’s smartphone-based ride-share app, demanding greater regulation from local government. And indeed, protests — and legal proceedings — have been launched in cities across Canada: not only in Toronto, but in Ottawa, Montreal and in Vancouver, where Uber is banned outright, at least for the moment.

The impetus for these actions is the same everywhere: loss of wages and jobs by taxi drivers previously protected from competition. In a sense this is understandable. Taxi companies in Toronto and other Canadian cities are subject to a raft of regulations from which Uber is exempt. Taxi drivers, for their part, have typically shelled out vast amounts for one of the limited supply of official taxi plates, an expense Uber drivers are spared.

So hard feelings are, as we say, understandable — in a sense. It is the same sense in which dairy farmers are entitled to feel aggrieved at the loss of supply management — that is, if the consumer interest is ignored altogether. The price of the taxi plate, like the price of dairy quota, is a measure of how much consumers are being overcharged thanks to restrictions on competition: the premium gets capitalized into the quota. Taxi companies may complain of the extra regulatory burden they face, but in truth the same regulations have long served to insulate them from competition.