captain cab wrote:
Skull wrote:
Most markets are regulated to certain extent, but it's not supposed to work against the interests of potential investors. A free market mechanism works by allowing the market to find its own level. Where do you think plate "values" come from if not the artificial scarcity of plates? And it's that very same scarcity that makes the streets less safe for women to walk...
No one is claiming that rapists or perverts will simply disappear but putting more cops on the beat in order to keep taxi numbers down, is simply ridiculous.
The council is playing politics with peoples lives. It should be free market first and then policing.

Therefore there is no such thing as a free market - Edinburgh in particular has not got a 'free taxi market' - its taxi fares are governed - its taxi vehicle choice is governed - it has restrictions on driver standards - so why not restrictions on vehicle numbers?
I dont accept what you say in respect of
A free market mechanism works by allowing the market to find its own level because the market itself is already manipulated - by all manner of differing things including what I state above.
The values argument is neither here nor there unless people are wanting to leave or enter - the values certainly have nothing to do with rape crime.
You claim the council are playing politics by controlling numbers - yet you are not so daft not to recognise that deregulation is also playing politics. Governments and politicians are always involved with the 'free market' as are those who cite the 'free market' .
CC, the “economic crash” of 2008 never really happened due to the market not being allowed to crash/reset itself after the bubble burst. All governments did was to re-inflate the bubble by robbing the public through “austerity” measures. Four years on and nothing has been resolved, and now we are facing a market reset/crash. The likes of which the world has never seen before.
A free market is supposed to create conditions whereby the market is in a continual state of reset and free from government manipulation. And that's how we got in this mess in the first place. The Government did away with the Gold standard and created a fiat currency model based on nothing but debt and simply kept pumping money into the system.
What you are witnessing now is a pump and dumb scheme, whereby Governments keep re-inflating the market until the system crashes. And we are forced to return to a gold standard for printing money.
If the market is not allowed to work as a free market mechanism should, sooner or latter there's a major crash.
So yes, there is a free market mechanism that sets a market rate, it's just not being allowed to work.
I am sure you recognise the similarities with the taxi/ph trade. Oh and there's a big difference between regulation and manipulation.
As for your rape argument, what we are talking about is minimising the risk of rape and nothing else.