Local governments routinely set up taxi cartels, limiting the number of cabs in order to boost profits of (and campaign contributions from) owners. As George Will explains in the Washington Post, one plucky immigrant, with help from the Institute for Justice, has managed to break the cartel in Minneapolis. In response, the cartel is claiming that the loss of their entitlement to monopoly profits is akin to a regulatory taking. Will concludes by stating it would be a good idea if the people who think that they have a right to use government coercion to obtain unearned wealth would leave the country as entrepreneurial immigrants arrive:

Paucar, 37, embodies the best qualities of American immigrants. He is a splendidly self-sufficient entrepreneur. And he is wielding American principles against some Americans who, in their decadent addiction to government assistance, are trying to litigate themselves to prosperity at the expense of Paucar and the public. …In 1937, New York City, full of liberalism’s itch to regulate everything, knew, just knew, how many taxicab permits there should be. For 70 years the number (about 12,000) has not been significantly changed, so rising prices have been powerless to create new suppliers of taxi services. Under this government-created scarcity, a permit (“medallion”) now costs about $500,000. Most people wealthy enough to buy medallions do not drive cabs, any more than plantation owners picked cotton. They lease their medallions at exorbitant rates to people like Paucar who drive, often for less than $15 an hour, for long days. … Paucar moved… Unfortunately, Minnesota has a “progressive,” meaning statist, tradition that can impede the progress of people like Paucar … 343 taxis were permitted. He wanted to launch a fleet of 15. That would have required him to find 15 incumbent license-holders willing to sell their licenses for up to $25,000 apiece. …[He] helped persuade the City Council members, liberals all (12 members of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, one member of the Green Party), to vote to allow 45 new cabs per year until 2010, at which point the cap will disappear. In response, the cartel is asking a federal court to say the cartel’s constitutional rights have been violated. It says the cap — a barrier to entry into the taxi business — constituted an entitlement to profits that now are being “taken” by government action. …By challenging his adopted country to honor its principles of economic liberty and limited government, Paucar, assisted by the local chapter of the libertarian Institute for Justice, is giving a timely demonstration of this fact: Some immigrants, with their acute understanding of why America beckons, refresh our national vigor. It would be wonderful if every time someone like Paucar comes to America, a native-born American rent-seeker who has been corrupted by today’s entitlement mentality would leave.