Taxicab blues....

Jeff Jacoby is all exercised about the plethora of "soviet style" regulations imposed on taxi cabs by the city of Boston.
Personally this is wretched rhetorical excess, there is room for reasoned debate over taxi regulation in Suffolk County sans recourse to the horrors of the Kolyma Goldmines or the planning failures of the Zond moon landing program.
But then this IS Jeff Jacoby we are talking about, staving off reasoned debate via gruesome similes is his very meat.
Frankly taxicab regulation is an issue dear to the overclass and only the overclass.
When is the last time a temp or a library assistant at the BPL took a cab anywhere?
For that fact, most average Americans take a taxi under the most dire circumstances possible usually involving life or death.
I am not sure I've taken a taxi anywhere in Boston for over a decade now.
What ordinary person can afford those prices?
If you are a columnist for the Boston Globe it is no doubt different, taxis and the status and convenience they confer are a part of your elite milieu.
And if you are a conservative columnist with a heavy schedule to keep, I'm sure they are simply vital.
The rest of us, the normal peeps are stuck on the Longfellow bridge waiting for the Red Line to stop slamming the doors and get on with our ride while Jeff goes whizzing by in a cab bitching and moaning about "statism".