I recently read an article about New York medallions and their concomitant financing. Basically, rich people buy a medallion in an auction with money borrowed from medallion financing banks (really, banks just to finance these medallions), and then lease out the medallion. For the few drivers that actually own their medallion, it's the most valuable thing they own.

It's a strange perversion of capitalism. In the standard case the owner of capital resources pays people to add value to raw materials and so on.

But in this case, the owner of the capital was the driver. Then the drivers got together and convinced the city to adopt a law which made it much more difficult to use capital which a lot of people own (a car) in order to make it more profitable for themselves. But now it's become so expensive to get into that club of 'allowed' operators that being a capital owner still forces you to borrow against years of earnings just to use that capital legally and the car owners are forced to borrow for years on something that they won't own. They've created an entirely new capital in order to serve themselves as drivers, but incidentally turned themselves into indentured servants to the medallion cost.