Washington, D.C.’s cab cartel and local government have fought popular Uber car service harder than in almost anyother city, repeatedly putting Uber through the regulatory wringer to maintain a monopoly for cab drivers who yell at you and won’t accept anything but cash. The reason they’re putting up such a fight is precisely because they are so very bad. With precious few exceptions, there’s no way they can compete with a service that actually serves its customers.

How bad are they? They kidnap people instead of letting them pay with a credit card, as the law requires them to do:

A taxi driver locked the daughter of a D.C. Council member in his car and drove her away from her home after a late-night dispute over an inoperable credit card machine in an incident that the council member said Wednesday “meets the definition of kidnapping.”

The November incident, in which police declined to arrest the driver, came to light Wednesday in a taxi cab commission oversight hearing chaired by Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3).

According to a police report retained by Cheh, her 26-year-old daughter arrived in a cab at her Cleveland Park home after midnight early in November. She attempted to pay the fare with two different credit cards. After both were declined, she stated that she would pay cash but would also “report [the driver] to the taxi cab commission because . . . the credit card machine was not working properly.”

At that point, the driver locked the doors and drove several blocks to Connecticut Avenue and called 911 to report that he had a passenger refusing to pay her fare. Cheh’s daughter, who is also an attorney, filed a police report and stated that she had been “taken against her will,” according to the report.

This does not surprise me at all.

Long live Uber and the object lesson it gives this town of big-government liberals in the abuses government-sanctioned cartels will perpetrate to keep their positions, and the liberation from crappy service the free market can bring. They’re all literally “limousine liberals” now, and they’re better for it. Now, to get them to take this lesson and apply it to other areas of life and the economy.