In this era, it was commonplace to fly with only a few passengers aboard. Full flights were rare. Immediately after deregulation, the flights became routinely full.
I.e. the airlines became far more efficient and served the flying public much better.
the benefits to society is in terms of reduced fuel consumption, only because that’s directly aligned with the airline’s profits.
> the benefits to society is in terms of reduced fuel consumption, only because that’s directly aligned with the airline’s profits
Companies don't burn fuel for fun. The fuel is about 40% of the cost of your ticket. Increased fuel efficiency is the major driver of new airline designs.
FTA: "Worse still, without mandated service, cities and regions across the country have lost commercial air service"
It sounds like planes stopped being directed to where customers were and no longer fly to where they wanted to go in many instances. This is not a win for the consumer.
Then there is gonna be a gold rush of airline startups leading to amazing innovation, offers and low prices for consumers. Unless your government intervenes and regulates the market into a monopoly of incumbents, of course.
> Corporations are authoritarian, tyrannical institutions
Corporations are at the mercy of their consumers and investors. They get toppled every day. Remember Nokia? Motorola? IBM? Zoom? Heck even Intel lately?
is not at all the same thing as having a choice.
Yes, because nobody wants to run a business at a loss.
> It sounds like planes stopped being directed to where customers were
You're assuming the airlines are stupid. The fact that the airplanes were often nearly empty under regulation and nearly always full when unregulated is pretty strong evidence they were serving a far larger number of customers.
Which is why some important services (like the post office) shouldn't be run as businesses.
> The fact that the airplanes were often nearly empty under regulation and nearly always full when unregulated is pretty strong evidence they were serving a far larger number of customers.
They are serving a far larger number of customers in areas A and B while now serving zero customers in areas C D E F and G. It might be far better if fewer people in areas A and B could fly if it meant that more people in the other areas could.
Airlines aren't stupid they are just doing everything they can to deliver the least to the public while charging the most they can extract from the public. Also, it isn't as if the changes airlines made to fill up seats couldn't have happened under regulation, or even that they never would have.
> they are just doing everything they can to deliver the least to the public while charging the most they can extract from the public
If you are sure they are gouging and making excessive profits, buy stock in the airlines and get your share.
> it isn't as if the changes airlines made to fill up seats couldn't have happened under regulation, or even that they never would have
They had 40 years to fix it and never did. The airlines fixed it overnight.
Yeah, I suggesting that at the very least it could be, if it means more Americans have access to an airport and airlines served a larger percentage of the country as opposed to only the areas that generated the most profit for them.
> If you are sure they are gouging and making excessive profits, buy stock in the airlines and get your share.
This wouldn't be the worst time. They suffered during the worst of the pandemic but are profitable this year. They'll be looking to claw back the profits they missed too so I expect prices and fees to continue to soar.
This exact kind of logic was why, during communism here in Eastern Europe, we couldn’t find anything in stores: the government in its infinite wisdom was deciding who should build what and how much. Because the greedy companies would’ve built only whatever was profitable for them.
The predictable end-result? We were starving looking at empty shelves, while greedy capitalists in western countries were spoiling the consumers for choice.
Why would it mean that? It obviously didn’t work that way before deregulation and afterwards air travel became much more accessible to more people
How "might" it be "far better" to the public at large for airlines to serve fewer people at a higher cost?
> Airlines aren't stupid they are just doing everything they can to deliver the least to the public while charging the most they can extract from the public.
If they did as you suggest, they'd be demonstrably and measurably delivering FAR less to the public while charging even more money. You're arguing in both directions!
For the same kinds of reasons it's better for the post office to serve people in remote areas at higher cost as opposed to leaving them without service and cut off. The same reasons why it's better for more Americans to have access to broadband, not just the Americans who live in the areas that would make ISPs the most profit. It can be worth it to spend more money when it means providing access to important services to more Americans vs a select few.
> If they did as you suggest, they'd be demonstrably and measurably delivering FAR less to the public while charging even more money.
Which is exactly the case. They ARE delivering less. Less access by only providing service to the locations which give them the most profit. Less leg room so that they can cram more people into every flight. Less service by cutting staff. Giving passengers fewer options/less choice. Allowing less baggage. Flights are increasingly canceled and delayed. Customer satisfaction gets lower and lower all the time. They are giving us less.
They are also charging more and more. Airline tickets are skyrocketing, outpacing inflation. Even as the service airlines provide keeps getting worse and worse, the prices keep getting higher, and higher but there are also the endless bullshit fees for everything they can think of (https://www.elliott.org/on-travel/hidden-airline-fees-are-ev...) which are often hidden.
They are serving far more people at far lower ticket prices than when they were regulated. I.e. deregulation enabled them to put the planes where the people are.
Do you know how much it costs to fly a jetliner? Why does it make sense to you that a 767 should fly into a rural airport to pick up 3 passengers?
These examples are not demonstrative of what you are arguing. If you were to instead propose "closing half of all UPS stores in densely populated cities and reallocating them to rural environments" it would be an apt comparison, and equally illogical.
There is an argument to be had (maybe) about expanded airline access for less populated geos. There is only an asinine argument to be had about doing that at the cost of reduced service for major population centers.
Congress very specifically, by design, does NOT represent the will of the people. It represents the will of land area. Even the part that was originally supposed to be representative of population no longer is due to shenanigans, and also over-represents land instead of people. We probably shouldn’t get into the pros and cons of this system here, but I did want to correct your fundamental misunderstanding.
Check out the 5 year chart of Delta stock. It's gone from $60 to $38. I'm wondering what happened to all that profit you alleged.
https://www.transportation.gov/policy/aviation-policy/small-...
So you have an industry that periodically starts a fare war that requires federal bailouts.
The airline would go bankrupt, the shareholders would lose their investment, the bondholders would own the new corp, and perhaps the aircraft fleet would get a new livery.
American airline tickets contain a 7.5% excise tax, $5.60 per-trip September 11th fee and another excise tax of $4 per flight segment. (That's in addition to the usual sales, payroll and corporate taxes.) Taking just the former, I'm curious what the net give/take ratio is. Because it might be argued that we run our airlines as an indirect tax on high earners to fund the jobs program that is the TSA.
Yeah, that’s the magic of capitalism. You make society more efficient and get paid for that.
You say that being crammed into planes isn’t a benefit. But the opportunity costs should be taken into account. Every resource not spent on airlines is a resource spent on something else.
capitalism can also be very harmful and inefficient for society. companies draining aquifers and producing tons of disposable plastic bottles to sell people that water for profits is a net negative for modern society. that money should go towards improving our water infrastructure so no one feels that their water is unclean. so much plastic pollution is the result of capitalism too.
It certainly was magical after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe to be able to visit capitalist countries and wonder at the shelves full of products and the countless affordable offers.
Starving under communism on the other hand was not magical at all. We were told incessantly that we were making the world a better place, improving the society unlike the evil capitalism that was destroying everything - but we were starving.
Funny enough the capitalist countries looked better and were less polluted too. Turns out rich societies tend to care more about the environment and invest accordingly too.
you get paid for giving people what they want, not necessarily making society more efficient. It's more profitable to sell a car to everyone than it is to sell them bicycles, even if the latter is "more efficient" in terms of space, mineral and fossil fuel resource usage, pollution, health of users...
and God forbid you just tell people to walk.
I used to work at H&M - getting low quality disposable clothing from Bangladesh isn't "more efficient" then buying a sewing machine and making your own clothing, at least not if you consider transport or environmental costs. But people are lazy, and they're easily bored, and they like "new" looking things, so H&M keeps on selling clothes.
I guess basically what I'm getting at is tragedy of the commons. You let people mindlessly pursue their short term interests, it doesn't necessarily lead to efficient behavior at the aggregate level.
Arguably what has made society more efficient, at least for automobiles, has not been "capitalism", but government regulation - safety, environmental, and cutting down on drunk driving. If you consider "dying en route" to be "inefficient", then you'd agree that while just building nicer looking cars with bigger tailfins to please the market didn't really do much to reduce this inefficiency, government mandating bumpers and seatbelts and airbags did.
But why stop there?! Cultivate your own cotton, make your own cloth. Mine and smelt your own iron. Cut the woods and build your tools, then build your sewing needles from scratch.
Funny enough during communism here it was close to impossible to find modern sewing machines - they were the product of the evil capitalist countries, of course. So the old foot-operated Singers were selling at quite the premium.
And yes, we did walk quite a lot - car production and gas distribution in a planned economy meant tens of years on waiting lists.
It might not be more efficient environmentally but it’s certainly more efficient economically (from the perspective of consumers in rich countries)