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Comment by thrance | Hacker News Reader

If we let the free market do its work, there'd be no airlines. Jet fuel is heavily subsidized, the State injects massive amounts of money into airports and plane manufacturers, etc.

Honestly, with the looming climate crisis, we should probably just let them fail one by one and let alternatives (who can actually be profitable) take off.

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In a free market, every working citizen could easily afford more expensive airline tickets, since they could keep their entire income with no taxes deducted.

That's a really cute idealized world, but it wouldn't work in practice. The structure of free-market capitalism all but precludes it.

The poster I replied to was already in the territory of idealized worlds. You can't just look at one side without looking at the other.

> every working citizen could easily afford more expensive airline tickets

You mean every laboring slave.

No free market means corporations are allowed to engage in slavery, chattel or otherwise. Let's be honest about what a free market actually is. Factory towns, lifetime debt bondage.

Ah yes, thank you for correcting me. That is exactly what I meant.

I've yet to hear a successful true free market argument of why slavery won't happen, or monopoly.

You're certainly right. I haven't thought about it that way before, there's no argument that holds up. Of course.

Sure they would. And some noble souls would pave the roads and build schools, act as firefighters... Like they did in Grafton.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project#Free_Town_P...

But the air travel system (airports/atc/etc) would not exist, because taxes were needed to bootstrap it.

Modern governments have their fingers involved everywhere. That doesn't mean that nothing would exist and nobody would survive if things were different.

You could just as well say that if it weren't for private investors nothing and nobody would exist, because they also have their fingers involved everywhere.

But the post I'm replying to is a scenario of a different world. We're not discussing how things actually are and how things actually happened.

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