Solving the Airline Crisis
First off I love the fact that it is still called a "crisis". This has been going on for years without solution, it isn't even building, it is just holding steady. It is a problem. It could even be called a huge major problem. But it isn't a crisis. When I think crisis, I am thinking of raw stump hemorrhaging blood. The airline thing is a stump certainly, but its not a raw gaping wound with the patient dying on the table.
Ok. Maybe it is. Lets go with the patient on the table analogy. The airlines are certainly hemorrhaging money. But it really isn't their money that is hemorrhaging. If you took a person with their hand ripped off hemorrhaging blood to the emergency room the first thing they would do is stop the bleeding. Then they would add more blood to keep the patient alive, and if they couldn't carefully sew the hand back on, they would fix the stump so it wouldn't be open raw and bleeding anymore.
So the man with the ripped off hand is the airlines, and the emergency room is congress. What congress is doing is going "Oh my gosh! That man is bleeding to death! Quick add more blood! They aren't trying to stop the bleeding at all, they are just adding blood for the patient to squirt out on the floor. Maybe congress thinks that the hand will magically just grow back. Maybe they are so freaked out by the stump they refuse to acknowledge it. Either way, how many billion dollars a year end up squirted out of the stump onto the floor?
Yes, that analogy is probably not for the squeemish. Lets make a new one.
Darwinism says that in a place with limited food resources only the strongest most able to adapt animal will survive. Most of the dinosaurs failed to make it because they couldn't adapt to a cooling environment and limited food resources. The whooly mamoth who evolved and thrived in the frozen world, didn't make it when the world thawed out. Thunderdome, two men enter, one man leaves. It is odd but man has a funny habbit of trying to pull a fast one on the natural order of things by stubbornly refusing to let the weak ones die off. This same habbit has manifested itself where airlines are concerned.
Walmart, Dell, Google, Microsoft, giants in their respective fields became giants because they adapted quickly and crushed their competition. So now they make gobs of money offering products and services on the cheap. Any competition they might have pales before their trememdous bottom line might.
ATA, Delta, Southwest, American Eagle, American West, Continental, Northwest, Southwest, United, US Airways, these are only the major airlines in America. There are a 177 other smaller carriers. That might count a few air freight compainies, when I got my list of the major carriers they included, UPS, and Fedex. If darwinism were just allowed to take place here in a few short years you would have a handful of carriers, and one major player. The major player wouldn't be that expencive because the volume of tickets they are selling would keep the cost down just like shopping at Walmart. Best of all this major player would be solvent all by themselves and wouldn't have to be bailed out by the federal government every few years like is taking place now.
You know when I woke up to NPR this morning they didn't say "airlines going bankrupt", they said, "airlines going bankrupt again". How can anyone expect that many competitors to survive and thrive with such a small number of passengers to go between them. They do what they have to, they try to undercut their competition, and there is so much competition that they end up operating at a loss. But that's ok, because when the money runs out they can just go to Uncle Sam and have their bank accounts refilled again. (blood transfusion if you like the first analogy)
Let the bankrupt airlines die. Let the strongest and most able to adapt survive and prosper.
Or, if you are bent another way, you can just let the government take over the airlines completely and run it like the post office. (For those of you who had a stroke at that last sentence, I drink to your memories.)
