Originally Posted by gloopy

I'm not against entrepreneurship, nor do I favor reregultion (although we're pretty well "regulated" as it is).

The problem is how the crony (non) capitalist system is set up. The government is supposed to vett all start ups for viability, yet the government blindly rubber stamps all of them while over 95% of them fail. But they are rubber stamped so the politicos can provide low fares to the masses, labor and industry stability be dammed.

On the other side of the equation, when a carrier should by all rights go away, they are bailed out while at the same time taking massive cuts that end up dragging everyone else down. Look at USAir 10 years ago. Had they liquidated, the other airlines wouldn't have furloughed many if at all and wouldn't have had nearly the leverage against labor so the cuts taken would have drastically less. Add in no VX, no SkyBus, no IndyAir and no JetBlue, and the remaining airlines would have been hiring like crazy and been more than able to fend off AirTran and Southwest, the latter of which wasn't nearly as much of a problem but they all still grew as fast as possible replacing legacy jobs with their super junior jobs.

Fast forward to today and USAir captains make less than many FO's so they didn't benefit in the long run either, but management sure did. Now we are agressively subsidizing foreign airlines to the tune of 5 million per plane per year and celebrating their discriminatory employment practices that would get any US company SWAT raided by machine gunners and shut down over night.

We need to stop allowing start ups at anywhere near the threshold we do. That doesn't require new laws but upholding ones we already have. The DOT should never rubber stamp all these idiotic experiments. Standing by for People's Express and SkyBus II and others in the coming years as well as the endless expansion of existing ponzh scheme ULCCs that have to live in growth mode. Then there's the foreign EGO airlines that we subsidize while at the same time subsidizing their nations by borrowing from them to defend them which devalues our currency so we have to keep sending them even more of our wealth to do so.

We need to end those subsidies and allow failing companies to fail. The amount of churn caused by the free market would be significantly less than the churn created by redundant layers of failed policy and misguided politics.