| Warning: Don't let the beginning of this diary fool you. It's actually about hegemony & the liberal vs. conservative view of "freedom".
Demos has a new report out, Flying Blind: Airline Deregulation Reconsidered, and what do you know? Surpise! Surprise! Deregulation doesn't work for the airline industry either!
While the report focuses attention on the current sorry state of the airline industry, and its underlying structural problems that lie behind the recent rash of airline crashes and near-misses such as the crash of the Continental/Colgan flight to Buffalo, it traces current conditions back to the decision, 30 years ago, to deregulate the airline industry.
How's this for an astonishing fact: Since 2000, U.S. airlines have reported net losses of more than $33 billion--almost twice their accumulated profits from 1938 to 1999!
Of course, the trump card for the deregulators is the claim of low fares, and broad affordability, but the executive summary notes:
[Economist Alfred] Kahn [the "father of airline deregulation"] and others have taken refuge in the argument that deregulation has produced lower airfares and wider access to air travel. The Demos report concludes that even this benefit is widely overstated. "While the price of flying has come down over the past thirty years," the report notes, "it decreased at a comparable rate from the 1940s through the 1960s. In any event, low airfares are as much a problem as an achievement if they leave an industry without the resources to maintain service standards and make crucial investments in equipment, technology, and human capital."
If anything this understates the case. If deregulation has resulted in net industry losses, those fare reductions were paid for by the airlines creditors! What kind of a business model is that? Considering the amount of technological innovation, and the increased traffic volume, it seems altogether possible that fares would have fallen more without deregulation! Heck, the food might even have been edible!
This is only one industry, but the story's the same everywhere you look: the deregulation mania has been a disaster for America. Sure, stupid regulations can be a pain in the ass. But that's about stupidity, not regulation per se.
This is an excellent report, but we need to build on this and other detailed reporting on specific failures of de-regulation to develop a new narrative stressing the positive value of smart, far-sighted regulation in crafting systems that work for everyone. If freedom means anything, it's not just freedom from arbitrary restraints, it's freedom to do things of one's own choosing, and the capacity to do things depends in part on soundly-functioning systems, from cars that won't blow up to government that won't get you killed for reasons they lie to you about. That's why smart regulations expand our freedom, rather than restricting it.
A few juicy tidbits from the report on the flip--along with some broader thoughts on history, transportation and freedom. |
First, as promised, the tidbits:
STATISTICAL HIGHLIGHTS:
- Out of roughly 150 low-cost airlines founded since 1978, fewer than a dozen are still operating; they account for only about 10 percent of current airline capacity.
- Before deregulation, there were 11 major trunkline carriers; today, the country has six large mainline carriers-American, United, Delta, Continental, US Airways, and Southwest. The first three, along with their regional partners, control two-thirds of domestic air travel.
- More than 100,000 pilots, mechanics, flight attendants, ticket agents, cargo handlers, and other airline workers who lost their jobs since 2001.
- The number of people on the payroll of the legacy airlines dropped 26 percent between 1998 and 2006.
- DOT Data for US Airways, United, Delta, American and Northwest show labor costs falling by nearly a third, on average, between the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2006.
- According to the U.S. DOT, 2008 total baggage-fee charges by U.S Airlines came to more than $1.1 billion-a figure that is expected to triple by 2010.
- In 2007, more than a quarter of all flights were delayed, accounting for 112 million lost passenger hours.
- More than 100 communities have lost air service over the past decade.
And now, some recommendations:
The report makes clear an urgent need for Congress and the relevant executive agencies to make a thorough-going study of the industry's troubles. The authors recommend creation of a federal task force to examine the industry's problems and propose solutions. Specifically, they call on the task force to:
- Develop a plan to moderate the booms and busts and build a more stable domestic airline industry. Here, the remedies could include capital-reserve requirements and bankruptcy reform.
- Expedite (and establish stable financing for) a modernized Air Traffic Control (ATC) network.
- Develop coordinated national and regional transportation plans, with provision for high speed rail networks to eliminate the need for excessive short-haul air traffic.
- Devise a code of customer service that would, among other things, protect passengers from wildly varying prices and establish more uniform procedures for ensuring remuneration and rebooking when a flight is delayed or cancelled.
- Promote more equitable and stable labor practices and return to the pre-deregulation practice of pattern bargaining in order to discourage airline competition based on low wages and high-pressure working conditions.
- Insist on uniform airline safety standards, including mechanic credentials and oversight of maintenance facilities.
- Develop new regulations to curtail airline consolidation and promote genuine competition where feasible, while, at the same time, cracking down on monopoly pricing and the other abuses of concentration on routes that are incapable of supporting more than one or two carriers.
Get that?
- Develop coordinated national and regional transportation plans, with provision for high speed rail networks to eliminate the need for excessive short-haul air traffic.
Another federal program to give Americans more freedom! More choices! More freedom of movement! More opportunity!
First interstate commerce. Then the canals. Then the railroads. Then the highways. Then air travel. Then the interstate. Now high-speed rail. Over and over and over again, the federal government has played a vital role in promoting American's freedom of movement, which is one of the fundamental foundations on which all others freedoms draw.
It's time we started crafting narratives like that, and repeating them over and over and over again. Not just because they're true--which they are--but because knowing the truth about what makes us more free helps us continue to make ourselves more free.
A Broader View on Freedom & Transportation
In his book, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, George Lakoff explains that the concept of freedom is rooted in the bodily experience of physical freedom to move, that liberals and conservative flesh out the concept of freedom in different ways, making freedom a deeply contested idea, that traditionally the liberal idea of freedom has predominated, but that conservatives have harped on it incessantly for the past several decades as part of their struggle for political dominance. Lakoff argues that liberals and progressives need to reclaim the concept of freedom as their own, articulating why their concept is the better one.
It's only natural that transportation issues--which also involve freedom of movement--should be one arena in which liberals and progressives take up Lakoff's advice. Adding a bit of social history to Lakoff's mix, it helps to consider the following: Conservatives argue from the position of inherited, unearned privilege and power. From this point of view--that of the pre-modern feudal aristocracy--democracy itself is a theft of their "freedom", the freedom to do whatever they damn well please, whoever gets hurt, or even killed in the process. Rule of law generally, and democracy in particular restricts their "freedom", which they think of primarily in terms described as "negative liberty"--freedom from restraints. But liberals and progressive argue from the position of commoners, and for commoners, the rule of law generally, and democracy in particular expands their freedom, which they think of primarily in term of described as "positive liberty"--freedom to engage in pursuing their hopes and dreams.
Naturally, freedom includes both freedom from and freedom to. The question is, which of these two concerns predominates over the other? Hardline conservatives go so far as to claim that freedom to doesn't exist. Liberals and progressives, OTOH, tend to see freedom from as a component of freedom to. For example, freedom from government coercion and restrictions embodied in the First Amendment protect ones freedom to speak, assemble and worship as one pleases. The value of the former is entirely dependent on the value of the later. It is freedom to that is essential. Freedom from is merely a means to an end--vitally important in real life, to be sure, but philosophically derivative.
Transportation issues are one way of making the abstract, philosophical priority of freedom to quite concrete. Generally speaking, people travel much more because of positive liberty (the desire to go somewhere), rather than negative liberty (the desire simply to escape). Even the desire to escape--to "get away from it all"--is usually informed by at least some notion of where one wants to go, even if it's as vague as "out west" or "hiking the Appalachian Trail" Argentina.
More importantly, people take it for granted that getting where you are going is more important than the rules and regulations one must have in order to get there. The "rules of the road" are generally accepted as the, well, "rules of the road". And this is precisely the liberal/progressive idea of freedom in a nutshell.
The issues of airline regulation, with which this diary began, are but an expanded version of the "rules of the road". The careless dismantling of those rules and the price we've paid for that failed experiment are an object lesson of the wrongheadedness of the conservative view of freedom. "Freedom from" is not the be-all, end-all and cure-all. Quite the opposite, it only makes sense in service to "freedom to." The more deeply we think and talk about the nature and history of transportation, the more conscious we become of the essential logic of the liberal/progressive view of freedom.
And that's a very big thing, indeed.
We also much better understand why America is an essentially liberal/progressive country based on liberal/progressive values and ideas. After all, we are a land of immigrants, a land of people who traveled here to live out their dreams, and bequeath greater freedom to their children.
And that, perhaps, is even bigger. It's high time we stopped letting conservatives pretend that they're the real Americans. They're not. We are. But they can become real Americans. If only they'll take off their imaginary crowns, and join the rest of us commoners, in the real world of our common dreams. |
