A short time ago My wife and I returned from Florida. Those who have done any flying recently will know that the trend towards making the customer do everything himself has extended in spades to airlines.
You check yourself in. You pay $25 per checked-in bag, yourself. You take the bag sticker and you attach it to your bag – yourself. Then you pick up your checked and paid-for bag and put it on the moving luggage track, planeward bound. No staff are involved except to check that you have paid the $25.
All this and the cost of jet fuel has collapsed and the staffing levels have probably halved. Notwithstanding this, airfares are higher and, of course, service is worse. They do give you a bag of little biscuits and a free(!) soft drink, but whole corporate Board meetings are devoted to discussing whether this piece of unwonted generosity should be scrapped in view of the current direction of the company’s shares.
The most important department under an Epicurean government, after a group of terriers who would recover every dollar of tax hidden by tax dodgers, would be a hugely beefed up Anti- Trust Department, charged with breaking up all these monopolies – because that is what the national airlines have become – effectively five huge airlines who have carved up the routes to avoid competition, and all with the blessing of the Federal Aviation Authority.
The scandal is that the FAA seems to be there to facilitate and assist the airlines. When the airlines wanted flightpath into our local airport was changed to come over our heavily residential, neighbourhood, the FAA let it happen without consulting the taxpayers , and had the gall to claim that we should have protested at the time (when no one had any idea that a change had been made!) This is from a Democrat Administration. Now the fights start at 5am and finish at about 11 p.m. You can’t sit out in your garden and hold an audible conversation. President Obama probably knows nothing about this, but you have to wonder what the bureaucrats think they are there for. Clearly not for ordinary citizens.
The combination of monopolies and “regulatory capture” is doing us in. Now it is simply heroic when an organization does what it’s actually created to do. How can citizens prevent the regulators from being corrupted by the regulated?