WSJ – ‘Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines?’

Yesterday, in Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines? WSJ columnist Holman Jenkins discussed the recent antitrust efforts by the Obama administration to disrupt the use of cost reducing alliances by the airlines. V1 responded to Mr. Jenkins’ column with the following post in the WSJ forum.

 

Mr. Jenkins demonstrates the simple hypocrisy of the Obama administration. On the one hand, the administration is prepared to charge into the free market melee of the air transportation industry barking hindering cries of ‘Antitrust!’. On the other hand, the administration has abandoned the fight, initiated by the previous administration, for allowing market-based allocation of the federal monopoly in aviation infrastructure. In short, the Obama administration wants ultimate competition in the seat and freight capacity sector, but ultimate centralized control in the aviation infrastructure sector (ATC).

If the administration desires to truly serve the people by ensuring an air transportation market which can produce low cost air fares, it might ponder the inescapable notion that the federal government has never been the low-cost provider of anything. So why should it continue to burden the air carrier industry, and travelers, with the high cost of a federal monopoly in the supply of air traffic control? It requires no great vision to see that it is way past time to treat ATC as just another free-market resource which is consumed in the fabrication of air transportation.