Bastiat, Hazlitt, and the unseen v. the feds
As a means to try to ease chronic nationwide air travel delays, the feds are going to reduce the number of flights in and out of New York City during peak travel times. That's certainly one way to reduce delays, similar to Lenin and Stalin reducing food shortages by implementing mass starvation. But, I digress.
Bastiat and Hazlitt would be screaming "don't forget the unseen."
Sure, Patty Passenger's flight out of NYC will take off on-time -- weather and other airports permitting of course, but Sammy Stranded will have to catch a later flight out as his regular flight is no longer offered.
So instead of possibly arriving an hour late due to a delay, Stranded may not see his family until the following morning, or later. Ask his wife and kids whether Sammy was delayed or not.
The feds have no concern for Stranded -- the unseen. They will celebrate their success and prized on-time metric, with claps on the back and cheers all around.
Missing is the true solution: The market is able to address both peak congestion and capacity constraints, as well as systemic breakdowns. But, once again the unseen will appear, this time in the form of unemployed tax consumers, er, I mean government employees.
And, we can't have that. Or, can we?
Comments (8)
The plan of the gov't must be great, it involved "months of closed-door wrangling".
I fly in and out of JFK every six weeks. I got tired of sitting on the ground for 3 hours after leaving the gate every Friday night, so I switched to Saturday morning. If more people switch - less congestion. If people don't switch - they must not mind the delay too much.
Published: December 20, 2007 10:09 PM
电加热器
填料
波纹填料
Published: December 20, 2007 11:30 PM
In fairness to Dubya & Co., they did propose a congestion pricing scheme that was promptly rejected by the airline industry.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17158945
Published: December 21, 2007 2:29 AM
Kevin:
You miss the point of the article. Dubya or Hillary or an airline economist, or a computer or person with computers, or groups of people with groups of computers CAN NOT optimally manage air space all the time. ONLY CONUMERS of airtravel are able to perform this function. They vote with their feet and as congestion increases so will prices until airlines find alternate solutions to their issues.
So Dubya is simply a socialist (Negater of private property rights and user of force) to provide a suboptimal solution to a problem that only the consumers and suppliers can solve.
Published: December 21, 2007 9:34 AM
[...] groups of people with groups of computers CAN NOT optimally manage air space all the time. ONLY CONUMERS of airtravel are able to perform this function.
Actually you need both the supply (airline and associated infrastructure) and the demand (consumer) sides to find the right price/allocation of resources. The consumer is part of the function, but not the only part.
Published: December 21, 2007 10:41 AM
Here's what I really don't understand. I'm sitting in Midway Airport, waiting for my connecting flight, which arrives 2 hours late because of "air traffic at La Guardia." It's not like this was unexpected. The airlines have known for months, many of them, when and where the planes are scheduled to move.
Why in the heck can they not see that 4,231,792 planes trying to leave from La Guardia at 6 p.m. will lead to a few delays, not only in New York, but throughout the country? It's not rocket surgery.
If I'm at AMR, should I not be able to look up the flight schedule for competitor's planes flying out of La Guardia in order to determine how many American flights we can get out around 6? There really should be an easy way to do this. As a good Austrian, I want to blame the gov't somehow, but I don't know enough about the industry/process to be able to make that declaration.
Published: December 22, 2007 4:25 AM
Then you have good cause to investigate, don't you agree? There are always regulations, often hidden, that have effects on economic goods, in hampered markets.
Published: December 22, 2007 10:14 AM
Here is how I see this:
1.FAA Gov't reduces the amount of flights creating scarcity
2.Airlines don't get the blame for this because of #1
3.Airlines raise prices to meet demand
4.Consumer gets to pay for Gov't and Corporate fraud
We are all witnessing in the US a new form of government called Corporatism which is a new form of Fascism.
Published: December 22, 2007 6:26 PM