GENIUS idea! #eyeroll RT @JonHenke: #HeadDesk — Washington Monthly wants to nationalize the airlines. Really. bit.ly/xzRp71
— Dina Fraioli (@DinaFraioli) March 13, 2012
It takes a very special, very well-educated kind of stupid. We could give you more bits and pieces, but this paragraph pretty much sums up the argument:
This result would hardly surprise Charles Francis Adams, Louis Brandeis, and many other great Americans who struggled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with how to harness the emergence of railroads, telephones, electrical power, and other networked industries to public purposes. They’d recognize the familiar boom-and-bust cycle of new entrants that occurred in the early period of airline deregulation and the subsequent trend toward consolidation, deteriorating service, and increasing price discrimination. What else would anyone who knows economic history expect of a natural monopoly that lacks the benefits of government regulation?
He mentions Amtrak, but seems not to take the lessons on board. We think of the US Postal Service.
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