[blockquote]
----------------
On 3/11/2003 9:54:08 PM Diesel8 wrote:
Forced nationalization will give us Amtrak of the skies, broke or in this case, broker (sic)!
The weak sink, the strong survive! If only the feds would remember that and let the chips fall where they may, but alas, the have already let the cat out of the bag.
Still, it may be what a few CEO's are hoping for, although I sincerely doubt it will happen. Further, it would cause some issues with the EU, they are trying to abolish any kind of national funding of the airlines.
( Before anyone starts ranting and raving about EU, vis-a-vis Iraq, just remember, there are more countries in the EU than France and Germany. Apart from a few "objectors", most do support the US.)
----------------
[/blockquote]
Let the chips fall where they may or let the Ships fall where they may? Look to history my friend and you will see that what we are seeing now has happened before. The Railroads were once as suicidally competitive as the airlines are today. The result of a completely unregulated or in other words "lawless" industry was a high rate of failures including Bank failures that were heavily tied to the Railroads and a high accident rate. That is the one of dark sides of pure competition. Another Dark side is that the object of competition is that eventually a victor arises, in other words a monopoly, the spoils of which is to be able to charge whatever the market can possibly bear, good for the monopolists but not the rest of society. While in theory these things should be self-correcting, the reality that was exposed by the trusts of the gilded age was that government interference was necessary to break the lock that the trusts had on markets. Pure free market theorists are just as out of touch with economic reality as communists.
Nationalization of the airlines is not what we should seek; however 26 cents of every dollar that the airlines get for their tickets goes to the government. So its not government subsidies we should seek but temporary relief. The government, which is supposed to protect the people conducted policies in somebody’s “interestsâ€, not mine, that brought us to the attention of nut jobs like Osama Bin Laden. Our allies, the Saudis, financed these nut jobs with petro dollars that were used to murder 3000 of our fellow citizens (some ally) and now the government has decided to impose costly changes upon the industry at a time when the industry can least afford it. The deficiencies that they seek to correct were discovered back when the industry was making tons of money but the government decided then that correcting them then, during record profitability, would be too costly, so instead they want the airlines to do it now. The government mandated it, they should pay for it, instead, they are helping the airlines to force its workers to pay for it. We had nothing to do with what happened yet we are being expected to pay for it, we certainly did not benifit from this. The oil companies are the primary benificiaries of our middle east policy, and they have benifited from all the crap that has and is going on over there as we see gasoline go up to two dollars a gallon. The government could have slapped a surcharge on fuel to pay for it, (and mandated that the fuel companies could not pass on the costs to the airlines but instead they went after us, the workers) after all the fuel companies are making out like bandits since all this crap started, I guess that’s the perk of having an oil man as President and VP. The point is that this has been declared an "essential" industry. If it’s so essential that the government reserves the right to deny workers in this industry the right to withhold their labor from a private company isn’t it a little hypocritical to allow the same company to go out of business due to government imposed expenses?
40 PM KCFlyer wrote: 
52 PM Bob Owens wrote: 
