US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

Interesting. The deregulation of airlines is already a case study of how deregulation tends to reduce competition and hurt consumers.

I suppose we’ve just given up on the concept of trying to do anything but nakedly extract profit at any cost. You’d think shareholders would be pro-competition in the end, though—I certainly would prefer that.

Edit: I mean short-term profits. As a shareholder I would prefer long-term profits via competition and diversification.

What are you talking about overall, deregulation of routes has not been bad for consumers. The opposite actually.

It’s been a disaster. There are fewer routes, and flying is miserable, and getting worse every year. Crashes are way up this year.

Airlines profits are basically zero per ticket. Adding $10 per trip would be some sort of fantasy land windfall for the shareholders.

Deregulation badly broke this industry.

Safety is massively improved since the days of regulation. Fares are way down in real terms. Flying might be miserable, but that's because people realize they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much.

Your comments remind me of the arguments Ma Bell gave to justify their monopoly. Oh noez, quality will suffer if there's telecom competition. Well, people ended up being willing to make the tradeoff.

You did score a hit with airline profits being low. The whole purpose of regulation was to artificially inflate prices to ensure profits for airlines.

I'm not sure if either you or the person you're replying to are correct about safety. The way I see it, safety is completely orthogonal to regulations about routes, passenger services and so on. Safety's been on a rough upward trend throughout history as technology improves. No matter what tools are given or taken away from airlines for extracting value from their passengers, I don't see how it impacts safety, since actual flying is its own separate thing. The one exception is rules on e.g. crew composition, maximum working hours for pilots, and so on. But in these cases, deregulation would hurt both.