03.19.08
The unregulated free market
The problem with a free market—free of any government interference or regulation—is illustrated with the recent revelations about Southwest Airlines, which failed to comply with safety directives. Of course, without government regulations, there would be no safety directives, so airlines could pretty much decide for themselves how much they would spend on maintenance and safety.
As this recent incident shows, the inclination of management is to maximize profit, even when maintenance is required. So I think it’s safe to assume that airlines would tolerate a lot more risk than they do now. (As the recent sub-prime debacle shows, greed drives businesses to accept intolerable levels of risk.)
So planes would crash. This would enable consumers to decide to move to other airlines (or other modes of transportation). Eventually, I suppose, airline crashes would become accepted as a norm, much as we accept traffic deaths due to automobile crashes.
I don’t like that solution. I like that the government is charged with enforcing safety standards on airlines (and automobile manufacturers). Without that, we’d have many avoidable deaths.
