These are all from my Twitter/X feed yesterday morning. What do these have in common? All of the major airlines in the U.S. are terrible.  While we often hear the airlines were "deregulated" during the Carter Administration, they really weren't. They were allowed to choose where they fly and a few other things but they are otherwise heavily regulated. For safety, regulation is fine. For everything else, it's bad.  For example: Suppose a startup airline's customer research said that many businesspeople would pay extra for an airline that allowed three carryons? Might be a great marketing niche. And, suppose they worked with Boeing to create additional safe and secure storage for the extra bags? Great, huh? WRONG!! The legacy airlines have lobbied the FAA to put two carryons and much more that would snuff out innovation into the law. Innovating in the airline industry is practically impossible. So, all we get is cheaper tickets -- which translate to incredibly bad ...

Probably not, since I was a child when the government actually enforced the laws as passed by Congress. But, the issues with allowing monopolies and quasi-monopolies are much worse than horrendously bad airline service. Matt Stoller has a terrific piece here .

As a result of Hurricane Florence, there are thousands of new readers on this blog. I got off Facebook early this year because of their highly unethical business practices. I stopped using Google about a year ago. I use the "duckduckgo.com" search engine. I'd recommend Bing over Google. I will soon be cancelling my Amazon Prime as soon as it is up for renewal. We can't keep being docile with regard to the threats to our freedom this monster companies pose.