Flying

THE FIRST TIME I flew was about fifty year ago. I am old enough, barely old enough, to remember reliable, convenient flight schedules, stable, reasonable ticket prices, and comfortable seats large enough for an expanded American butt. Also full, hot meals during flights, and clean restrooms. In other words, I'm old. Actually, nearly all commercial passenger flights are of short enough duration that eating before or after a flight, or both, will suffice to stave off starvation or even the munchies, but, nevertheless, having a gourmet, full course meal brought to you in your seat halfway between Boston and L.A., with cocktails and appetizers first, is just special. Plus mixed drinks pn demand, and snacks, if desired. Hedonistic. Air travel used to be comfortable, pleasant,hedonistic. Then came deregulation, and the race to the bottom. People think of Ronald Reagan as being the deregulation president, but Jimmy Carter began the process in the late nineteen seventies with the deregulation of the commercial passenger airline industry. Government, getting out of the way of free enterprise. The new wave of what is called "neo-liberalism", meaning the removal of government involvement ("interference") from the economy, otherwise known as "Reaganomics", swept cross the fruited plains, and remains with us today, disastrously. Deregulation does not open the door to unlimited business opportunity and prosperity, but rather, to less competition, concentrated wealth, low wages, high prices, and shitty servie. The rationale for airline deregulation is that it would free up the big airline companies to innovate, expand, and improve service amid a healthy market of air travel providers. Obviously, precisely the opposite happened, and is still happening. A small collection of air carriers, essentially constituting a monopoly, with bloated ticket prices, chaotic, unreliable schedules, and crappy serivce to the customers is what we have today. If the restroom is working onboard your flight, and is clean, you're lucky. Nowadays they'll either give you nothing to eat, or something out of a vending machine, if you're lucky. Over the past few decades, flying has become less and less pleasant, as the airlines fall all over each other trying to squeeze ever more money out its customers by cutting quality in the name of efficiency, the government powerless to prevent it. Deregulation of the economy is of course one of conservative Republicanism's most cherished ideals. It is probably more harmful and horrible than most of their other ideals, but that, of course, is debatable. Our current economy in which less than one percent of the population owns more than twenty five percent of the wealth, an utterly deplorable, uncivilized state of affairs, is the direct result of consrvative economics policies, policies such as low taxes for the wealthy, low wages for workers, corporate control, and weak government regulation. Polices designed first, foremost, and exclusively for the wealthy, by the wealthy, who own the politicians as well as the political and economic systems. Conservatism, by allowing and indeed even encouraging policies which assist only the wealthy, are in fact the political party of the wealthy. Millions of hard working but poor white working people voted for Republicans, voted for Trump, and will again,even though doing so is directly opposed to their own best interests. The people who have never had enough money to be on an airplane, voting for the first class private jet crowd. Folks in rural Arkansas voting for a New York City billionaire, a con artist and crook to boot. Go figure.