OK, air travel can be a mess. There is nothing so frustrating as delays, especially delays on the tarmac. To some, this is a reason to have government create and enforce a so-called passenger bill of rights. In fact, New York is just days away from being the first state to have such positive rights enforced by the power of law. That said, we already have a passenger bill of rights: the dollar.
You see, if you are willing to pay the price, you can have aircraft on standby ready to hustle you to your destination, 24/7. Sure, if the weather is bad, you will also have delays, yet delays in relative comfort.
Given that government regulations have created the current air travel mess, why anyone would expect that the next regulation will cure the ills of regulations past is beyond me. OK. I can guess why: the lack of knowledge of Mises. But, doesn't common sense quickly reach the same conclusion as Mises? For many, the answer is no.
Let's take a look at the current system and that which is proposed. Today, whenever passengers are stuck for a long time, sitting on the tarmac, the newspapers and the internet quickly report the details. What an incentive to improve service. And, airlines are doing their best to improve given government's entangling regulations and the price and quality desires of consumers.
We libertarians, wrote Henry Hazlitt, cannot content ourselves merely with repeating pious generalities about liberty, free enterprise, and limited government. To assert and repeat these general principles is absolutely necessary, of course, either as prologue or conclusion. But if we hope to be individually or collectively effective, we must individually master a great deal of detailed knowledge, and make ourselves specialists in one or two lines, so that we can show how our libertarian principles apply in special fields, and so that we can convincingly dispute the proponents of statist schemes for public housing, farm subsidies, increased relief, bigger Social Security benefits, bigger Medicare, guaranteed incomes, bigger government spending, bigger taxation, especially more progressive income taxation, higher tariffs or import quotas, restrictions or penalties on foreign investment and foreign travel, price controls, wage controls, rent controls, interest rate controls, more laws for so-called "consumer protection," and still tighter regulations and restrictions on business everywhere.
This means, among other things, that libertarians must form and maintain organizations not only to promote their broad principles, but to promote these principles in special fields.
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