prairiechickin prairiechickin:
I'm not a lawyer, but I do enjoy Judge Judy admonishing the lumpenproletariat. Does not the act of booking and paying for a flight imply some sort of contract? I don't understand how the airline can send three people to physically remove you from your seat if you've paid your two bits to see the high diving act.
Good article here on the nature of the airline industry. As with the banking sector, amalgamation and reduction of competition has created a near-monopoly situation where you have zero rights because ALL of them are in a postition to treat you like crap if they want to. You giving them your money means absolutely nothing at all to benefit you.
http://fusion.net/airlines-can-treat-yo ... 1794192270$1:
There is actually a pretty simple answer. Why is an armed agent of the state using violence to enforce a contract freely entered into by two private parties? Because that is more or less how you define “classical liberalism.” You may have thought that buying a ticket and boarding a plane and even sitting in your assigned seat meant you had some “right” to “fly on the plane.” Legally and contractually, you do not. (Welcome, Tweeps, to your first reckoning with the inherent contradictions in the philosophical underpinnings of laissez-faire capitalism and its conception of “coercion.”)
Of course, this isn’t how capitalism is supposed to work. This isn’t how it’s sold to us. Goons dragging bloodied passengers off of airplanes shouldn’t happen in a world where people “vote with their wallets” and corporations compete with one another to attract consumers. This is the disconnect that has puzzled so many. The first hint to the answer comes in noting that this was not an isolated incident, and that this sort of corporate mistreatment of paying customers is not limited to United.
Why do these airlines sound so unapologetic on social media? Why aren’t the CEOs apologizing? Why does no one sound contrite? This isn’t how the outrage cycle is supposed to work!
When everyone gets mad at Pepsi, Pepsi has to apologize because it is very easy to not drink Pepsi. One must affirmatively choose to drink Pepsi; not drinking Pepsi is the default option. (Though, thanks to consolidation, it’s much harder to avoid Pepsico products entirely than you might think.)
The major American airlines, though, do not need to do anything to convince people to fly with them, because they all merged and consolidated until there were just four firms controlling the vast majority of domestic flights, and they have determined that it is in their collective best interest not to seriously compete with one another.
There used to be competition, which seemed—just like we were taught in high school economics—to bring lower fares and more routes to more destinations, but the airlines weren’t making enough money, so they consolidated into a few huge carriers, reduced service to medium-sized airports, and massively raised the cost of flying through both increased fares and skyrocketing fees.
At this stage human passengers need to realize that they're no different than cargo, and if a piece of cargo gets bashed about and broken by the airline no one in the upper ranks of the company is going to give a damn at all.
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