Should Congress pass an airline passengers’ bill of rights?
Government and the market
We’ve all heard the horror stories of passengers stranded on planes for hours on end. On Friday night, a Continental flight from Houston to Minneapolis/St. Paul was diverted to Rochester due to thunderstorms. The airline kept passengers stranded on the tiny commuter plane all night, before finally letting them disembark at 6:30am. The fiasco has re-raised public calls for Congress to pass an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights, an effort supported by consumer organizations like the Coalition for an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights and FlyersRights.
Several years ago my significant other was the victim of JetBlue mistreatment, so I can certainly sympathize with the impulse. But is there a normative case to be made for government interference in this market?
The case for congress to pass a passengers’ bill of rights seems to hinge on the idea that for airlines to keep people on grounded planes for extended periods of time is to treat them inhumanely. As Kate Hanni, founder of FlyersRights argued in an April USA TODAY article, “Passengers don’t want to be treated like cargo,” they “feel completely powerless trapped in a sealed metal tube with no access to goods and services, and no way to get off.” This last phrase is key, for it is not illegal or necessarily morally wrong to treat people poorly – no one is talking about regulating companies with bad customer service. Airplanes are special because once you’re on, you can’t get off. It’s not like a restaurant where you can leave if the waiter is rude. Because you can’t get off a plane, the argument goes, government regulation is needed to ensure that people are treated humanely.
On the other hand, there is nothing obvious about the airline industry that is inhibiting a free market and, thus, might warrant government interference. If consumers wanted to punish airlines that they believed treated passengers poorly, they could choose not to fly with them and they would still have ample alternatives. Conceivably, this would cause those airlines to change the way they handle such contingencies and the problem of hours-long delays stuck on planes would go away. Of course this has not happened for, what I believe are, two reasons. First, long delays are incredibly rare (according to USA TODAY, only 1.35 out of every 10,000 flights is delayed three hours or more), so have only affected a small percentage of passengers. Second, the American consumer is notoriously cheap and buy whatever flight Kayak lists at the best price, even if that airline was recently in the headlines. In other words, the fact that the market hasn’t naturally corrected the problem tells us not that the market isn’t free, but that consumers don’t consider the problem to be that significant. With no inhibitors to a free market, the argument goes, there is no case for government intervention.
One’s position on the airline passengers’ bill of rights, then, hinges on whether the airplane is a special case – because you can’t choose to get off once it departs the gate – that warrants government intervention in a market that would probably not otherwise merit such action.
-Marc
Photo by Flickr user rene_ehrhardt used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Related posts:
- The skies are already friendly
- Let’s talk about rights, baby
- When one bill contains the great and the terrible…
- Healthcare, Rights, and Human Rights
- Should government protect consumer safety?
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