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Comment by rayiner

I mean this is facially untrue. We’ve been undergoing a 70-year long period of deregulation, and it’s been overwhelmingly positive. (Not to mention, it’s been copied by nearly every Western European country, and has markedly improved what during the 1970s and 1980s were very weak economies.)

We can get next day packages from Amazon, for example, because of the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries: https://parcelindustry.com/article-5131-De-Regulation-of-the.... Previously, package delivery would take much long because packages would be transferred from carrier to carrier operating on regulated routes with regulated prices.

In the electric industry, deregulation of the generator side of the industry has caused wholesale electricity prices to plummet. Today, more than half the cost of electricity is from the still-regulated, retail distribution side.

As to airline deregulation: fatality rates per million passenger miles has trended linearly down since the 1960s. So have ticket prices. https://www.fastcompany.com/3022215/what-it-was-really-like-....

We have also largely avoided regulation of the first major post-FDR industry: the Internet. If the US operated the way it did in the 1950s and 1960s, we’d likely have regulated prices per ad impression and things like that. Instead, the industry has flourished in the absence of regulation.

There is a reason anti-deregulation screeds focus on isolated incidents and are heavy on narrative. Why are we fixating in one instance of failure instead of looking at what airline safety records have looked like over the past decades overall? Objective views of numbers and long term trends make the situation look far more rosey.

parent rayiner 7 years ago

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