We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Sorry for the light posting lately. I’ve been traveling like crazy, with one more trip tomorrow. I just bought the tickets for a late September trip, and it reminded me of a profound injustice we Texans suffer under: The Wright Amendment.

Jim Wright was a member of the US House of Representatives for 34 years from Fort Worth, Texas. He rose to prominence as a Democrat, and briefly served as Speaker of the House. He was forced out of office in 1989 over some ethics problems.

But the Wright Amendment is what Jim Wright is most remembered for. It amended the International Air Transportation Act of 1979, which was part of an overall federal deregulation of air travel. This amendment focused on the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport (DFW), which is a behemoth located halfway between those two cities. Within Dallas is a smaller facility, Love Field, which was the area’s main airport before they built DFW. Nearly all the airlines left Love Field when they finished building DFW—all except Southwest.

Those of you outside of Texas may not be familiar with Southwest Airlines. It is an aggressively efficient airline that has grown exponentially since its start in the early seventies. The older airlines view air travel as analogous to a cruise ship, with different classes of seats, assigned seating, and lots of perks available for more money. Southwest runs like a bus line: You sit where you want. All the seats cost the same. Snacks and drinks are simple but free; there’s no upselling. Best of all, they do something amazing with training and incentives. Their crew always seems happy. They seem to enjoy what they’re doing, and that makes everything run efficiently.

Back to the Wright Amendment: When Southwest refused to move to DFW with its high fees, the other airlines pressured Congress to restrict Southwest’s growth. They knew that they couldn’t compete in the marketplace with Southwest, so they went to the politicians.

And they succeeded. The Wright Amendment says that planes flying out of Love Field can only fly to states adjoining Texas: New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. And that doesn’t just mean that the plane has to touch down in those states. The ticket must stop there, meaning specifically that you must pick up your checked luggage there. It was once possible to bypass the Wright Amendment by carrying everything onto the plane: You could print out all your boarding passes the night before, fly the first leg, get off the plane, and walk to the next flight as if you had just arrived at the airport. It was a pain to set up, because Southwest is forbidden by law from helping you do it. And it was more expensive than what Southwest would charge you if it could sell the through ticket. But it was still a lot cheaper than flying on any other airline. More fun, too.

But the liquid-explosive terrorists have put a stop to all that. It’s difficult to travel without carrying any liquids, which means that you’re pretty much required to check your bags. And checking your bags means that you can’t evade this silly law and save on airline tickets.

Today all this came into focus for me. I have to travel to Jacksonville Florida in September. Southwest can’t sell me that ticket under the Wright Amendment. But if I were in Houston, then I could to Jacksonville and back for $178, plus taxes and fees. But to fly from Amarillo to Jacksonville, which is only slightly longer, costs a minimum of $305, plus taxes and fees. That stupid amendment just cost me over $127 for an inferior service, all for a dirty backroom deal engineered by Jim Wright.

And it’s not just my money. It’s the whole state. We could all be flying on Southwest and getting better service at lower prices. It’s the populist’s fantasy come true: We’re all paying too much and getting lousy service to prop up some inefficient but politically connected airlines that a free market would promptly put out of business. The populist imagines that this arrangement gives huge profits the government backed businesses.

And if that were so, it might not bother me so much. But the trouble with government control of the economy isn’t so much that it picks winners and losers, but that it generates so much economic waste while doing so. Of the extra $127 that I had to pay American Airlines, I bet that they enjoy less than half of it as profit. The rest is simply destroyed through inefficiency. It doesn’t make anyone happy.

If government-favored businesses could generate huge profits, then they wouldn’t need government favors. The government can prevent weak swimmers from drowning, but it can’t make them strong. No one can make them strong. The only way to improve is to let the weak drown, release those resources back into the economy, and let a new crop of businesses sink or swim.

Or think of it this way: If a major airline declares bankruptcy and stops business, it’s not as if all of its planes suddenly disappear. Those planes go up for auction, and then somebody buys them who hopes to use them more efficiently than their previous owner did. Government intervention mandates that the planes must stay in the hands of those who obviously don’t know how to manage them very well. I wish that they would set the planes free, and give me back my $127.

In case you somehow missed it, this video explains very directly how US and international news agencies have been publishing fraudulent photos to generate sympathy for Hezbollah, which is the puppet of Iran. Remember Iran? That’s the country whose leaders want us all dead, and whose scientists and technicians are busy building nuclear bombs with which they hope to annihilate Israel.

To echo Victor Davis Hanson, it’s the 1930s all over again: Whole countries are run by madmen who eagerly pursue war, and half the country wants us to twiddle our thumbs and hope that diplomats can save us from doing some real work. As the recent news out of London demonstrates, many Muslims still want us all dead, and no amount of self-flagellation or self-castration will appease them. At some point in the future the terrorists will succeed with one of their plots, and the deaths will run into the tens of thousands. Maybe it will be enough blood to wake the liberals from the pipe dream that their hollow mantras have forever vanquished the evil that lurks naturally within each man’s heart. Maybe it will be enough death to shame them into allowing us to defend ourselves.

Or maybe not. Recall that the deaths of thousands of Frenchmen and Britons didn’t shame the force of appeasement and isolation back in WWII. The war had been raging for over two years before we bothered to join. We had heard plenty of warnings that Hitler intended to conquer Europe. We had read of Japanese atrocities in China, and yawned. Only when our own ships lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor did we pay attention. I think that we’re probably going to lose a city time time, and it’s just a question of which one.

The infuriating part is that no blame will fall on the bloodthirsty liberals, like those at Reuters and the New York Times, who are working right now to ensure that thousands more of us will die. Few will remember them with the bitterness that they deserve, just as few today look back with the proper level of disgust at the fools who kept us out of WWII for so long.

Schoolchildren of the future will read about this decade and ask their teachers: “But why didn’t they do anything? They knew that Iran had nuclear bombs. They knew that lots of Muslims were willing to die trying to kill us. Wasn’t it obvious to them that one of them would eventually make it into New York City or Washington DC?” The teachers will try to explain how lots of people in America thought that we could avoid more attacks with appeasement. And that schoolchild will shake his head and wonder how anyone could have been so stupid.

Thanks to Clayton Cramer for pointing me to this hilarious movie.  It shows roughly what happens when your typical horror-movie slasher tries to break into a conservative woman’s house.  I’m not personally into guns, but I’m sure glad that so many of my neighbors are.