Kevin Williamson of National Review Online offers an interesting take on the current controversy surrounding United Airlines.

Capitalism is unpopular for four reasons: banks, health-insurance companies, cable providers, and airlines. These all have something in common.

Airlines are in the wringer this week, with United shaming itself in spectacular fashion: Having overbooked a flight and seated the passengers, the company found itself needing four seats—not for paying customers but for airline employees who needed to be moved to another airport. When they did not find any takers for their paltry travel-voucher offers, they simply dispatched armed men to the airplane to force paying customers off, in a now-famous case, literally dragging one of them away. …

… As bad as the airlines are, it remains possible to offer stupid criticism of them, as Eric Levitz does in New York. Levitz sings a familiar lament, the one about deregulation. …

… Levitz uncritically quotes Washington Monthly’s claim that airline deregulation transferred “control of the airline industry from experts answerable to the public to corporate boardrooms and Wall Street.” We have lots of important services purportedly controlled by “experts answerable to the public,” but our public schools are still terrible, the LAPD is still corrupt, and the New York City subways still smell like hobo. Control by “experts answerable to the public” sounds lovely to progressive ears, but nobody bothers to ask how well that has worked.

In fact, a great deal of what is wrong with American air travel has nothing to do with deregulation and price competition, which have worked excellently: A round-trip NYC-L.A. flight cost about 100 hours of average-wage labor in the early 1960s, back when Don Draper was flirting with all those Pan-Am stewardesses; that trip now costs about 17 hours of average-wage labor. Rather, what’s wrong has to do with — let me find the words — “experts answerable to the public,” those being the buffoons who run our local airport authorities, the buffoons in charge of air-traffic control, and the thieving, dope-and-porn-smuggling, molester-y buffoons at the Transportation Security Administration.