Chap, I find a lot of your arguments quite telling.

First your general tone about government “subsidies”. You speak of them as if the government itself has money that just appears out of nowhere and they – in their benevolence – bestow it upon the good folks and/or businesses of our country. You know as well as I do that this is far from the truth.

Second, your insistence that there’s no difference between “wanting out” and being “forced out”. I’m not sure why you can’t see the difference. Let’s look at your law practice. There’s a very big difference between a situation where you might be losing clients (with no outside intervention) and deciding to close your doors (or sell your practice to someone else), i.e. “wanting out”, and having a successful and thriving business that starts going in the tank because a government entity begins imposing rules and regulations on you that has an adverse effect on your ability to attract and keep a clientele (being forced out). Surely you aren’t so disingenuous as to continue to insist with a straight face that there’s no difference between being “forced out” and “wanting out”?

Third, airlines would be more than happy to return to the days of providing for their own security. I worked for TSA at the beginning. It was a good operation with good people. Unfortunately, it took only a couple of months for the government to start relaxing their standards as to whom they would employ, the ranks started filling with incompetent political cronies at all levels, and before they could get a good reputation established, it was already ruined. I left because I didn’t want to be associated with something that looked like a low-grade entry on “Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour”. The airlines began begging to be able to go back to hiring and being responsible for their own security, but the Imperial Federal Government has said no to this several times over.

There is nothing that the government can do that private industry can’t do better and more efficiently – with the possible exception of maintaining national defense forces.

Like I said, my 2 cents.

The New Left The Anti Industrialist. Retitled “The Return of the Primitive” The Anti Industrialist. “IT CAME FROM THE 60S”

That was shown to be false. Air passengers PAY over $12 billion in taxes, tariffs and fees, which covers the expenses for the activities the FAA performs in civil aviation. Chaps says that the FAA only accounts something over $5 billion out of what we pay. How does that make for a tax-payer subsidy for flyers?

But all this looses track of a basic point he was making. Namely: people who use transport of virtually any kind in the US are being tax-payer subsidized. This is bunk, but let’s say it isn’t.

If that were true, what it says to a conservative is that we need to get government the freak out of transport. What it means is that very INEFFICIENT Federal money is being taken from us…and from the private sector…and squandered on transport spending. That money should be left with us, and we should be paying the efficient actual costs of the transport we use.

A government subsidy is not “free”. It is, in fact, very costly…the least effective way for us to spend a dollar.

There is no excuse for government to subsidize anything. It is a market distortion, by definition.

There is no excuse for a government monopoly, such as Amtrak. It is fascist economics, and it has no place in a free America.

I am just curious, how did the Airport that is Murthas monument to himself get funded?