Privatize Air Traffic Control? Of Course!

“Trump seeks to privatize US air traffic control system”. President Donald Trump said Monday that the nation’s air traffic control system needed a modern makeover and urged Congress to approve a privatization plan that he said would increase safety and reduce wait times for passengers.

Dismissing the current system as an anachronism, Trump said the air traffic control operations needed to be separated from the Federal Aviation Administration, an approach that U.S. airlines have long championed. But opponents worry that the plan, which would require congressional approval, will give too much power to the airline industries.

Here’s the thing: You want the airline industry to have power over the operation of airports. Why? Because airlines, unlike government, have skin in the game. Or accountability, if you prefer. Airlines, unlike government, can make profits and go out of business.

It’s not just with airlines. It’s with everything, outside of a military or police force. Private is always better. No, private is not perfect because human beings are fallible and cannot guarantee omniscience and perfection. But government authorities are even less omniscient and perfect than accountable persons in the private sector.

Big business does sometimes get a bad name, and deservedly so, but only when it teams up with government to create what’s called “crony capitalism”. It’s valid to fear such a thing. However, the only way to get rid of “crony capitalism” is to replace it with real capitalism. How do you do that? By privatizing as many things as possible, as quickly and as rationally as possible.

One of the good things about having a businessman as U.S. President, even if he’s not a consistent advocate of capitalism, is that he actually understands and appreciates how the private sector works. The last U.S. President never worked an honest day in the private sector in his life. He loathed the private sector, even though the trillions of dollars in redistributed wealth and debt he counted on comes entirely from the private sector.

Democrats and other career politicians scream that “airline interests” will overtake safety interests. But what in the world are airline interests? Do airlines make a profit by crashing planes or by landing them safely? With airports and air traffic control a perpetual mess under government control, why not give airlines the ability to take responsibility for actually getting it right? If you think politicians and bureaucrats will ever get anything right, then you’re due to ask yourself why you’d never fly on a government-run airline.

Of course we should privatize air traffic control and airports. In fact, we should privatize just about everything outside of military, police and courts. Education and medical care are at the top of my list for privatization. Those fields are in worse shape than air traffic control, as anyone can plainly see. Until or unless people grasp that only the private sector can save us, and that government never will, we’ll never achieve our full potential.