Deregulation has been an unmitigated, proven disaster as far as aviation goes; the last "Act" in this worst-of-all-possible political economies is now unfolding under SMS - the deregulation and privatization of flight safety where managers of "for-profit" corporations are responsible at once for commercial and safety decision-making.
We in the flight safety department at a major carrier were once characterized as a "profit center" and had to show where our activities provided reasonable expectation of profit. It was hard to believe we were in the aviation business, so stupid and ignorant was this free-market, profit-at-all-cost thinking which has naively been adopted by those who can't tell the front of an airplane from its tail.
The term "free market" actually refers to the systemic privatization of profit and the socialization of risk. As presently constituted, capitalism is not a social system nor does it care about its effects upon people; it is merely a technique for the concentration of wealth; the emaciation of a society and its values is immaterial to those who believe that the free-market can come to terms with human problems.
With others, I have compared the reasons for last October's economic collapse of Western economies with the reasons why organizational factors cause airplanes to crash. Surely someone would have written a paper on this but so far the lessons are not seen because they are not believed.
We could debate this until the cows (or the commodities) come home and my only interest is how the "free-market mentality" which has been taken to its natural, greed-driven extremes, has effected aviation and how the serious issues which have arisen might be dealt with within the present capitalist system. This is mainly because the lessons of last October have yet to be learned let alone even understood. We are far too focussed on propping up a system which delivered us into this disaster and will do so again, just like accidents are repeated by those who fail to learn from them.
Last edited by PJ2; 27th Oct 2009 at 19:13.