Airlines can only conduct their business in full cooperation and necessarily under the supervision of government. The plane loads passengers at a public airport, it's takes off from a public runway, it's communicates and navigates on our Victor Airways maintained by the government. Bearing hundreds of souls, it is necessarily under scrutiny for safety regulations as is any common carrier.
So airlines are regulated, before Ronald Reagan they were over regulated but now they have a degree of independence within which to maximize their profits and that, in turn, through the invisible hand of the marketplace produces the best and cheapest air transportation system available.
Now we are not discussing the safety of passengers which most people except the most committed libertarian would concede should be regulated by the government, we are moving from safety into the realm of passenger comfort.
When we speak of passenger comfort we are inclined to revert to our original position and argue that the passenger and the airline should have the power free of government to negotiate the price and size of the seats as well as the quality of the food or the rating of the movie. But again, alas, the matter is not that simple.
It's not that simple primarily because leftists simply will not leave it that way. To them the world consists of government in search of a problem. Inevitably, they will impose a solution on this dilemma of providing adequate seating for manly men and curvaceous women without infringing on the comfort zone of the punies in the next seat but they will seek to do so by stealth if necessary in order to gain credit without paying any political cost. A likely solution for them will be to require the airlines to provide oversized seating for heavyset people at no additional cost. This will appeal to the left because the costs are hidden because the costs are spread over 300 or 400 seats or more and the traveling public will likely be unaware why their ticket price went up a bit.
Such a regulation, it would come from from bureaucrats, is a win-win for leftists because inevitably the airlines will come begging to government to relieve them of the inevitably overbroad regulation which they will be only too happy to do in exchange for campaign contributions. If the large airlines can convince leftist bureaucrats or leftist politicians to erect barriers to entry against small time startup competitors, so much the better for them and so much the better for the politicians.
So from a simple everyday human exchange starting with an elbow in the ribs we have found a way for everyone to prosper-isn't that wonderful when we all realize that it takes a village because we didn't build that?
