On Sunday, September 16, 2001, at 11:14 AM, Dr. Evil wrote:
>> In any case, let the insurers and builders do it if they want. But
>> they'd better not use any money taken by force from others. And they'd
>
> "Money taken by force from others" is flowing very freely these days.
> I'm sure taxpayer money will be used to rebuild the WTC. Even worse,
> I'm sure billions in taxpayer dollars will be used to bail out the
> airlines. Apparently all airlines were having a bad year even before
> Tuesday, and now even the biggest are facing bankruptcy. The
Anyone who has travelled by plane in the past decade knows exactly why
they were and are on the verge of bankruptcy: they converted themselves
into low-margin versions of Greyhound buses, with the crowding and chaos
and lowlifes we used to see in Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals 30
years ago.
I'm not being elitist, just noting the obvious.
They bought extremely expensive pieces of machinery (jets), with
borrowed money, and then counted on keeping them at 80%+ capacity in
order to meet their debt payments. And a dozen of these airlines all set
themselves the goal of being "the next Southwest," complete with the
InstaTicket cash machines, long lines, and cattle-cars-to-Aushchwitz
amenities. "Would you like a second 1.5 ounce bag of pretzels?"
Not surprisingly, these cattle cars in the sky face bankruptcy if the
flow of cattle slows for even a few days.
So now we are to bail them out.
Why not bail out Circuit City, whose sales of big screen t.v.s have
plummeted? How about Intel, as people quite reasonably put off purchases
of 1.7 GHz PCs? How about Ford, where SUV sales have all but stopped?
Bailing out the airlines and other industries is state socialism. And as
with most cases of socialism, it perpetuates their bad ways and punished
those (few) companies who prepared.
Besides, the shut-down of several airlines due to bankruptcy liquidation
will dump a lot of planes at low prices on the market, will reduce
overall capacity, and will help restore the industry to the new lower
level of flight reality. I wouldn't want to hold their stocks, though.
Nor Boeing's.
--Tim May
