As everyone who follows the news has heard, United Airlines had a customer literally dragged off a plane to make room for an employee to fly in his seat. Naturally, there is a lot of commentary about the root cause of how a customer could be treated so badly by the company that he happily paid for services and just wanted to use the service he had rightfully paid for.
A friend of mine posted an article on facebook written by James Martin, in the Jesuit Priest online magazine called 'America: The Jesuit Review'. The link is here.
While James gets most of his facts wrong in his analysis which would naturally predispose him to illogical conclusions. He does get the title of his article correct. He says that:
The United Airlines debacle isn't about customer service. It's about the morality of capitalism.
Then he proceeds to use the situation as if it is somehow representative of all the immoral excesses of capitalism. But that kind of logical fallacy is easily turned on it's head when the facts of the case indicate that this situation can equally be used to aptly illustration the questionable morality of socialism. In fact, I will show below how this situation is actually shows that United would have treated their customer with the utmost of respect and courtesy, and stays on the moral high ground if they had actually followed the free market principles of of capitalism. I will show how the facts surrounding this PR disaster actually occurred as soon as United dumped their free-market methodology in favor of a Socialism by Authoritarian means method instead. Or stated another way: I will show how this tragic scene on the United Airlines flight is in reality a very hard lesson in the immorality of Socialism.
The author's commentary makes it very plain that he lays the blame for this immoral behavior at the evil motivations or excesses inherent in capitalism. [a.k.a. the evil pursuit of profit over people.] And with a graduate degree from the Wharton School of Business, I would expect the author to know something about that. However, in his rush to judgement he puts on display a complete misunderstanding of the fundamental human relations actually in action on the infamous United Express Flight 3411.
First the critical fact that Mr. Martin was sadly misinformed on is as follows. Because it is common air-line practice, he assumes this customer was ejected from the flight due to over-booking the flight with too many passengers. However the truth is that United Airlines wanted to fly 4 employees on that fully booked flight. This is a critical difference as it explains the (immoral, but legal) decision path that the manager of that flight took.
Without that critical fact, the author unfortunately draws conclusions that are exactly backwards and upside down. The tragic events that happened on that plane had zero to do with free market capitalism. By definition, only the offering of money to buy back the tickets that United wanted for its own employees and the people who voluntarily take that deal is representative of free market capitalism. As soon as someone made the decision to use even the threat of government force to pick a few losers who would be dragged off the plane involuntary the situation metastasized into the exact opposite of capitalism. That was socialist rationing. Due to poor planning on the part of United Airlines, there was not enough seats for the employees to fly also. And Federal law states they had to fly to their next take off point to prevent another flight from being delayed or canceled. Therefore, the privileged few who had special connections with the government (the airport security) then used Federal government authority to steal a rightfully purchased good from the paying customer. The obvious result being that 4 seats went to the politically connected people who had paid nothing for that seat. Stated another way, you must admit that they only got the seat because they had the violent force of government in order to give it to them. United was not pursuing profit in any way. They just lost over $800 million dollars (1) in a couple of days just to take that seat for their own use. They could have paid every single person on that flight 1 Million dollars to not fly that night and still would have been more profitable than their stupid idiotic decision to use the power of government to steal one seat for themselves!!!!
Therefore, the logical capitalistic and moral thing for the United Airline's passenger manager to do is to keep increasing the seat buy-back price until finally the necessary 4 passengers voluntarily take the money and debark from the fight. Everyone has a price their are willing to inconvenience themselves at. Evidently, $1000 plus hotel room was not enough, so they should have just gone to $2000, and $5000, and $10,000 until someone took the offer. At some point, it would be so high, that one of the employees probably would have taken the offer, and just taken a very long vacation starting immediately. Or used the money to change jobs to work for a better airline. But most likely at about $5k, about 10 people on that fight would have been happy to take it. And United Airlines would have been Millions of Dollars more profitable than taking the Socialist path. But the Airline manager had the option to use the Federal Government's monopoly on physical violence to redistribute goods and services that he or she felt 'needed' to be rationed based on political rankings of who deserves to fly at that time, and whom does not 'deserve' to fly. And those that get the limited resource of a seat on the plane is precisely the person with the most political status. (the United employees in this case.)
That is the very definition of Socialism in action in the microcosm of an Airline fuselage.
(1) Link to an article at Fortune Magazine detailing actual immediate value lost by United Airlines due to this use of socialism inside their business. But the stock bounce back slightly a few days later, bring the total loss to a mere $800 million, but who is counting? To coin a phrase from the well know VISA commercials: the fact that now millions of people won't fly United Airlines for any amount of money?... priceless.
(2) Link to a video illustration of free-market Capitalism by George Mason University Economics professor Walter Williams.