Column by George Sibley
Transportation – December 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
SO WE DID IT: we passed a tax referendum to guarantee that the nation’s major airlines won’t lose money flying into the Gunnison-Crested Butte International Airport.
Now I think it’s time we Americans had a serious discussion about our religion, our strange sacrificial worship at the altar of private enterprise.
The transportation sector is a good arena for this discussion. We have created a “Rural Transportation Authority” in Gunnison County because the basic elements of our local economy — a ski resort, a second-home aristocracy, and the college (now reaching aggressively beyond the state borders) — are all increasingly dependent on air transportation, as direct as possible, from the larger world, especially from its larger cities.
Aware of this, the airlines have initiated a new policy. Now, communities with airports smaller than Denver’s must guarantee that the airlines will lose no money by “serving” them — and all of the mountain resort communities are having to face some variation of this.
But our little half-million dollar guarantee to United Airlines is insignificant compared to the airline’s losses everywhere else — $889 million in the third quarter alone this year.
So soon, in addition to our local subsidies, we taxpayers will undoubtedly get to plug the airlines’ hemorrhages at the national level, too. Just a year or so ago we the people gave the airlines $5 billion, which is all gone, and now they are back for another guaranteed “loan” from the people. And that direct dollar subsidization doesn’t include the massive local, state and federal infrastructure investment in the form of airports, air safety systems, and the underwriting of R & D (through defense contracts) and the like.
The airlines cite 9/11 as the reason for their problems, but the truth is, they were in trouble well before 9/11/01. In a recent column, Allan Sloan, a Newsweek business editor, cited Air Transport Association statistics showing that the total profits for the entire air industry, for the 64 years from 1938 to the present, were only around $3 billion.
That’s for 64 years. And that’s with all of that publicly funded infrastructure, and with occasional direct gifts like the $5 billion — a sum which exceeds more than the total profits of the entire industry since its inception.
This makes me wonder: Why can’t we just come out and admit that we are socializing the transportation industry?
Long ago, we gave up on the idea that the private sector could provide adequate highways. And at this point, we’ve already socialized the infrastructure that privately-owned vehicles require for both auto and air transport.
With rail transportation, however, the public basically owns the other half of the picture. Amtrak passenger trains run on a crummy, undermaintained private infrastructure — and that “crummy undermaintained infrastructure” needs to be emphasized here. Every time I have ever been late getting anywhere on Amtrak (which is usually), it has been because private-sector freight derailments on lousy private-sector trackage have caused time-consuming reroutings. Whoever believes that “the private sector does it better” has a lot of explaining to do when it comes to railroads.
So why not just go ahead and concede that there are aspects of modern culture that will run more economically, and with no noticeable decrease in efficiency, if we would just…?
WHAT THE HELL, let’s stop subsidizing this private-enterprise myth and just admit that transportation is a public-sector line item. Modern society can’t survive without public transportation, and the private corporations can’t provide it without steady public subsidies in one form or another.
But we can’t do that, of course, because that merely makes sense. And we all know that humankind shall not live by good sense alone.
We are a religious people, and we worship at the altar of private enterprise. Eager as we are to jump all over any inefficiency in the government, we will tolerate and forgive just about any shoddy, destructive and even corrupt behavior in the private corporate sector. (Let’s just see how many of the CEOs and CFOs who did the on-camera “perp walks” recently will actually do any serious time.)
And to prop up that altar of private enterprise, we the people will continue to shell out regularly, at all levels from the local to the national, to cover the losses of corporations that provide vital services in what is clearly a kind of de facto socialization. But God forbid that we should call it that!
And should the airlines ever actually have a good year, then we the people will continue to bless the sharing of profits among those corporate shareholders who so generously let all of us “share” a big piece of their losses.
That’s what America is all about! Someday, I might be rich too, and then the people will be worshipping at my altar, and covering my losses!
This is a strange religion.
And let’s not even look at “health care,” where the basic privatization idea — that investment in misfortune should turn a profit — makes even less sense. Thereby requiring even more faith.
A good American challenge.
George Sibley, a former sawmill operator, teaches, writes, agitates, and organizes in Gunnison.