Let The Private Sector Lead the Way

Let the private sector lead the way. Private enterprise is always more efficient and provides better service than government bureaucrats.

--Scott Brown, (and any Republican who has read the Tea Party Gospel)

The Phantom arrived at the airport this morning, well ahead of schedule to board his Boston shuttle on U.S. Airways and asked if there was space available on an earlier flight. "Sure, for $75" he was told. 

Declining that bargain, the Phantom watched as that earlier flight loaded and took off with empty seats.  There was nothing unethical or illegal about this legacy airline's rule.  They had agreed to transport the Phantom to Boston at 12:30 PM on the shuttle and they were prepared to keep that promise.  But it was stupid business.

That act of attempted "move up" fee changed the relationship from one of mutual happiness into one in which an adversarial spirit emerged. We were no longer a willing buyer and a willing seller but two parties playing a game of chicken. You can sit here in the waiting room for an hour, or you can pay and get on now. 

If a doctor had kept a patient waiting in a waiting room when that patient could see the patient scheduled ahead of him had canceled  and the waiting patient, who arrived early knew he was being kept in the waiting room while he could have been taken back to the exam room early, that would have become one unhappy patient.

If you arrive early at the ferry and there is space, the boat men put you on. Across a whole variety of businesses and services, the prevailing spirit is, "We want you to be happy with us." 

It is supposed to be the government worker, complacent in his job security, who keeps you waiting, who doesn't care whether or not he keeps your business or your goodwill because you do not have anywhere else to go, who is supposed to be the unresponsive,  just do it by the book face of an indifferent bureaucracy.

But, in real life, it is the big private for profit companies who act with imperious disregard for their customers.

Southwest airlines has made its living understanding the psychology of "we aim to please" and customers have beaten a path to the Southwest door.  But Southwest does not have space at DC National airport, or at a lot of other airports where the legacy airlines have managed to lock out the competition.

If there really were free open market competition, airlines would not get away with playing games of who will blink first with their customers.

That is the problem with free market, the private sector is always better Republicans and economists: The market, in the United States at least, is only rarely truly "free."
A business uses its size and power to occupy a position and the customer has no bargaining power.

In New Hampshire, the live free or die" state with its libertarian ideology allows corporations to enforce "non compete" clauses, so doctors who want to leave their employers cannot set up shop down the street,  and architects, lawyers, even housing contractors have to leave town and start over if they want to continue their services. They are locked into their "owners" (the corporations) as surely as baseball players were once locked into their club owners by the old "reserve clause." 

So when you hear Scott Brown or any other Republican waxing euphoric about how bad government is and how wonderful free market, big business is, think about the last time you ran up against free market, big business style.