Why is it that every...single...time a rule that purports to give "more information to the customer" is deemed "an unreasonable regulatory burden?" The ENTIRE FUCKING POINT of capitalism is that market participants are supposed to trade based on equality of information.
But no, not now. Customers aren't entitled to know what something will cost before they buy it or in a way that enables comparisons. That's just unreasonable. How can we possibly expect a business whose entire model is the juggling of pricing and availability information for maximum profit to EVER be able to figure out how to display the costs for ancillary services at point of purchase?
"Representatives" in the U.S. government no longer represent the citizens at all — they represent the lobbyists that pay for their votes.
Logically, this behavior should result in the representatives being voted out of office.
However, the two party system combined with the unbelievably high cost of running for office makes it nearly impossible for representatives who don't fall in line with the status quo to receive the campaign financing necessary to be elected.
It's a rotten system and won't go away until campaign finance laws are reformed.
Completely agree with you here. I also want to reinforce your conclusion.
I used to think the two party system was flawed because it is so hard to get anything done. I see now that is a feature and under the current administration we are lucky to be in such a slow moving system.
The solution here truly is in campaign finance and other forms of voting reform such as addressing gerrymandering. If we put the people back in charge of the government I think everything else will fall into place.
This is a wonderful comment, but I fear you still might be underestimating the problem. Even if you replaced the two-party system with any other number of parties, you'd still never have a party dedicated to each issue. Voters will always be choosing a candidate who supports the majority of their views, and small issues such as this one will almost never be the deciding factor between the available candidates.
Making it worse, these issue-specific lobbyists don't really care which individual (or party) wins the election, just that the votes on the few bills that their funders care about go in their desired direction. So they can simply make it known after the election that anyone who votes in their preferred direction can expect to receive a "donation" funding their reelection campaign.
But helping the candidate get reelected isn't the only way that lobbyists can help a candidate. Instead, they could donate to the candidate's nonprofit family foundation, give the candidate's family members well paying board seats, wait until their retirement and overpay the candidate for lectures. Once word gets out that candidates who vote in a particular direction are given future preference of any sort, the lobbyists are pretty assured of getting what they want regardless of what the campaign finance laws say.
Short of finding some hidden trove of non-corruptible and non-self-interested politicians, I don't think there are any easy fixes for this. Unless you can find a way that "representatives" are unable to derive personal benefit from their votes and are compelled to put their constituents interests above their own, the system will be vulnerable to being swayed those able to offer that benefit.
The campaign finance laws won't change until the GOP loses control of the congress and presidency and/or the balance on the Supreme Court shifts (which is why stealing Garland's seat was a top priority despite all of Grassley et al.'s long history of sanctimonious pronouncements about the proud traditions of the Senate and blah blah; Gorsuch is even to the right of Scalia on all of these topics). There has been a decades-long effort on the right to shift power to moneyed corporate interests and away from the public (defanging regulators, opposing anti-trust action and promoting corporate consolidation across many industries, supporting binding arbitration, allowing unlimited anonymous political spending, privatizing public institutions and selling public assets, encouraging various kinds of tax dodges, taking the corporate side when ambiguous fine print in contracts borders on outright fraud, ...), tracking soaring levels of wealth/power inequality, and the party is all-in on it from top to bottom.
I think his point was that democracy is the responsibility of the people being governed, so if you don't like it then it becomes your responsibility to do something about it. (Although I could be mis-interpreting.)
Except that "representatives" of one of the two parties is explicitly trying to help people here and the other isn't. So pushing the narrative of the two-party system being the problem doesn't apply here.
There's been one election cycle since the current administration took office and that party was punished for its hostility to citizens and failure to deliver on its promises. So while the system has severe flaws, it's working as intended in this aspect.
I dunno the nuances in America, but from an Australian perspective; this sort of rule is a great target for removal, it is too prescriptive. It would be better to have a rule 'costs must be clearly identified to consumers before the time of purchase' and then hit everyone with it.
Companies have to comply with regulation. That literally means they need to have a person who audits that the rule is being complied with (amongst other compliance duties). If the rule is not being complied with, someone must fix it even if the airline ticket would be easily comparable without the rule. Management must put valuable time and attention into this process because they are obliged to comply with the rules.
On the other hand, the government has to check the rule. They have to read it, interpret it and enforce it. If they don't then why exactly bother having it?
Less rules (but still clear, and possibly with guidelines that while not strictly mandatory are /strongly recommended/) is easier to audit and enforce.
Good point, this is a great candidate for replacement with a more broadly-defined regulation, like the replacement regulation the white house also ann- oh, wait.
It's based on information but not equality. In fact it's based on unequal information. Otherwise there would be no need for a market. The government could successfully plan everything.
But this is a bit of an aside. I agree more transparency is always good, all else being equal. And I agree that undisclosed fees are borderline fraud.
Well, knowledge of preferences is information. But also, some people know or at least understand things better than others. Those people (all else equal) are better entrepreneurs or investors.
Some regulations ARE burdensome and cause problems, possibly more harm than benefit.
And perhaps this is silly and unnecessary. But now that it's already been implemented by every airline, I completely fail to see any value whatsoever in REMOVING it; if anything, that is an equally burdensome 'regulation'. (of course they don't HAVE to remove the notices, but if they don't, suddenly they're at an apparent price disadvantage compared to the competition that does).
Customers aren't entitled to know what something will cost before they buy it or in a way that enables comparisons.
On the other hand, unless airlines force customers to sign NDAs on pricing or similar, they can and will compare prices and whatever else about the companies (like QoS) elsewhere. Word of mouth, now amplified through social media, can be very powerful too.
> "How can we possibly expect a business whose entire model is the juggling of pricing and availability information for maximum profit to EVER be able to figure out how to display the costs for ancillary services at point of purchase?"
3rd party fare comparisons sites could learn these prices based on history and might provide that info to users for profit.
I thought the point of capitalism is to acquire capital at any cost. What you're talking about sounds like a patch to make it kinda work for other purposes.
No. The Free Market is a specific distributed economic value apportionment tool, and like any tool it has requirements to operate efficiently, failure modes, and no inherent "goals". Amongst the key foundational requirements is Information Symmetry: in an ideal Free Market exchange, participants all have access to full & identical information. The more asymmetrical the information, the less efficient the exchange will be until you see full market failure.
Now yes, in the real world there are certainly man areas where it can get complex (such as processing ability). But for a party that claims to champion the Free Market, things like information symmetry and cost internalization should be core goals. Information symmetry in particular is low hanging fruit, it should be both utterly uncontroversial and straight forward for businesses to implement as obviously they're keeping track of all of it internally anyway. It is explicitly and incontrovertibly anti-Free Market to support efforts to hide pricing information from any party to a transaction, full stop.
It is a shame that the Republicans have so often been opposed to the Free Market in their actual actions and policies, whatever words they choose to say, given that the Democrats are also not all-weather friends to it. It's a very powerful tool that could be used for a lot more good then it is. I guess it doesn't help though that so few people in the general population have any idea what it actually is. The name probably doesn't help either: "Free" and "Market" are two of the most overloaded words in the English language, and the name might encourage people to imagine they know what it is through "common sense" in a way they wouldn't about something like quantum chromodynamics. Economics (along with probability and statistics) is sorely under taught in most public education curriculums I've read, despite being key to modern life.
If you buy directly from the airline, it shows bag fees. If you are buying through a third party website, you can easily look up the airline's website and see the domestic and international baggage policies and fees before you buy. If you are ever confused, you can call the free customer support. Why is specific regulation forcing information to be presented a certain way necessary?
> Currently, airlines are only required to disclose bag fees, and even then they don't have to provide an exact price. Some airlines provide a range of possible fees in sometimes complex charts.
> Many consumers are unable to determine the true cost of a ticket because fees are often hard to find or decipher, the government says.
> More recently, some airlines have begun offering consumers not only a stripped-down "base" airfare, but also a choice of several packages with some of the once-free services added back into the cost of a ticket, but at higher prices. With packages and a la carte fees multiplying, comparison shopping for airfares is becoming more difficult, consumer advocates say.
Yea, I know the ideology. I was criticizing it. It's foolish to believe that under conditions of regulatory capture, which is incentivised by capitalism and made possible by gross inequality putting power into few hands, that capitalists will do anything other that accrue capital at all costs.
So you theorize that all airlines will implement completely random fees for baggage so no one has any idea what a flight will really cost...
It seems that at best there will be a small amount of information asymmetry and that should the randomness of bag prices get too bad, someone will be incentivized by the market to publish bag prices.
At worst, it will lead to something like GasBuddy where consumers input what flight they took and how much the bag cost.
The idea that the market for airlines will completely break down because there is no regulation on bag fees seems a little... far fetched.
You're arguing against a bunch of things I didn't say. I didn't say even a single word about the 'market for airlines' (or about the market for air travel).
My comment was a direct response to the parent comment, which claimed information symmetry isn't cited as a requirement for functioning markets.
That particular statement is untrue, so I replied.
I'm glad you brought up the stock market. Insider trading laws exist in the US and most developed countries, precisely because information symmetry is important to the functioning of equities markets.
EDIT: Don't take my word for it. Look at the SEC web site's description of their purpose. Excerpt (emphasis mine): "To achieve this, the SEC requires public companies to disclose meaningful financial and other information to the public. This provides a common pool of knowledge for all investors to use to judge for themselves whether to buy, sell, or hold a particular security. Only through the steady flow of timely, comprehensive, and accurate information can people make sound investment decisions."
I mean, the Wikipedia article you linked about information asymmetry characterizes it as a cause of market problems and inefficiencies, including adverse selection ("The Market for Lemons"). To say that you need information symmetry for the market to work well is just another way of saying the same thing - at least in the kinds of situations described.
At a high level I see your frustration. But, for airlines, the US government has implemented lots of rules around pricing/fee displays, website accessibility, length of time on the tarmac, and tons more.
So, I disagree, in this space, with the "every single time" part.
I think OP was trying to express that "every single time" these rules are turned down, it is with the idea that any regulation harms the free market, which OP clearly explained is not the case.
The fact that some rules did get implemented does not detract from that.
Obviously OP was exaggerating. If you are unwilling to see past the literal content to the meaning, then you certainly won't see what the rest of us see.
OF COURSE THEY ARE.
Why is it that every...single...time a rule that purports to give "more information to the customer" is deemed "an unreasonable regulatory burden?" The ENTIRE FUCKING POINT of capitalism is that market participants are supposed to trade based on equality of information.
But no, not now. Customers aren't entitled to know what something will cost before they buy it or in a way that enables comparisons. That's just unreasonable. How can we possibly expect a business whose entire model is the juggling of pricing and availability information for maximum profit to EVER be able to figure out how to display the costs for ancillary services at point of purchase?
Damn.