Stephen Breyer’s True Legacy

POLITICS & POLICY
A Laker Airways McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 airliner in flight, May 30, 1979.
(Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Who said it?

Someone sitting in a room with a pencil and piece of paper is not going to be able to figure out the proper airline rate any better than allowing the consumers and producers in a competitive marketplace to experiment with rates and service, and permit those that provide the lowest rates or the best service or the proper combination to survive, while the others fall by the wayside. In other words, efforts, both here and abroad, to have people guess what the market would produce if it were free to create a price are so very different in their result from what the market does produce when it is free that it becomes a kind of parody of a free-market situation. And people found that it often would hurt the consumers and the producers as well, compared to what would happen if you allowed the market to function on its own.

Milton Friedman? F. A. Hayek? Walter Williams? Thomas Sowell?

No, this quotation is from Stephen Breyer.

Yes, that Stephen Breyer, the progressive Supreme Court justice whose retirement is forthcoming. With the news of President Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to succeed him today, I thought I’d reflect on the most important part of Breyer’s legacy: airline deregulation.

In the early days of large-scale commercial air travel, flying was something only the rich could afford. Even as technology progressed and planes got larger and safer, air travel was still financially out of reach for most Americans. The industry was strictly regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which set fares and decided which airlines could fly which routes.

By the late 1970s, with inflation soaring and voters upset about the economy, even Democrats were willing to give the free market a try. Jimmy Carter appointed Alfred Kahn, a regulatory economist from Cornell, to run the Civil Aeronautics Board, with an eye to reform. Ted Kennedy took notice and began holding hearings in the Senate about airline deregulation. It was there that Stephen Breyer got involved as a Senate staffer.

Only interstate travel was federally regulated; intrastate travel was not. As a result, Alaska, California, and Texas all had cheap air travel within their state borders, much cheaper than flights of a similar distance across state lines. Other countries with less onerous regulations had more accessible air travel. Airlines in the U.S. looked like they were headed for the same fate that passenger rail suffered in the early ’70s: bankruptcy from regulatory strangulation. The evidence for deregulation was flowing in from every angle, and Breyer’s work in the Senate played a huge role in organizing and disseminating that evidence.

In 1978, Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act with huge bipartisan majorities. President Carter signed it into law. It did the impossible: It abolished a federal government agency. The Civil Aeronautics Board was no more, the industry was opened up to price competition, and flying was no longer a rich man’s privilege.

In saying this was Stephen Breyer’s true legacy, I’m being a bit facetious, but only a little bit. As airline analyst Michael Derchin wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently, Breyer himself “has cited his research for the Airline Deregulation Act as among his best and most significant work.” And for good reason. Derchin records the numbers:

Since deregulation, average domestic round-trip real airfares have plunged about 60%, to $302 from $695. Load factors—the percentage of seats filled on each flight—stood at 84% just before the pandemic, compared with 55% before deregulation. In the early 1970s, 49% of U.S. adults had flown. In 2020 the share was 87%.

In his trademark style of using eleven words where one word would do, Breyer told the Air and Space Law Forum of the American Bar Association in 1999:

What I would say the process that I was involved in did was take an issue that hardly anyone had ever heard of — four economists at Brookings had written about it — take that issue, and through the efforts of lots of people, some of whom were elected, some of whom were not, some of whom were on staffs, some of whom were in the academy, took all their efforts and raised that level to what I call a level of political visibility, where elected officials would begin, seriously, to think change may happen. And once they think change may happen, they begin to evaluate, “Should it happen?” And at that point, everyone takes it seriously, and with this issue, once I think the merits were explored fully, and I believe the hearings helped do that, to begin to take it seriously was, I think, inevitably, through learning about it to come to the conclusion that major change was in the public interest. We didn’t bring about that change. What we did do was start the ball rolling in a significant way.

If you made it through all of that, I commend you. Suffice it to say that, yes, Breyer was part of getting the ball rolling on airline deregulation. He wrote a lot of words as a Supreme Court justice that will not be long remembered. But he deserves to be remembered for his greatest act of public service: helping to get the federal government out of the air-travel market.

Articles You May Like

Former RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel becomes NBC News political analyst
Vanderbilt students at anti-Israel protest ridiculed for calling 911 over tampon ‘toxic shock’ panic: ‘Like a comedy sketch’
Breaking: Massive Bridge Collapse in Baltimore; Large Sections of Key Bridge Fell into Patapsco River After Ship Takes Out Support Column
After Souring on Lemon, X Eyeing Real Journalist Catherine Herridge
OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP By J6 Political Hostage Richard ‘Bigo’ Barnett: ‘Wielding The Sword Of Truth Requires Much Sacrifice’

Leave a Comment - No Links Allowed:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *