> Isn't each individual airline is itself a command economy, internally

Yes. The difference is that an "airline command economy" collapsing from incompetence is an uneventful bankruptcy, and a national command economy collapsing means civil war and anarchy.

That's a trivially true statement for any descriptor which can be applied to both a business and a nation? National economic collapse generally means civil war and anarchy in almost any case.

Nation is like "too big to fail" businesses and both are bad because of this. Free market system requires everyone to be able to be eliminated from the competition.

Although sometimes I imaged UBI to instead enhance free market because it allows every person to contribute to the competition and can still fail gracefully. Instead poor person is now also "too big to fall" because they're betting their livelihood for each proposal.

But Sears gave Donald Rumsfeld a lifetime discount card. Which brings us to the major government subsidy of US airlines. People work for airlines at reduced wages to have available very great discounts on their personal travel, totally untaxed. Live wherever you want, and commute on the airline! Second major subsidy is that people who pay or have their employers pay for airline tickets as deductible business expenses manage to use their kickbacks (free flights for repeat customers) for personal travel untaxed. Eliminate those subsidies and watch what happens.

> Isn't each individual airline is itself a command economy, internally?

The difference is that airlines, no matter how large they are, have to deal with the reality via market forces. So there's a feedback mechanism that will eventually point out if your commands are correct.

Command economies (or sectors of economies) don't have such a mechanism, so they can stay inefficient forever.

>or sectors of economies

I would argue that the energy sector of most developed nations as a counterexample. I think we can go back and forth all day about the extent to which they are true command economies, but the ultimate point that natural monopolies can and often are successfully managed by nations in a centrally-planned manner I think is clear.

Oh! Let's talk about the energy sector! I worked professionally in that area.

Europe and the US are most definitely not counter-examples. Power generation is almost everywhere done commercially. Transmission is more often publicly owned, but even that is not universal.

The closest example to the command economy is rail in Europe. And it's predictably struggling.

I fear you are confusing the concepts of central planning (which commercial monopolies can and often do have) and government control or ownership.

The European grid is not centrally planned. It's certainly affected by the government policy, but its development is driven by private profit-seeking companies.

Right, so let's say Duke Energy is a private profit-seeking company in the eastern US. In many areas it is the only energy company in town. Are you trying to say that, just because it's a private company, it's not centrally planned? That each section of its business is in some sort of free market?

Private corporate ownership and central planning are not mutually exclusive. Texas is maybe the only place in the US where energy production isn't centrally planned, for any reasonably local definition of "central."

> Are you trying to say that, just because it's a private company, it's not centrally planned?

Correct. For example, the government is not saying that Duke must put ten gas power plants in a particular location for $10 by 2025.

> That each section of its business is in some sort of free market?

Funnily enough, this is pretty close to how Duke operates. The central holding company only deals with the strategic planning, and its subsidiaries make their own plans to implement these plans.

But anyway, even in the areas where Duke has a legal monopoly, it has to contend with other utilities, otherwise its monopoly will end.

> Private corporate ownership and central planning are not mutually exclusive.

They are. Central planning from the government means that there's no meaning in private ownership. Centrally planned industries are not affected by the market forces, so they can become inefficient without the market feedback.

Central goal setting is fine, but not planning.

It looks like we're working off fundamentally different definitions of central planning, so of course we disagree. Central planning, in my vernacular, does not at all imply government control. It simply means that most decisions are made by some sort of central authority and executed by decentralized agents, rather than plans being made by the agents themselves. This is how most non-franchise businesses operate.

If you require central planning to retain an element of planning by the government in your definition, then I agree, energy is not a good example of this.

I mean I'm just saying that it's a regulated monopoly as the article was saying that airlines used to be.

> Isn't each individual airline is itself a command economy, internally?

Perhaps, but in competition with others. Governments compete too, but the cost of switching brands is inordinately high, so the competition there is too weak to generate better results among the various governments.

Idk why everyone interpreted this comment as asserting that we should switch to a centrally planned economy nationally, I'm just clarifying that the argument "centrally planned economies don't work, therefore nationalizing natural monopolies is folly" doesn't hold water.

> natural monopolies

Most of the "natural monopolies" we have were created directly as such by governments.

Electric utilities? There used to be competition. Idk what happened exactly, but then we had no competition and they were regulated.

Public transportation? New York's subways (90% of existing track!) were built by two competing companies, then NYC regulated them into bankruptcy, and then NYC acquired them. Similarly with busses and trolleys. There used to be a vibrant trolley system in New York, then the city killed it and "nationalized" it. Compare to Buenos Aires, where they never nationalized the bus system, and which has a privately operated bus system that is the envy of every American city!

Cable systems also had competition, but then all the towns regulated them.

If Edison and Westinghouse could compete a century ago, they could compete today.

Roads are pretty much the main case where I'd agree there's a natural monopoly, and then only because there's not enough physical surface space for competition.

In any case, airlines are far far from natural monopolies. Airports might be, but not airlines.

Natural monopoly in the formal macroeconomic meaning of very high fixed cost with virtually zero marginal cost (ex. it costs ~nothing to transmit an extra watt of power, fly one more passenger, insure one more person, etc). In these cases basic econometric theory shows that production cost is lowest with a single provider, adding two or more competitors increases total cost of production without changing the total output. Obviously nothing obtains these conditions precisely in the real world, but in general the principal holds for big infra stuff. I think your example of a bus system faces the obvious fact that the US dumped a ton of resources into private auto travel which makes it challenging for any public/shared transit to succeed.

The power grid is another classic example of a natural monopoly, it costs a lot to make a power plant and hang a bunch of wires, but once it's running it's basically free to send a small unit of additional power to a person. For this reason the US was going to nationalize the grid back in the 20s but at the last minute decided to lease to a "regulated monopoly" private corp (IIRC it was some dude in Chicago who convinced them to give him the lease). Texas tried to roll this back in the like the 90s and their power costs shot through the roof and still remain nationally high.