OT: Because letting a few huge corporations self-regulate is a GREAT idea!

[Alan Baker]

'In an announcement that included near-verbatim quotes from several
aviation Big Four lobbyists, Donald Trump announced plans to shut down
the FAA and let the incumbents regulate themselves.'

<http://boingboing.net/2017/06/06/what-could-go-wrong.html>

'If Trump can stop tweeting horrible things long enough to let the
lobbyist-funded swamp-dwellers in his cabinet and Congress make this
happen, there will be two enormous problems with this arrangement. First
and most obviously, the industry will cut corners on safety and people
will die. Corporations are pathological externalizers: any costs that
can be put off to other parties are. That's why corporations pollute,
kill their workers, and defraud their customers: in the
next-quarter-focused version of shareholder capitalism, anything that
adds an extra dollar to this quarter's balance sheet is the duty of
management.

But the second problem is, if anything, more pernicious: letting a
highly concentrated industry regulate itself inevitably leads to rules
that prevent any new competitors from appearing on the scene. New
entrants will come up with practices that are different, and potentially
superior, to the ones in place now -- practices that are difficult to
match if you've already sunk billions into the old system. By refusing
to consider these practices on their merits -- and simply ruling them
out on the basis that they're not compliant with the old rules -- the
incumbents can create a system where any improvement is literally illegal.

These two are a deadly combination. Without competition from new
entrants, the incumbents can deliver less and less value to the country
(and retain more and more value for their shareholders) without the fear
of losing customers to an upstart. Privatizing aviation safety allows
the Big Four to treat us worse and make us less safe, and removes any
floor on such bad behavior by eliminating competition.'