White House scraps proposal requiring airlines to disclose bag fees
thehill.com
thehill.com
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.
So, I disagree, in this space, with the "every single time" part.
The fact that some rules did get implemented does not detract from that.
There's probably lower hanging fruit out there at this point. Ever shop at Kohl's? Their pricing practices are pretty shady.
I'm really not interested in where you are taking it, sorry.
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.
Those who are opposed to regulation generally cite regulation as being in opposition to the free market.
I can't even find much on the subject compared to information asymmetry.
Here is an example frequently used in introductory microeconomics courses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
In this example, information symmetry would be better for the majority of market participants, and no worse for the remainder.
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.
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.
A lot of the value in things like the stock market is to disseminate the various information asymmetries in the form of price.
There's a reason guys like Paul Krugman write books on economics rather than trade the market.
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."
Because it never happens like you imagine it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/govt-airlines-should-disclose-b...
> 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.
Which of this is good?
No, that's just what some books have been sold saying, modern neo-liberal capitalism operates exclusively in the opposite manner.
There's a reason everyone likes service fees rather than membership fees - service fees are charged after the service has been rendered.
[citation needed]
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).
Correct, but some people subscribe to the view that any and all regulation is bad
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
But that would mean an entirely different political culture.
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.
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.
3rd party fare comparisons sites could learn these prices based on history and might provide that info to users for profit.
This is all made possible by an increasingly desperate and increasingly irrelevant white "Christian" movement that seems to have completely bought into the ends justifying the means to the point of electing a pedophile over a Democrat (Alabama).
Interestingly this actually seems to be right out of Vladimir Putin's political playbook. Putin's stranglehold on power was and is made possibly by him placating a politically active conservative movement within Russia that also feared sliding into irrelevance and that their beliefs and way of life were under attack by what they perceived to be an increasingly hostile and militant progressive class.
This simply won't change while the vast majority of people will vote for their particular party no matter what. And that goes both ways.
I bet we could find a few airliners in the campaign finances of the GOP. Technically still public info I think? Although I doubt Americans even care at this point.
> Mia Garlick, Facebook’s director of Asia-Pacific safety programs, said, “We are committed to helping ensure that journalists around the world feel safe on Facebook as they connect their audiences with meaningful stories. We permit open and critical discussion of people who are featured in the news or have a large public audience based on their profession or chosen activities, but will remove any threats or hate speech directed at journalists, even those who are public figures, when reported to us.”
Maybe this is just the result of lobbying, but people frequently fail to compare the ex ante case with the proposed legislation; they just buy the [putatively] pro-consumer excitement of the proposed legislation hook, line, and sinker.
It looks as though this was a proposal that has now been scrapped.
So we've been living, till now, in a world not governed by this proposal.
In that world, have you ever been shocked at a bag fee? I haven't. I either expect no fee (at United, where I have status), or expect one (everywhere else).
And what about the bag fees that airline passengers paid from 1903 to 2010, when they were totally legal with no disclosure obligations, and assessed even against people bringing no bags at all on the plane? Were those high ticket prices fair to the innocent people traveling light?
Estimating 2010 as the year when most airlines starting charging.
It's similar to pork -- congress can write: spend $X on whatever; or they can write: spend $1 on project A, $2 on project B, etc with a final total of $X. If congress writes the first, then the executive branch will make the decisions about the specifics of how $X will be spent.
If congress does not want the executive branch to decide, it's up to Congress to put the details into the law, and restrain the authority of the agencies. Federal rules can never override a law passed by congress.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo1743668...
See: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3d45/15c4f13933f50394a0a220...
> The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional,* and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution.
https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...
Regulatory agencies such as FDA and EPA exist because it actually takes an agency to do a competent job regulating drugs and medical devices and investigating the toxicity of effluent. They were created by Congress, but under the Executive branch.