To leap free from an overweening bureaucracy is a benefit but we do then have to be careful about the home grown equivalents:
Ryanair's spat with the Civil Aviation Authority escalated on Wednesday night as plans emerged to axe all domestic routes and all services from Britain to non-EU countries.
The budget carrier will only operate out of London Stansted airport and will cull 13 routes to Morocco, Ukraine, Montenegro, and Norway.
We do sort of assume that consumers like being able to fly on Ryanair - we’re not quite sure why, we’ve done it and enjoyment perhaps is not le mot juste - from non-Stanstead airports. After all, the airline gained customers by doing so and so those customers must have thought the bus in the sky approach worth it.
So too about flights to non-EU countries from the UK. People took the deal on offer, it was an increase in consumer utility therefore.
So, why the spat, why the action?
A row erupted in December between Ryanair and the CAA over pre-Brexit rule changes. At the centre of the dispute is Ryanair’s use of so-called “wet-leasing”, where airlines hire aircraft and crew to operate services on their behalf.
Ryanair only has one UK-registered aircraft. The CAA wanted less than half of Ryanair’s UK services to be run by “wet leased” aircraft.
No one is claiming that wet leased aircraft are less safe. If that were so then the CAA shouldn’t allow them at all of course. But there is still this insistence:
The CAA’s Paul Smith said at the time: “A UK airline with a significant presence in the UK, should not rely heavily on using wet-leased, foreign-registered aircraft.”
Umm, why? We find it difficult to believe that the CAA is so hungry for the £146 registration fee that they’re willing to cause the severing of such international links.
It is true that other countries - the EU itself - have weird rules about who may fly and where on what sort of registered aircraft. But that’s exactly the sort of thing we’ve been trying to leap free of. As Joan Robinson said about trade itself, just because someone throws rocks in their own harbours no reason to chuck ‘em in our own.
At a deeper level this is akin to the shareholder primacy argument. That has the merit of there being the one single objective of a company. The same should be true of regulatory bodies - the one, single, simple, objective of the organisation. This being the consumer interest. That’s what they’re there for, to enable the maximisation of consumer utility and nothing else.
The CAA is, perhaps simply as a result of amour propre, reducing the choices of consumers and thus acting against their, our, interests.
The government should tell the CAA to go boil its head. After all, the entire point of the system is that they all work for us, in our interests. Something the CAA quite obviously isn’t at present.