Jack Kemp forwards this update tohis piece at the Aviary:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/04/whats_behind_uniteds_unfriendly_skies.html

By Monica Showalter

United Airlines' big toxic public relations dumpster fire just seems to get worse the longer it burns. What an incredible take of corporate boneheadedness.

To make room for a deadheading flight crew, a passenger was dragged off a flight kicking and screaming as rent-a-cops bloodied his face. First, the airline's executives dug in their heels and said the problem was the passenger, not their policies. Then, as their stock tanked, they finally apologized to the passenger. Then they apologized again.

By that point, the damage was done. The passenger said he was in the hospital recovering from his wounds and lawyering up. The company's market cap had skidded by $1.5 billion. The coveted Asian flight routes market was in for trouble as Chinese, Vietnamese, and other social media sites lit up with charges of racism and vows never to fly that airline. Congress was vowing to investigate. And the speed with which social media was able to transmit the hysterical incident on tape rocketed and rocketed around the world millions of times over as the company stumbled around with different responses.

To what does one attribute such pig-stupid corporate behavior in a consumer industry such as an airline? The inflexibility of the airline was mind-boggling. You'd never see Starbucks or Michaels Arts & Crafts or Amazon treat a customer like that. Except of course, airport contract workers at Starbucks – a different breed.

Airlines are full of such indignities – massive overcharges for baggage, capricious gate closings, paid carby snacks of paltry selection, insufficient overhead bin space with weak enforcement for violators, inadequate accommodation for bumped passengers (once when I was a college student, I was bumped overnight into a hotel and given no voucher for food), lost and delayed luggage (come pick it up yourself if we find it), lousy compensation for lost luggage, no accommodation for bawling babies or spillover customers from adjacent seats – and that's before you run into the tender hands of the TSA or high airport parking costs.
What is behind this? The airlines themselves, for sure, but it looks as though the worker inflexibility may be the work of outdated unions at odds with the modern world – working to letter, not my job, mac, put the customer last may be part of it. The other part is its flip-side – an out-of-touch corporate elite that finds that situation just fine, given the inability to press for better conditions. Working together, they really couldn't empathize as a company with a doctor passenger who said he needed to be at a hospital to see patients and couldn't be bumped? He was just a computer-generated random number to them, and they were determined to throw him off anyway. And it doesn't appear that they are even bothering with the technical details anymore. Whether of honoring their three-year-old pledge of assigned seats or giving passengers their bills of rights as the law requires, they are just sending in the goons.

Read the rest at American Thinker

Things got interesting in the comments section to this article where more points were brought up. When VonMisesJr related United Airline's behavior to the Patriot Act, the corporate state taking our rights, and the teachings of Hayek in "The Road to Serfdom," some people accused him of misinterpreting some history and facts. I, however, thought that he explained the growing self-importance of airport security rent-a-cops - and one I had to deal with - to these major political forces going back decades.

Here below is VonMisesJr's comment, followed by Army Aviator's comment and my own. I've left out some of the others because I wanted to concentrate on what just these three people wrote as comments.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/04/what_were_all_missing_from_the_united_airlines_fiasco_comments.html#disqus_thread

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VonMisesJr replying to Schmutzli • 3 hours ago
The author is head of the local Shenandoah County Freedom Caucus but speaks like the GOP Shenandoah County Establishment that he also apparently leads. This is NOT simply a poor decision by a CEO and poor PR. It is a result of Statism and the loss of Liberty due to both Parties colluding with the Fortune 500 in a Fascist/Corporatist cabal.
G.W. Bush gave us TARP and told us that "I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system." He gave us the Patriot Act where our Bill of Rights was shredded regarding Amendments I, II, IV, V, VI, VII and VIII. This provided the ability for Obama to bailout GM stealing the Bond Holders Investments (who are second in line only behind Accounts Receivable) and give their money to the Unions to Fund their Pensions and Health Care. The Patriot Act allowed Obama to conduct surveillance on a private citizen and Campaign Volunteer Carter Page to spy on Trump and his Campaign and incoming Administration.
It was the Airport Police who beat the crap our of Dr. Dao, not the employees of United Airlines. They called in the Police because they are told that Police Power Force is to be used against anyone who disrupts. But by implementing authoritarian tactics, the government has effectively prevented people from their Amendment I Right to Petition the government. If you talk back, you get punched out.
Hayek in "The Road to Serfdom" explained that Central Planning leads to Totalitarianism. Hans-Hermann Hoppe posited that there are several steps on the way to totalitarianism (High-Tax Socialist Democracy). They follow the Bismarck model of building a Welfare State and buying votes. They "democratize" government so that many people covet government jobs with their Pensions and Benefits, and if you're lucky, you get to beat the crap out of or molest some doctor, grandma or cripple. They not only rob from the Middle Class taxing them to buy votes from the non-productive, but they also cripple SMB to create Monopolies and Mercantilism with the likes of Boeing, GE, Caterpillar, GM and United Airlines.
The Bismarck model also creates a massive Bureaucracy, so that unlike Monarchy where one can hate the cruel King, there is no target in a faceless Bureaucracy. Finally, Hoppe wrote that while Regulation does not directly benefit the Central government, it uses these myriad of Rules to stifle "We the People." He suggested that the U.S. and Britain defeated Nazi Germany and Mussolini Italy because their Regulation stifled their economy to the extent that they could not adapt to the war-time economic demands. It appears that after Bush and Obama, we have become much like the Nazi and Mussolini Fascist Bureaucracies.



ArmyAviator replying to VonMisesJr • 9 minutes ago
Otto von Bismarck was a brilliant man and was a master of human nature. While supporting the trappings of monarchy, he knew that the key to power was the people. Maintenance of the King and later Emperor in Berlin, was key to HIS power, yet as you have illustrated power centralized into one figure, such as a king can be hazardous.
Bismarck knew about Socialism and realized benefits of some Socialist principles in order to maintain good order. The revolution of 1848 was still clearly in his mind as he rose to power and assumed the Chancellorship of Prussia under William I, who was to become Emperor (Kaiser) when the German Empire was established in 1871.
Bismarck sought to rule Germany via a MASSIVE bureaucracy that he controlled. The German bureaucracy heavily regulated everyday society and while people were at time angered by bureau regulations, they did not vent their anger at either the Kaiser, or the Chancellor. Unknown bureaucrats were blamed.
Bismarck passed out free goodies to the masses in efforts to placate their poverty and station in life, in efforts to maintain power and control. This worked. High taxes and heavy regulations imposed by unknown bureaucrats kept the government in wealth and power.
The German Empire of 1871-1918, truly was a Welfare State and the "Bismarckian system" stands as the founding elements of current Liberal Socialist ideology regarding government. Yet, one must remember that Imperial Germany was nonetheless a TOTALITARIAN system of governance. The government did dole out goodies to the masses, but maintained strict control by imposing Deutsche Ordnung, or "German Order" on the very people who thought they were benefitting, by government benevolence. It proved to be a sad footnote in German history.
World War I, was fought by those masses who blindly followed the leadership of their Kaiser and his government, much to their detriment! An entire generation of men and women, was lost! This would never have been possible, had Bismarck not brought about a Welfare State that ingrained devotion to duty, so that the "bennies" would never stop! (Scroll down past the space gap to read Jack Kemp's reply)
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JackKemp replying to VonMisesJr • 20 minutes ago
Whatever the alleged imperfections of VonMisesJr's argument, he (and the article author) have perfectly explained the cause of an incident with a rent-a-cop (police dept. reject) that happened to me after I passed through the boarding area security at LaGuardia Airport in NY City one Christmas season. I was then getting my shoes shined near the boarding gates when a minor guard started to berate me for not really celebrating the Christmas season. How he knew that I wasn't going to visit my family in another city and attend church there is beyond me. But I did give him a short, polite, and truthful answer that shut him up. I replied, "With all due respect, it's not my holiday. I'm Jewish." He had no reply for that.

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