WHEN everyone else at the airline counter for the flight from Hicksville to Washington was sighing, checking their watches and using their elbows on their neighbours, Alfred Kahn would be smiling. And later, cramped in his seat between some 20-stone wrestler and a passenger whose “sartorial, hirsute and ablutional state” all offended him, snacking from a tiny packet of peanuts that had cost him a dollar, he would sometimes allow the smile to spread under his Groucho Marx moustache into a big, wide, gloating grin.

For Mr Kahn had made this crowd and packed this aircraft. His deregulation of America's airlines in the 1970s opened up the skies to the people, for better and worse. And though, being an economist, he could not help muttering about the imperfection of societies and systems and the absurdity of predictions—and though, being an inveterate puncturer of himself, he would demand a paternity test if anyone called him the father of the deregulated world—his adventures with airlines led on to the freeing of the trucking, telecoms and power industries, and heralded the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions.

When he took over the Civil Aeronautics Board for President Jimmy Carter in 1977 air travel was regulated to the hilt, with prices, routes and returns all fixed and aircraft, which could compete only on the number of flights and the meals they served, flying half-full. Mr Khan, furiously resisted by companies, pilots and unions, removed the rules. As an academic, author of “The Economics of Regulation” in two stout volumes, he was eager to see those elusive and fascinating things, marginal costs, brought into play: to let prices follow the constantly shifting value of an aircraft seat as demand changed or departure time loomed, or indeed as shiny new jet planes depreciated above him, just “marginal costs with wings”.

He had no idea what would happen when he took the restraints off, except that, at a time of raging inflation, he was pretty sure fare prices would fall. The great wave of mergers, predations and bankruptcies that followed shocked him; the reconcentration of the industry into giant hub-and-spoke operations scandalised him; the disappearance of the humble Allegheny Airlines flight that used to take him to work, transformed into USAir's transcontinental ambitions, annoyed him; but he could only be delighted that by 1986 90% of Americans were flying on discounts, and that the savings to consumers were reckoned at around $20 billion a year.

His success was all the more surprising because he was an old-fashioned Democrat, from his shiny pate to the stockinged feet in which, like a lizard, he would pad around the office. (His party piece was Stephen Sondheim's “Send in the Clowns”, dedicated to the Reagan administration.) Yet his thinking had scarcely a shred of Keynesianism in it. Mr Kahn sometimes talked wistfully of price caps, especially when he was appointed Mr Carter's “inflation tsar” in 1978, a thankless, staffless, hopeless job which he threw in after 15 months, inflation riding high as ever, declaring that no one else would be fool enough to do it. But politics always ran second to economics, and his economics was the classical kind, in which everything was left to the markets. The government, if it couldn't be useful, should get the hell out of the way. And this, as a federal bureaucrat, he did, enthusiastically undermining his own agency until it ceased to be.

A fruit substitute

Really, he said, he was a show-off and a ham; he loved the spotlight, and if he hadn't been such a brain at school and college, steaming effortlessly (if short-sightedly) towards the economics department at Cornell, he would have gone in for musicals. The songs of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin were on his lips, as well as numbers from “The Pirates of Penzance” and “The Yeoman of the Guard”, in which he sang and danced until his 80s.

Breezily, too, he winged his way in government. He was an academic, after all; he had nothing to lose, so he would speak his mind. Asked once by a reporter if he could defend the defence budget, he said “No”. Told off for using the word “depression” in public, he replaced it with “banana”, and announced that the country was heading for its worst banana in 45 years. Told off by the head of United Fruit for using “banana”, he made it “kumquat”. As the oil price continued to soar he called the Arab producers “schnooks”, earning yet another rebuke; but he didn't care. He could always go back to being dean of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, as he did in 1980, even though “dean is to faculty as a hydrant is to a dog.”

His great passion was to set things free: not just the airlines, not just his own wickedly candid tongue, but also the English language. In a famous memo at the start of his stint at the CAB he begged staff to write drafts as if they were destined for their children or their friends; to eschew “herein” and “regarding” and “prior to” in favour of “here”, and “about” and “before”. Away with gobbledygook and pomposity, though “a final example of pomposity, perhaps, is this memorandum itself.” No airs and graces, and preferably no “Alfred” either: just Fred, jetting here and there, round and about, with his discount ticket and his warm, wide, proud, unstoppable smile.