Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Opinion columnist

So United Airlines has apologized for killing a passenger’s dog. Reportedly, a flight attendant ordered the owner to place her black French bulldog in the overhead compartment, where it died, apparently of suffocation. (And almost immediately thereafter, it came out that United had also flown another passenger’s dog to Japan by mistake.)

United has apologized, but a lot of my friends on social media are promising never to fly United again. Of course, United knows that these threats — like the threats to boycott United after it took away NRA members’ discounts, or broke a man’s guitar, or ordered a passenger to be dragged off a plane — are ultimately not much to worry about. Because in today’s airline world, there’s not a lot of competition.

The fact is that between airline mergers and hub-and-spoke networks, most air routes are dominated by one or two airlines. It’s not like the heady competitive days of the 1980s, which is why fares are up and service is down.

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And given the risks involved in starting up an airline, and the advantages that big established airlines hold, the prospects of getting new competition in the United States are slim. Unless...

Unless that competition comes from somewhere else. I think that we should lower fares, and improve service, by letting select foreign airlines carry passengers between American cities. (This is called “cabotage” in the trade).

As Matthew Yglesias wrote in Slate, "This is one of those ideas that’s so commonsensical, people tend not to realize it isn’t permitted.” You can fly British Airways from New York to London, but if your trip starts in, say, Knoxville you have to fly that first leg on some American carrier, like United. And if you just want to fly from Knoxville to New York, it’s the same.

This has the effect of protecting American carriers from competition, which is the whole point. (Oh, there’s some talk about national security reasons, but that’s mostly balderdash.)

Protecting American carriers from competition means inflating American prices and reducing consumers’ choices — and airlines’ incentives to provide good, or even decent, service. (Like the old Bell System, their motto seems to be: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.”)

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Many foreign airlines offer superior service, as most experienced travellers can attest. And many would leap at the chance to serve American routes.

Of course, we wouldn’t want to open it up to just anyone. American domestic routes should be limited to airlines that meet American standards of safety and training. But it’s not as if we’d be cutting corners with Swiss Air, Cathay Pacific or Lufthansa.

As Matt Welch wrote recently, Europe endorsed competition, including cabotage and air fares plummeted. He observed: “The result is those annoying Instagram pics from friends who live in London, showing off that people in Europe fly everywhere for dirt cheap. Yes, airlines in Europe come and go faster than New York restaurants. But that’s precisely the point: With real competition comes real failure, hopefully followed by bankruptcy and even liquidation, instead of American-style too-big-to-fail bailouts. How many customers must United pummel before they can Gershwin us no more?”

When you deal with competitive industries, you generally encounter falling prices and a pronounced eagerness to make the customer happy. When you deal with industries that are protected from competition, you generally encounter high prices and a pronounced arrogance toward customers.

As Marc Scribner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, quoted by Welch, puts it: “If American consumers wish to enjoy improved service quality in air travel, they should demand that Congress repeal 90 years of anti-competitive federal law. Less regulation of air travel, not more, is the solution.”

Who knows? It might even be safer to fly as a dog.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @instapundit.