Chep Seats and White Knuckles
Kaus, Robert M.
Cheap Seats and White Knuckles by Robert M. Kaus I hate to bring it up, but doesn’t it seem as if an awful lot of airliners have been crashing-or coming close-the past few years? The...
...A president who really wanted to make air deregulation a success would have gone after some of them, and used the savings to pay for more people to do the actual work needed to keep the skies safe...
...The headlines have been about the big disasters, like the plunge of that Air Florida jet into the Potomac in 1981...
...unless it is accompanied by economic regulation...
...Before we join Frederick Thayer in waxing nostalgic about the glory days of CAB-type cartels, let’s give that government a try...
...This is the original sin of regulation, because-under the jerry-built system established during the New Deal-a rule that OSHA, say, comes up with will be second-guessed by the courts...
...And they struggle gamely with the question of whether the businessgovernment cooperation that everyone would like is possible outside of a CAB-style cartel...
...The consensus holds that “social regulation” to protect health, safety, and the like is necessary, but “economic regulation” of the sort that protected industries such as the airlines from competition is wrong...
...But they do seem to recognize that a better system would start with Congress taking a more active, politically accountable role by passing specific regulations itself, instead of passing the buck to the agencies...
...Clearly, they have their doubts...
...They point out, for example, that when it comes to enforcing safety and consumer precautions, economy-wide social regulators like the Federal Trade Commission and OSHA are at a big political disadvantage compared with the oldstyle economic regulators like the CAB...
...The payoff will be the virtual elimination of lawsuits in the formulation of health and safety rules...
...As long as Congress is responsive to lobbyists, the Tolchins imply, agencies like the FTC will always lose out...
...So FAA officials will tell you that nothing can be proved...
...Deregulation, he notes, has created powerful incentives for airlines to meet the competition by cutting costs...
...Don’t go bandying that statistic about Washington, though...
...Instead of first removing the engine from the supporting pylon, as specified by the manufacturer, American decided to remove engine and pylon all in one piece...
...Even scarier, Republic pilots were pressured into cutting fuel costs by coasting in for landings at a steep angle, instead of taking a safer, “stabilized” approach, which uses more fuel because it requires turning the engines up to high thrust...
...Everyone can support laws against driving through red lights, but after that it’s you against the cops...
...the Tolchins respond instinctively...
...Unfortunately, their book isn’t about to convince large numbers of voters to boot Reagan anywhere...
...And they can impose costs on every industry, which makes the entire business community their potential adversary in Congress (as the activist FTC, under Michael Pertschuk, quickly discovered...
...Republic crews had ignored safety checklists, didn’t know anti-ice procedures, and didn’t communicate with each other...
...But don’t worry...
...The Tolchins chronicle the demise under the Reagan administration of precisely those “social” regulations on which the mainstream consensus relies...
...Current trends are statistically suspect...
...The Tolchins can’t quite bring themselves to condemn this system for the disaster that it is...
...The jury is still out...
...How many of the complaints about Anne Gorsuch’s personnel cuts simply reflected bureaucratic self-interest...
...A lot of other costs were passed on as well-like $89,000 salaries for pilots who only worked 11 days a month...
...But, Thayer might answer, pilots who fly 11 days a month tend to be well rested...
...To make the competitive game tolerable to both businessmen and bystanders, we need a government with the unquestioned power to decide the basic ground rules swiftly and democratically, and to enforce them firmly...
...In the end, enforcing rules to protect the environment, or the lives of air travelers, doesn’t seem much more inherently difficult than enforcing the traffic laws...
...But what about enforcing the rules once they’re made...
...Who was injured when OSHA inspections declined by 15 percent...
...They have invested too much in attacking the Reagan administration for undermining the wonderful opportunities it offers public-interest types...
...Bacardi spent $10 million to clean up the water around its rum factories, only to find that the Reagan administration was granting its competitors “regulatory relief...
...On the other hand, the Tolchins note optimistically that sometimes the businessmen have an interest in supporting federal regulationseither to build the public’s confidence in their product (Detroit wants people to think autos are safe) or to avoid the crazy-quilt regulation by 50 states that is the logical result of Reaganite federalism...
...Airlines, trucks, railroads, telephones, and banks have all been freed, to one degree or another, from the latter sort of regulation over the past five years...
...This regulatory ideal is sufficiently compelling that one wonders why it hasn’t worked...
...Seventy-eight were killed...
...Now along comes Thayer and suggests that you can’t have one kind of regulation without the other-that “social regulation of health and safety standards cannot be effective...
...Not even the “equal partnership” suggested by the Tolchins...
...But one of the costs that might be cut is the cost of air safety...
...Underneath all the rhetoric, though, the Tolchins recognize that the problem is not just Reagan...
...The industry won’t necessarily like it (its products will be more expensive) but it will be able to live with it...
...The trouble starts, the Tolchins point out, when Congress decides to create an agency to make rules it doesn’t want to make itself...
...It is here that the Reagan administration’s solicitude for business seems most profoundly destructive...
...Cost-cutting was again a factor when Air Florida’s jet failed to clear a bridge over the Potomac during takeoff...
...No one wants to think what they did may have cost dozens of lives...
...What actually happens in a plant when the OSHA inspector comes around, anyway...
...That is a government we didn’t have, even before Reagan came along...
...It granted lucrative routes, stopped price wars, engineered mergers of weak companies...
...He suddenly realized maybe they don’t save all that money just by not answering their phones...
...Our system is legalistic in this situation also-if you object to a traffic ticket, or an EPA fine, you can go to court...
...Thayer’s gloomy prediction seemed confirmed last month when Douglas Feaver of The Washington Post obtained an FAA report on Republic Airlines that would be enough to give Chuck Yeager sweaty palms on the runway...
...At times the Tolchins seem to agree with this simple prescription...
...Does he really discover the important safety lapses or do workers, as well as managers, attempt to conceal the truth from him...
...In 1979, Thayer reminds us, American Airlines decided to save some money in the inspection of the engines on its DC-10s...
...Agencies like the FTC and OSHA, however, have no goodies to provide...
...No one can sue Congress (at least yet) by claiming that when it passes a law it has “abused its discretion...
...Here was a rare occasion on which politicians of diverse ideological stripes actually agreed to do something...
...If the problem were only Reagan, of course, the solution would be simple: boot him out of office and renew the government’s commitment to protect the public against business...
...I remember one friend of mine at the EPA, employed for a handsome salary in the Carter era to study the philosophical ramifications of cost-benefit analysis, who used to call me up on his free federal phone and talk for hours about how overworked he was under Gorsuch...
...Not the cooperation of a government bent on pleasing individual firms...
...They also forgot to check their fuel levels, with the result that Republic jetliners twice ran out of fuel before reaching their destinations...
...When the public elected Ronald Reagan to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government, it is doubtful they had FAA inspectors in mind...
...Who did the pressuring...
...So we say “yes, officer” and pay the fine...
...Period...
...Instead, they appear to have done just the opposite...
...The problems come when the government’s enforcement power is weak enough to lead individual businesses to think they can get away with cheating-and they’d better do it before their competitors do...
...Much of Dismantling America is a flat recitation of cuts in the budgets of regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Health and Safety Administration, of regulations that were canceled at the behest of industry lobbyists...
...But does ensuring safety really require Mussolini-style state cartelization, or can “social regulation” be beefed up to do the job by itself...
...We might apply the same model to the enforcement of the safety rules affecting industrysacrificing an individual company’s ability to fight an EPA order, for example, because we know that if EPA repeatedly gets out of line it won’t be difficult to rein it in...
...Susan and Martin Tolchin’s new book, Dismantling America* is in large part an effort, not entirely successful, to answer this question...
...These views are not necessarily those of Senator Hollings...
...Few government initiatives have been so applauded by so many respectable people as air deregulation...
...The pylon on a DC-10 leaving Chicago’s O’Hare airport gave way, and 273 people were killed in the resulting crash...
...Thayer applies his argument across-the-board to every industry where cutting corners might endanger the public-that is to say, virtually every industry...
...The old CAB had goodies to give out along with punishment for breaking its rules...
...Here, at the level of the individual firm that wants to cut corners, regulation is irreducibly adversarial...
...This is a Washington job, filled with dry excerpts of congressional testimony and legal briefs, almost completely bereft of the sort of on-the-spot reporting that would engage the reader and convince him that the president really has mortgaged the health and safety of millions...
...The result is 17,000-page transcripts and a system that takes 12 years to fail to decide whether to put airbags in cars...
...Thayer’s book directly challenges a consensus on government regulation that has come to be shared by both the liberal left (e.g., Ralph Nader and Teddy Kennedy) and the nonlibertarian right (e.g., Irving Kristol and Gerald Ford...
...The FAA is instead putting more emphasis on the “check-airman’’ program...
...Why, the “checkairmen’LRepublic employees who were delegated by the FAA to enforce safe procedures...
...The Tolchins don’t bother to distinguish between useful and useless regulators any more than Reagan does...
...Back when the airlines were a happy cartel run by the Civil Aeronautics Board, Thayer points out, there were only a few firms, flying stable routes that their pilots knew well...
...Industry-government “cooperation” in writing the rules of the game, then, depends on a very different sort of “cooperation” when those rules are enforced...
...Maybe...
...Thayer has been a somewhat lonely voice over the past decade, decrying virtually all forms of deregulation, but his argument regarding air safety is so plausible as to be almost obvious...
...Which is why, as you are sitting in your Republic Airlines jet awaiting clearance for takeoff, it will probably not cheer you up to learn that the number of FAA inspectors has not been increased to cope with the temptations of deregulation-it has fallen from 640 in 1980 to 534 today...
...No lawsuits...
...But what about the semicomatose sea turtles...
...Several other” similar mistakes were caught just in time...
...If Congress is going to stop passing the buck, it will have to be forced to do so, preferably by an aroused citizenry...
...As the Tolchins argue, businessmen can be expected to support government regulation only if each one knows that the rules will be enforced firmly, that he’s not going to be the sucker who spends money on extra gas for a “stabilized” landing while his competitor gets away with cheating...
...The reason it’s touchy is that date: 1978, the year Congress deregulated the airline industry...
...According to three Republic pilots, the cheok-airman “would raise hell” if the pilots expended precious fuel just for a safer landing...
...Frederick Thayer makes the case against air deregulation in his new book, Rebuilding America: The Case for Economic Regulation...
...But smaller headlines are appearing with disconcerting frequency on page three of the paper, saying things like: PLANE LANDS SAFELY AFTER ENGINE FAILS or MIDAIR VESTIGATED...
...But there are also plenty of situations where Congress, instead of, say, telling the Department of Transportation to “make the roads as safe as is feasible” can pass a law (as it has) saying, “the speed limit is 55 miles per hour...
...But they are surely right to point out that the two halves of Reagan’s antigovernment crusade-economic deregulation and social deregulation-are at war with each other...
...As long as the regulations are the same for everyone, everyone can pass the costs on to the consumer...
...What are the chances that Bacardi will willingly spend another $10 million in the near future...
...We accept this because we know that, in a democracy, if the police start handing out too many stupid tickets, there is a way to stop them...
...Federal Aviation Administration figures show that the number of people killed on commercial flights, which averaged less than 80 a year for three years before 1978, has averaged 150 a year since-almost double...
...Sometimes the cops are arbitrary...
...Dismantling America: The Rush to Deregulate, Martin and Susan J. Tolchin, Houghton Mifflin, $16.95...
...Air Florida pilots, it turned out, had been trained to avoid using full power on takeoff in order to economize on fuel...
...Instead, they content themselves with labeling canceled regulations as “strong” or “watered down:’ and with ritual invocations of Love Canal and Three Mile Island...
...Back to Mussolini...
...Robert M. Kaus is a speechwriter for Senator Ernest Hollings and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...The CAB restricted competition, and set prices high enough to allow the cost of safety to be passed on to the public...
...This possibility was brought home recently to a friend of mine who was riding on a cut-rate People Express flight when the plane began to rattle ominously...
...This probability of litigation feeds back into the system, with “public interest” lawyers and business lawyers all girding for the inevitable suit at the interminable public hearings that an agency must hold to justify itself in court...
...The low point comes when the Tolchins mention a regulation, characterized by the Reagan administration as “sill$’ that requires fishermen to resuscitate sea turtles caught in their nets before throwing the turtles back in the water...
...They didn’t have to worry about extra fuel costs or lavish training procedures or constantly upgraded equipment...
...Congress would debate a rule, Ralph Nader would lobby for it, businessmen might (or might not) lobby against it, and it would either pass or not pass...
...The Tolchins at least hint at an explanation different from Thayer’s: the system doesn’t work, not because it is “adversarial:’ but because it is so legalistic, which is something a bit different...
...they can only impose costs...
...Even when the CAB antagonized the airline industry, it had antagonized only a single industry...
...I have in mind more the cooperation that small Caribbean islands give to large invading armies-the cooperation that businessmen might be expected to give to regulators who had unquestioned power to punish those who cheated on the rules...
...Rebuilding America: The Case for Economic Regulation, Frederick Thayer, Praeger Publishers, $15.95...
...Did anybody get sick when the USDA chose to “relax cooking requirements for tuberculosis-infected hogs...
...There are, for example, 44,768 employees of the FAA who are not inspectors...
...The great virtue of Dismaqtling America is that it reminds us there is a practical, even noble, ideal of regulation-the idea of the level playing field, where the government sets the rules, and enforces them, and no businessman wants to see his competitor get away with cheating...
...There is waste in government, of course...
...This is a touchy subject...
...Missing are examples of actual people who have been hurt or endangered as a result of these Reagan administration actions...
...But the jury is rapidly coming in, and I fear the verdict will be guilty...
...There may be regulations so complex that Congress must delegate the job to agency experts...
...Answering these questions requires . some legwork, and the Tolchins haven’t done it...
...Imagine a New York Times editorial expanded to 277 pages and you have a rough idea of the rhetoric-to-reportage ratio in this book...
...Like others, they worry about the “adversarial” nature of the regulatory system that Reagan confronted...
...One reason the traffic laws are widely obeyed, after all, is precisely that drivers don’t have time to litigate every ticket...
...In fact, virtually any rule that matters will be the subject of a lawsuit, from one side or the other, claiming that the agency “abused its discretion:’ (“We have to litigate to maintain our credibilitg’ one environmental lawyer told the Tolchins...
Vol. 15 • December 1983 • No. 9
