Fee for Service

It’s not just for the airlines, anymore. What if doctors, drug companies and school districts had to give refunds?

The ethos of freedom—whether you harken back to the origins of Western civilization, to the Enlightenment, to Ayn Rand—is that people should be free to do what they choose as long as they don’t harm others.

“A wise and frugal government,” as Thomas Jefferson said, “which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”¹

Indeed, the cornerstones of American jurisprudence—and higher law as a wonderful little book for kids reminds us—rest upon the twin notions of not encroaching on other persons or their property (the law of torts) and doing all you have agreed to do (the law of contracts).²

In other words, the absence of force and fraud.

Of course, the challenge for self-government is defining those terms. Is someone flying their drone within the sight lines of my home an exercise of their property rights or a violation of mine? Nuisance, at times, can be in the eye of the beholder or however the courts might parse it. As ‘slick Willy’ famously said, “it all depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”³

Nevertheless, all but the most diehard of ‘wannabe dictators’ haven’t questioned the principles themselves. Why even the Biden administration is cracking down on the airline industry for ‘defrauding’ consumers. We’ve been writing about this in Jason’s Newsletter ever since enduring the horrors of traveling during COVID.

Unfortunately, the skies still haven’t got any friendlier. Notwithstanding more urgent concerns over safety under an antiquated ground control system, bad public policy combined with internet pricing has reduced air travel into a nightmarish cattle call replete with delays and cancellations. At the same time, airlines have shrunk capacity and increased volume.

The administration’s new rules may force airlines to actually refund customers over the lack of promised service—but apparently not in time for the summer travel season.⁴ Better late than never. Soon at least they won’t be able to blame every interminable delay or cancellation on the weather.

But while we’re at it, why not apply these time-honored principles to the rest of America’s consumer crisis, starting with, say…education and medicine? Dumb kids? Get a refund from your school district. Bad health care, don’t pay ‘em.