You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Well, you know, as I'm wont to do, I always have a little extra that didn't make it into the podcast.

Not as much with airline deregulation.

I really did.

I mean, it's a narrow policy point.

I really did try to get everything in.

But some things you do leave out.

So David Boyce, he is also playing a role here.

We didn't really talk about him. He's also a Kennedy staffer in addition to Stephen Breyer and working

with the White House. Now he's kind of a super lawyer for a lot of cases. Note that airline deregulation leads to love because David Boyce and Mary Shulman over at the White

House end up meeting over working on this regulation, fall in love and get married and

still married today.

Southwest Airlines is, you know, even though people express, people's express died out,

deregulation doesn't guarantee that any startup competitor is going to survive.

They can go out of business just as much as the big lines.

But Southwest Airlines is kind of the beneficiary of airline deregulation.

And they actually saluted Ted Kennedy on his death in 2009. At that point, they were offering $59 one-way fares, really dominating the industry when once they were confined to interstate Texas

flights. And that was true until 1979. Southwest couldn't get out of Texas because they just

couldn't compete. We talked a little bit about Ralph Nader and his commitment to deregulation as kind of a consumer issue.

There was another element of his thinking that we just didn't have time to get to.

He wasn't just concerned about high consumer prices, but also systemic risk.

And we've seen that with the too big to fail debate with banks.

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