This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 18th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One item that should be on the international trade agenda freeing the friendly skies to competition.

Kenneth Button argues in a new Cato study that objections to liberalizing markets in air travel lack genuine merit. We spoke last week.

For younger people, and I'm one of them, at least with respect to this question,

let's talk about the bad old days of air travel, which is essentially

pre- 1978. What was air travel like for the average American?

There wasn't any.

There was no air travel for the average American,

the wealthy traveled, and a businessman traveled.

The planes were half filled in 1970. The average load factor, the average

occupancy of an airliner was 50%. Fares were high. There were two types of fair, economy and first class.

First class was approximately 50% more than economy.

The government set the fares.

The government decided which airline would provide each service, there's very little choice.

So the average person couldn't afford to fly, and in many cases there's very few options to fly.

The choice routes were very limited.

Okay, I like to surprise my libertarian friends

by telling them that Jimmy Carter was one of our biggest

deregulating presidents of the in the 20th century.

So what happened in 1978?

I think I would add to that, but the guy who pushed this through, the Senate was actually

...