As you all probably know, air travel this summer is broken. On some days,

major airlines have been canceling 10% of their flights. You show up at the

airport, security lines lasting four or five, even six hours, but at least you're hoping that you're not booked on a flight that is among the one in ten flights cancelled.

Keep in mind in normal times,'s something like 1 and 100 that are

cancelled. So from 1% of flights cancelled in normal times to 10% now. Now how did

this happen? Is there an explanation beyond just the obvious?

Which is the turbocharged rebound from the past two years of pandemic-induced turmoil in the airline industry.

After 9-11 we saw a single-digit percentage decline in air travel in the year or so afterwards.

In 2020, during peak pandemic, the drop was north of 70 percent so consumer demand has come barreling back after the

entire industry was all but shut down. So of course there was going to be some

inevitable stress on the system but today's guest thinks that there's something

else going on that the post-Covid travel summer has revealed. It's a structural problem that

predated the pandemic, and he also sees similar forces at work

in other industries, including the baby formula crisis.

It's the structural roots of crises of scarcity

that we get at in today's conversation with Scott Linsacom.

Scott is at the Cato Institute of Washington Think Tank where he's the director of

general economics and trade policy studies. He's also a visiting lecturer at Duke University Law School and

spent two decades as a trade law negotiator advising some of the largest multinationals.

He also writes an indispensable sub-stack called capitalism

Capital with an O in the middle. We'll post it in the show notes.

I highly recommend that you subscribe to it.

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