President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

1) Presumably, they would turn a profit by selling their service to travelers / airlines, if it was privately allocated. How does the person who sells you a cup of coffee make a profit? They sell the coffee for more than the cost of making and selling it.
2) The "government" doesn't fund it. At best, the government can pass the cost to individual citizens via taxes (or in the case of our government in practice, by running up debt we're all the hook for).
3) The real reason privatization doesn't really work with air traffic control (and from Trump's babbling, they aren't really talking about privatization, likely for this reason), is that trying to get airlines (and travelers) to all pony up voluntarily for an air traffic control system runs into what's known as a "free rider" problem. An air traffic control system only works if EVERYONE is a part of it. Knowing that, there is no incentive to pay for it. Let's say there are 10 airlines, and 9 of them agree to chip in for the system. The system doesn't work without the 10th airline. Knowing that, the incentive for that 10th airline is to try to benefit from the system without paying for it. The other 9 airlines see that, and then they don't want to pay for it. And you end up with no air traffic control system. Those kinds of services are the one thing it actually makes sense for government to provide -- because without it, you don't get it.

 

This is likely similar to what Trump will be proposing. I don't consider this "privatized." It's kinda, sorta privately run-- I get that--but it's not operating in a competitive environment of any sort. And it only exists by the grace of a government-created (and enforced) monopoly.

There may be legit reasons to have a system set up that way -- privately run, rather than run directly by a government entity of some sort -- but the differences between the two aren't that great. The one thing Canada NAV has going for it is that rather than just clueless and corrupt political appointees running the system, there is at least some representation from the air carriers themselves on the Board of Directors. Given that those carriers bear all of the cost, though, the shortfall is that they don't even have a majority of the director seats. ... there are three political appointees and two labor union seats that can form a majority if they team up.