Cycloptichorn wrote:Do you honestly believe that the practices of the FAA reflect the values of air traffic controllers?
For your analogy to work, you would have us believe that emergency-room doctors would be lazy and inefficient, knowing that their jobs are secured by the gov't. I have a hard time believing that this is true.
Let's forget about the FAA in particular, and go back to my main point - is there a problem with recognizing the fact that some doctors, who perform emergency services, are not exactly under the same set of rules and moral obligations as others?
Some doctors are better and more engaged than others. I am free to reject those I don't like and seek others I do. The aggregate effect of these choices tends to eliminate the worst providers and enhance the activities of the best.
The situation with air traffic controllers is quite different. I have no influence whatever on whose services I get, and, indeed, on the collective efficiency of their organization. In 1982 the Labor Union representing these controllers had convinced the American public that theirs was somehow a particularly stressful job. Partly as a result most of them were retiring on "disability" in their early '50s. I recall sitting alone in the cramped cockpit of an A-4 on a dark, bad weather night asking for radar vectors around a thunderstorm and being curtly told they "don't do that anymore". I sat there - alone at 30,000 feet and getting bumped around by the turbulence in the dark - contemplating just who was operating under unusual stress.
Soon afterwards, confronted with a strike by the Union, president Reagan fired them all - the entire system. A few hundred drafted military controllers operated the entire nationwide system for the next several months without a hitch. After 25 years the system and its organization have drifted back to their former dismal condition.
Not what I would want for my own health care.