INTERVENTIONISTS ON AUTOPILOT.

You can’t avoid feeling sympathy for David Dao, the Kentucky physician hauled violently, bleeding from his seat on a United flight Sunday, dragged off to make room for some airline employees who’d been ordered to fly. So shocking and outrageous is the video of that terrible incident, which was captured by passengers’ cell phones and went globally viral on the Internet Monday, that it almost makes you forget the dozens of times you’ve probably fantasized about seeing the person in the seat next to you ejected just as violently, midflight, for the crime of stealing the armrest from you one too many times.

Still, the incident has nonetheless turned into an opportunity for all the deepest air-travel thinkers the media has to offer to volunteer reflections on how a once-glamorous mode of transport has degraded into such a barbaric dystopia in the sky. Like any story about corporations behaving badly, the United debacle serves up a blank canvas onto which any anti- business pet theory can be easily projected, even if it happens to be totally off base. And most are off base.

THEORY 1: THIS DEMONSTRATES THE INHERENT INHUMANITY OF THE FREE- MARKET SYSTEM.

Britain’s liberal- minded New Statesman says the fiasco exposes the “violent double standards of capitalism,” a system that supposedly gives greater rights to sellers than buyers. The Toronto Star’s resident eccentric, Heather Mallick, held the video up as proof the “so-called ‘wisdom of the market’ needs government regulation.” And at the online outlet, Paste Magazine, writer Jacob Weindling excoriates United for its “incompetence and greed” for overbooking the flight, calling it a “jarring reminder of who really controls this country … the United Corporatist States of America.”

Weindling at least rightly notes the difference between capitalism and corporatism, because you won’t find many signs of free-market capitalism in air travel, among the most heavily regulated consumer industries. U. S. airlines operate very much in an un-free market, with the government determining which operators can fly, and airport authorities determining where they can fly.

United is famously awful. In the past few years, it has been in the news for stranding children and allegedly killing or nearly killing travelling pets. It has been fined for its treatment of disabled passengers, for leaving planeloads of passengers stuck on the tarmac for hours on end, and for arranging expensive favours to influence government officials. Throughout those scandals, its stock price has more than tripled. Even after Monday’s incident, and a sell-off on Tuesday, it has largely recovered, now down about one or two per cent since last week. As Fortune magazine noted, most investors know the scandal won’t make much difference in a market where fliers have few alternatives; an Associated Press analysis in 2015 found that at 40 of America’s 100 largest airports, a single airline dominates the majority of the market and at 93 of them, just one or two controls the majority.

THEORY 2: THIS IS WHY OVERBOOKING MUST BE STOPPED

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has written the U. S. Transportation Department demanding it suspend overbooking flights, pending a thorough review of the United incident. “As you are aware, every day passengers are ‘ bumped off ’ flights,” he wrote. “The practice has become unconscionable … and is abusing passengers coming into Newark Airport and around the nation without cause.” Here in Canada, the federal Liberals announced this week plans to put limits on overbooking (at the Star, Mallick says they should just “ban” it).

But what happened to Dao wasn’t even a problem with overbooking, which airlines frequently use to account for the inevitable few passengers every flight that miss the connection or don’t show up. Overbooked bumping is actually a very tiny issue since, as aviation expert John Strickland told the Financial Times, airlines have developed “highly sophisticated process( es) based on extensive statistical analysis” to ensure they predict correctly how many customers will show and how many won’t. The number of bumped passengers in the U. S. fell by half from 1999 to 2015 — from 1.1 million to 552,000. That’s just 0.09 per cent of trips.

And anyway, those incidents always dealt with by bumping passengers before boarding, usually by offering cash or other incentives to those willing to fly later. But Dao had a seat. He had already boarded when United decided to revoke his seat, not for other paying passengers, but for its employees. Banning overbooking won’t solve that problem, it will just mean more empty seats and, so, higher prices for consumers.

THEORY 3: WE NEED MORE LAWS GIVING PASSENGERS ACTUAL RIGHTS

The real rights passengers lack is the right to fly RyanAir or Qantas from Chicago to Louisville (or from Edmonton to Montreal), and since it’s the law that prevents that, layering on more legislation won’t help. It appears United broke laws already on the books, anyway. U. S. regulations say “In the event of an oversold flight, every carrier shall ensure that the smallest practicable number of persons holding confirmed reserved space on that flight are denied boarding involuntarily.” Even United’s own contract of carriage gives fewer rights to its employees than to paying travellers, so staff in Chicago probably defied their own rules.

What happened to Dr. Dao certainly seems unjust, since he had a contract with United and the airline not only broke it, but employed violence to do so. He clearly has grounds for a whopping lawsuit. You can be sure the massive cost United will be forced to pay for freeing up that one seat will be more than enough to keep this from ever happening again — and will more than pay for Dao to hire a chauffeur to drive him the four hours from Chicago to Louisville, for life.