The beauty of using supply&demand to sort out all these conflicting priorities using price as the discriminator is it works better than any bureaucratic system ever has.
> it works better than any bureaucratic system ever has.
And there we go! While there's definitely cases where basically supply and demand trumps any other allocation system, in this case it will just kill competition and some will just hyperbole their expectations to win. Look at the UK's defunct rail franchising system where pure money play was used (they somehow always fails because they overbid).
While I'm all for taking UK trains back under public control, note that one of the problems with the existing rail franchising system is that the franchise operators have almost no skin in the game. The trains and tracks are owned and operated by other companies. The franchise operators tends to be subsidiaries set up with very few assets, and can just be shut down if they fail. And while narrow margins of errors relative to their projections cause many of them to fail, when they succeed the profit relative to the actual investment made by the parent companies can be huge.
The incentives structure has been all wrong in that there is basically no penalty for the parent companies in taking outsize risks and underfunding the operations and then walking away if they fail.
Align those incentives and the rail franchising will likely still have issues but nowhere near as bad as today. E.g. if Deutsche Bahn faced having Arriva (their subsidiary which owns it's UK train operating companies) or themselves having to actually put up financial guarantees for the full period and facing long term effects on their ability to bid for future franchises, their bids would look very different.
Put another way: When Virgin and Stagecoach were actually held to reasonable standards (being expected to actually properly fund pensions? the horror) which led to Stagecoach being disqualified from several bids they caused a massive stink and Virgin Trains closed.
Any outfit going bankrupt buying landing slots will have those slots then sold to the next lowest bidder by the outfit's creditors.
There are many stories of governments trying to half-bake a market system resulting in failure. You have to set that against the absurd result of 18,000 empty flights of a fully regulated system.
