There's also a fairly good argument for this in the line of trains and highways. Planes aren't physically trapped on one course, but pretty much every nation heavily regulates who can fly where, when. Airports are often state-controlled, and even private ones need state approval to add new runways or flights.
What we have now is one of the ridiculous "private non-market" arrangements. When airlines in Europe fly empty planes to stop the government from taking their flight slots away, that's not the fault of the companies, but it's also not a functional market we should expect efficiencies from.
I'm not a fan of "regulate markets into dysfunction then nationalize them", but if the fundamental restraints on travel are too severe to let the market function freely, privatization stops making much sense.
The TARP bailout in 2008 involved buying a ton of stock from troubled companies, but it was sold back to them as soon as they could buy the money back. And this will be the second bailout for a bunch of airlines.
So one of the most interesting ideas I've heard is that we shouldn't nationalize things by fiat, but when TARP-style bailouts happen, the government should just keep the stock, at least for a while. If it really was a one-off crisis, the shares are a good investment. But if it's a failing business, or one paying dividends and then looking for handouts, it's not just a money sink.
And like, in this case, it's not even a violation of capitalistic principals: if you need money from investors, you sell shares and ownership to investors, and in this case the investor is the people as represented by the government. If you make risk public, then profits should be public too.
> and in this case the investor is the people as represented by the government.
Or you could just sell shares to the public, since you're a public company. That would get more people involved in the market which is a good thing. If the government were to buy the airlines to inject cash they ought to assign the shares to individual americans.
If they were publicly owned, the prices of flights would just go down until there was no profit. Also, the CEOs wouldn't be paid tens of millions of dollars per year [2], so again, prices would go down.
You’re using one data point, 2019, a pretty damn good year for the U.S. economy. I encourage you to look at the last 20 some years of U.S. airlines profits (emphasis on U.S. since those aren’t subsidized as much as national carriers like Emirates, Singapore, AirFrance...etc). Average profit margin is around 0.5% despite creating a ton of value for the US economy.
Publicly owned doesn’t mean non-profit, it means government ownership. There are plenty of public companies who post profits.
And even if we were to make airline public, wed just be reversing the trend over the last few decades. There is a reason why so many nationalized airline went private, the government kind sucks at running businesses (not always, but often).
And while we're at it, let's make the internet a utility.