Safety is massively improved since the days of regulation. Fares are way down in real terms. Flying might be miserable, but that's because people realize they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much.

Your comments remind me of the arguments Ma Bell gave to justify their monopoly. Oh noez, quality will suffer if there's telecom competition. Well, people ended up being willing to make the tradeoff.

You did score a hit with airline profits being low. The whole purpose of regulation was to artificially inflate prices to ensure profits for airlines.

>they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much

Basically. I have used a combination of miles and co-pays to upgrade to business trans-Pacific. But most of the time going from the east coast US to Europe (especially when I can do it without a red-eye to London), I end up thinking of all the nice stuff I could do with $5K at the cost of sort of a miserable flight.

It's not that I couldn't splurge but there are other things I'd generally prefer to splurge on.

I'm not sure if either you or the person you're replying to are correct about safety. The way I see it, safety is completely orthogonal to regulations about routes, passenger services and so on. Safety's been on a rough upward trend throughout history as technology improves. No matter what tools are given or taken away from airlines for extracting value from their passengers, I don't see how it impacts safety, since actual flying is its own separate thing. The one exception is rules on e.g. crew composition, maximum working hours for pilots, and so on. But in these cases, deregulation would hurt both.