News last month that budget airline Ryanair was
contemplating charging passengers for use of toilets both sparked cries of outrage and stimulated the creative juices of satirists.
Mind you, the CEO was merely
contemplating the change, but for anyone who has actually flown on that carrier, the prospect seemed all too likely. Given the airline's stringent limits on weight of baggage and personal items, I felt, as I was packing my luggage some years ago, that I had been thrust back into my more youthful days as a backpacker when, as the late Colin Fletcher explained in his now-classic
Complete Walker, fanatics felt moved to snip the labels off their tea bags in an obsessive quest to reduce carrying weight.
The really sad thing is that this is all part of the cynical shell game that we play in modern capitalist society, the more so, as economic crisis looms: We constantly disguise the real costs of things, and who notices? We have an unjust and in some ways inefficient health care system, but we don't realize that part of the expense arises from our unwillingness to tackle real across-the-board reform. The University of Massachusetts notoriously promises (or is required) to limit tuition increases, which it then makes up for by charging
increased "fees" for everything else imaginable. The tuna can, which some years ago dropped from 6 and a half to 6 and one-eighth ounces, recently
plummeted to 5 (do people ever read weights on packages, or are they just focusing on the "sale" price?). And of course, the biggest shell game in the country is the conservative obsession with "taxes." There is a legitimate debate to be had about size of government and extent of taxation, but it won't be an honest one until we confront the fact that we pay for the things we need one way or another, through the front door or the back, progressively or regressively. Our taxes are kept low, but we pay increased health care costs out of our private funds. Our roads and other infrastructure fall apart--but we pay for the flat tire or busted axle, or we finance highways and public transportation in part through regressive and often regionally and socially unfair taxes and charges. Just look at what is happening in Massachusetts, as residents are being asked to pay an
increased gas tax that will primarily fund the eastern turnpike, the whopping debt for Boston's corrupt and mismanaged "Big Dig," and the Boston Metropolitan Transit Authority. Western Mass. residents--who have been getting the shaft since the days of
Shays's Rebellion-- are understandably outraged. Charging more for tolls and transit tickets to the Boston-area residents who actually use the structures and services in question would be the most logical and fair solution, but no one wants to face up to market value and fight that fight, so we hide the cost by spreading it around in inequitable ways. To raise the income tax would be equitable and might result in a more equitable distribution of goods, but there's an ideological bias against that. Because most people, educated or otherwise, can't handle quantitative reasoning--we all lose.
And what of the future of and on Ryanair? As always, satire, like science fiction, has the best answer. A friend forwarded this prediction:
Which is ultimately scarier: the prospect that we might one day need to pay to pee--gives new meaning to that economic phrase, "pay as you go"--or that, because most of us can't count, we don't even know what we're really paying for?
It's not just a radical point. Capitalist gurus, too, get it. Why can't the rest of us?
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
