Don't use planning, use prices

A certain chortle here as French Greenpeace gets very upset:

Greenpeace France said the halted flights represented only three among 100 domestic routes, which was “extremely insufficient”. However, with other campaign groups it called France’s action important as it set a precedent that could be expanded across Europe. France plans to add more routes to the ban when it reviews its list in three years.

This is about that French plan to ban flights between places that can be reached by train. To which one response is well, having spent all that money on high speed trains they’ve got to do something to get passenger numbers up, don’t they?

What’s annoying Greenpeace (and, joy, it’s the French division of) is that this carefully crafted political plan only stopped those three flight routes - which Air France had actually stopped running already as people voluntarily took to the trains instead. So the actual effect here was, umm, nothing.

Now, we’re not sure that flights need banning, curtailing or even diminishing. We’re even less certain that domestic flying is the abomination some think it is. But there is still some advice possible.

Think, for a moment, about Air Passenger Duty. This was just, last month, halved for UK domestic flights. On the grounds that the rate was discouraging too many people from flying. That is, prices work in curbing domestic flights. Planning doesn’t, as in the French example. So, therefore use prices not planning.

As we say, we’re deeply uncertain (in fact, to the point of not caring) whether domestic flights should be curbed. Just as there are many other things demanded by all sorts of people that we’re either not sure or uncaring about. But the advice we want to pass on is that if you do actually want to change something then use prices, not regulation and planning. Because prices work and regulation and planning don’t work.

Of course, this advice is useless in this specific example because it’s difficult to get a Frenchman to believe that the Anglo-Saxonism of markets will cure anything and absolutely impossible to get anyone from Greenpeace to believe prices are important. But for those few rational out there - use prices, they work.