Comment by toast0

> That was surprising. Goes against the idea that deregulation allows companies to squeeze consumers and earn excess profits.

It really depends on the market. In a potentially competitive market, deregulation can work as a function to drive down margins.

Air travel is such a market. Prior to deregulation, routes were set by government action and competition was limited. With deregulation, it's not that hard to setup a commercial scheduled airline, and new airlines popup relatively frequently to address routes where there is margin. It doesn't take that much capital to start an airline; you can lease the aircraft and contract out maintenance (might be part of the lease) and start with a single round trip per day. You don't need to start with a big network or a lot of aircraft. It's not so easy to get slots at busy airports, but you don't have to start there either.

Where deregulation ends up leading to outsized profits is where the market leads to natural monopoly and regulation provides an upper bound on margin, rather than a lower bound. Things like last mile utilities, where it's difficult to run multiple networks in the same space: ex water, sewage, electricity, telecom. In situations like that, to promote competition you want to do regulated unbundling, so there's one organization that runs the last mile and choices for service over the last mile: ex you pay the last mile for delivery of water per acre foot and also your water supplier who must deliver the same number of acre feet to the water network. (or probably a little more, water networks have shrinkage)