"American Airlines, the World's Worst Airline"

You can’t fly Chicago-San Francisco on All Nippon Airlines or JAL.  If you could, the domestic lines would be out of business in three weeks.  The only way they can clip customers for a hundred bucks per guitar is by being a federally mandated monopoly.

— Fred Reed

'Nuff said.

The book touts at the bottom of the page are fun, too...

Right and wrong in high finance

First is the assumption that talented bankers only come with gigantic price tags. It turns out there are thousands of banks — including pretty much any bank still standing that didn’t get bailed out — that are being run by reasonably competent people who don't make enough in one year to buy a Major League Baseball team.  If you’re managing a bank that's survived the crisis this far, you must be doing something right.

[...]

If you can’t make money borrowing at zero and charging 29.99 percent on a credit card, maybe you’re in the wrong line of business.

— John W. Schoen, for MSNBC, on why the argument that big banks need to pay top dollar to hire and retain "top performers" is fallacious.  Many of the "top performers" retained by the big bucks so far have been part of the problem, and there's little evidence megabank executives pulling down tens of millions of dollars in compensation a year are actually doing their jobs any better than — or even as well as — smaller bankers earning a tenth or a hundredth as much.