Professor Tim Wu: Airlines Want You To Suffer

Like most essays Tim Wu has written, this one is pretty awesome.

As airline customers, we must suffer at baseline. And besides, suffering not only builds character,  it reinforces an important social lesson. The natural order of things requires that we all understand that decent treatment is a privilege, to be purchased with money. If you lack money, you don't deserve the good treatment that only money can buy. If you have money, no matter how you acquired it, you are entitled to the best of everything. Furthermore, everyone must be conscious of the differences having money brings. So, if you're part of the great, unwashed masses, and you're miserable in airports, bus stations, subway stops and other places of public accommodation, the system is working, and the correct lesson is being taught.