Jon Lovett

This was just a clear-cut case where the judge came in and said, the law is the law, and this would hurt consumers.

And there was a famous quote, if you remember from the time, which is,

Like something I don't have in front of me, I lost it, but it was something the effect of Spirit may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it has customers who love it.

And I don't know who those insane people are, but it served a purpose.

And so when it didn't get approved, oh, one other point about this is Spirit could have said, hey, if you don't approve of this merger.

We're going to go out of business.

And by the way, look, maybe if the shareholders had not had dollar signs in their eyes and decided to merge with Frontier instead of JetBlue, it would have been a bigger airline that could have survived this.

Like, stepping back, you know, one way to prevent airlines from going out of business is just to have one giant one, one giant airline that you allowed all these guys to consolidate into.

Bigger companies can weather financial difficulties more than others.

It's not saying that, like, a market with competition is not without trade-offs, right?

Like, there are all kinds of examples of...

Bigger companies are able to kind of weather financial difficulties more than smaller ones.

The purpose of having antitrust law is you weigh the costs and the benefits on behalf of consumers in a market that's competitive.

And by the way, there is more turnover and more abilities for some companies rise and some fall.

That's the nature of having a free market economy in which you protect against monopoly.

But in this specific case, it just doesn't apply because the judge who did it was a Republican and the deck was stacked against it from the beginning.

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