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Something invisible guides any idea into communication. Jonathan came in the '70s when people need to hear what he is saying to them. If I had finished the manuscript in the late '50s when I started it, the book probably would not have been accepted. . . . Jonathan is a crystal sphere in which we can see glimpses of our past and our future. He is true for anyone who finds him true.
-Richard Bach, qtd. in Judith Wagner, "Jonathan and Richard: Catch Them If You Can"
Airborne, thousands of feet above the ground, soaring, wings straining against gravity and invisible downdrafts, banking now, wheeling precipitously, magnificently gyrating amidst the luminous heavens. The year is 1969, and University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman is circling in a commercial jet above New York's Kennedy Airport, waiting, along with passengers and crew, for permission to land. It had taken only six hours to wing across the Atlantic Ocean, but now landing has been delayed for an hour. "What a waste," he writes; "A multimillion dollar jet, a marvel of modern technology, manned by a highly skilled and highly paid crew, occupied by nearly 200 passengers, many spending highly valuable time, serviced by a pleasant and attractive complement of hostesses, guzzling fuel as it circled aimlessly high in the sky" ("Up in the Air").
Friedman is frustrated that capitalism seems able to produce airplanes with efficiency, train flight crews and stewardesses, secure "meals to feed the passengers, or liquor to befuddle them," yet remains at the mercy of a single inefficient link in the supply chainwhich is to say the "supply" of winged flight, of instantaneous presence anywhere in the world, or as nearly as technology allows. The cause of this maddening "bottleneck," according to Friedman, is the government's "socialized monopoly" over airports. He claims that "in the heyday of free enterprise, the railroads built and almost wholly financed their own terminals"; similarly, private enterprise now should assume ownership and operation of airports and other conduits of market infrastructure. For according to Friedman delays are found on government highways and streets, but not in automobile showrooms, "inefficient" public schools but not textbook publishing, the governmentally run post office but not the privately run phone industry ("Up in...