Al, I believe monopolies hurt customers, workers, businesses, or any combination of those. Alfred Kahn was interviewed on a PBS program (Frontline?) a few years ago about deregulation, which he had pushed in the Carter Administration. Kahn said that he had never imagained that the government would stop enforcing the anti-trust laws. I think that David Ross hit the nail on the head about the Republic - Northwest merger; in fact, Detroit also became a Northwest city as well as Minneapolis. I am not sure what US air picked up in the South from its "merger" (takeover) of Piedmont, but in the Midwest, it removed an airline competing with US Air and put lots of people out of work in Dayton, the Piedmont hub. (Nick Laflamme mentioned reduced competition in this case too). I was probably wrong about Delta - Western, although, when the merger took place, Western was just beginning to fly into Dulles from Western's hub in Salt Lake. (I think :-) ). There were stupid mergers as well, but I don't think Congress should legilate against stupidity, except when it harms the public interest. Pan Am - National was stupid -- yes, the route systems did not overlap, National could have helped Pan Am, etc, etc, but both were sick airlines. The most insiduous result of deregulation was that airlines felt they had to go national. They did this with hub systems. Big hubs and security screening made it hard to transfer from one airline to another, which increased the pressure to go national. john On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Allan9 wrote: > John, > Why would you say the mergers should not have been approved? > Al -- John F. Kurtzke, C.S.C. Department of Mathematics 278 Buckley Center University of Portland Portland, OR 97203 503-943-7377 kurtzke@xxxxxx