Writes Stephen Fairfax: “My copy of Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto is being shipped to my home via UPS. Amazon sent an email with the tracking number. I subscribe to Amazon Prime, which means 2-day shipping at no extra cost. My volume of book and gift purchases means that the effective shipping cost is less than $0.50 per book.

“I was struck by the contrast with a colleague, who just endured a 13+ hour flight from Chicago to Shanghai on United Airlines. The business-class ticket cost more than $13,000. He arrived safely, but his luggage was lost, despite all the eyewash about matching passengers and bags on international flights.

“So while Amazon and UPS provide me with stop-by-stop times and dates for one of 15 million packages they ship every day to millions of different destinations, United can’t match a single bag with a high-paying business customer on a point-to-point flight, one of only 3,300 flights per day to a paltry 210 possible destinations. UPS proves that the technology exists; United demonstrates that they don’t care, because they don’t have to. Amazing.”