A woman died on an American Airlines flight yesterday after being rudely dismissed by a flight attendant after asking her for oxygen. When she collapsed and they tried to give her oxygen, the cannister turned out to be empty. The defilibrator didn't work, either. "Nothing on the plane worked," said one passenger.

But I bet the airline did not fail to blast every single passenger's eardrums with all those asinine government-madated "safety" messages at takeoff, something that was noticeably absent on some of the European airlines I've flown on in the past few years. And don't EVER forget those instructions on how to buckle a seatbelt, required by, well, by some bureaucratic moron in D.C. Not to mention all those senseless "security measures" and lectures by 50 I.Q. airline and government employees at the airport.

The already heavily regulated airline industry has been all but nationalized since the $5 billion "bailout" after 9/11. This woman's death is a sad illustration of what Ludwig von Mises discussed in his book, Bureaucracy: With government regulation the administration of governmental rules takes the place of customer service in pursuit of profit. Businesses become slaves to their bureaucratic masters at the expense of their customers, shareholders, and employees.