Spirit Airlines didn’t just hit turbulence. It flew straight into a policy-made storm.

In a functioning free market, failure is not a tragedy. It’s a feature. Bad business models collapse. Poorly run companies get punished. Capital gets reallocated. Stronger competitors rise. That’s how markets correct themselves and how consumers ultimately benefit.

So let’s be clear from the start. If Spirit Airlines failed because it couldn’t compete, couldn’t manage its balance sheet, or couldn’t deliver a product people wanted, then so be it. Let it fail. That’s capitalism.

But that’s not what happened here. Spirit was struggling, yes. It was imperfectly run, yes. But in a brutally competitive industry dominated by a handful of legacy giants, this wasn’t just about mismanagement. It was about survival. The proposed merger wasn’t some anti-competitive power grab. It was a lifeline. In modern aviation, scale isn’t a luxury. It’s a requirement to compete.

Spirit’s collapse wasn’t simply the result of market forces. It was the result of political interference that boxed the company into a corner and then left it there to suffocate.

All Washington had to do was nothing.

Step aside. Let the deal go through. Let the market decide whether the combined JetBlue–Spirit entity could compete, deliver value, and survive. If it........

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