It's not even zero profits. It's zero economic profits, meaning that your accounting profit can be positive, without considering the opportunity cost of not in

It's not even zero profits. It's zero economic profits, meaning that your accounting profit can be positive, without considering the opportunity cost of not investing in other businesses. You make money, just not more money than skipping the hard work part and investing everything you have in a robot-managed index fund. In theory, commoditized industries are ruled by entry and exit of firms, based on how the capital costs and economies of scale affect marginal cost of production. When the political process creates friction for the entry and exit of those firms, you get problems in the commodity markets. You have to allow big companies to fail, and have smaller firms take their place then merge-and-acquire or otherwise destroy each other until the magic optimal size for that industry is reached. I'd probably have all airports auction off 5-year leases for 20% of their terminal gates every year, and base the number of takeoff and landing slots an airline can use per day on the number of gates it currently leases.