Flying on a commercial airline is like eating at one of those novelty seafood restaurants where the waiters insult you and the menu features sixteen "ass" puns: you wait forever to sit down, the food sucks, and you spend an inordinate amount of money to be debased and humiliated. "Don't like sitting in a tube full of stale coffee breath and Shake Shack farts?" the airlines ask, spitting into your tall glass of Ass-Tea. "Flap your own fucking wings to Jenny & Jack's destination treehouse wedding. Capitalism, you idiot. Oh, this assortment of knockoff Wheat Thins and stale raisins costs $9, credit card only."

The price of oil has plummeted 50% since June (Thanks, Obama) and is expected to tumble by another 15% this year, which has meant lower gas prices for drivers and roughly the same gougy airfares for anyone who has to book a flight.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, who usually acts as a hot towel on the fat white neck of Commerce, uses the word "oligopoly" three times in an unusually pointed column about how the four major airlines are refusing to compete with each other and lower the costs of fares on popular routes, despite the fact that gas is an airline's number one expenditure.

Airline executives insist that the industry is as competitive as ever and that they are just more “disciplined” about pricing and investing in routes. The airlines like to say that they haven’t lowered prices because there is so much demand and so little capacity, an industry term that means available seats. They also point to hedging contracts for oil that they entered into last year, which locked some of them into paying higher prices for fuel. And they say they are investing heavily: American Airlines, for example, is investing $2 billion in its fleet. Delta, too, is upgrading many of its planes.

All of that is true to some degree.

But in a truly competitive marketplace, airlines would add capacity to popular routes where they saw the opportunity to undercut a competitor. And given low oil prices, you would imagine that at least one airline would lower its rates to pick up market share and make it up in volume.

American Airlines, for example, doesn’t hedge its fuel costs, so it would arguably be well positioned to pick up business from its rivals. But it hasn’t tried.

The Department of Justice thought this might happen when they were deciding whether to approve the merger of US Airways and American Airlines a few years ago. The merger went through, and competition (surprise!) decreased. In December, Senator Charles Schumer demanded an investigation of the airlines' behavior, but that seems to have gone the way of his calls for an investigation of outrageously high utility bills and his crusade against laser pointers.

After the merger, the DOJ decided to take a page from the books of the corrupt and ruinous financial institutions they neglected to investigate and now assure us that all is well:

The Justice Department sent a letter to Senator Schumer contending that the merger of American Airlines and US Airways — which it approved contingent upon some divestitures — has led to benefits for consumers through “lower prices and increased service.”

Think about those "lower prices and increased service" the next time you wait on JFK's tarmac for two hours, watching a loop of the commercial for Jersey Boys flicker gently across the pained, sweat-flecked expression of your Middle Seat companion (at least until jetBlue gets rid of the TVs, too).