Here's a simple question: How much will your next flight cost?

Here's a simple answer: The airlines don't want you to know.

Here's a frightening solution: A well-meaning government agency is getting metaphysical in its attempt to get you an honest answer to your simple question.

What could possibly go wrong?

Buried deep within 84 pages of government-speak known as NPRM (that's "notice of proposed rule making" for the rest of us), the Department of Transportation last week decided that it was time to call the nation's airlines on their latest pricing trick. Depending on which airline executive is spouting the jargon, the new fare game goes by any number of names: unbundling, ancillary revenue, a la carte pricing, pizza pricing, opt in/opt out, and even the Dell strategy.

But the goal is always the same: Seduce potential flyers with a low-ball advertised price, then force them to wade through a maddening list of ups, extras, surcharges, government-mandated taxes, and airline-imposed mandatory fees. It's how an advertised $99 fare somehow becomes a $400 flight without you knowing about it—and without you having a chance to compare whether another airline promoting the same $99 fare would only charge you $250 or $300 when all is said and done.

Confused already? Me too. And I know what I'm talking about.

So let's roll back the clock a bit, back to those supposedly happy days when airlines were tightly regulated, everyone dressed in their Sunday best when they flew, and flight attendants were called stewardesses. Except for the stewardess part, our brief foray into history will explain how we got to today's reality, when fares are merely a suggestion and the price you actually pay requires a degree in metaphysics and the intervention of a government regulator.

When Congress deregulated commercial aviation in 1978, it specifically exempted airlines from state and local oversight. Only the federal government could regulate the airlines. So that explains why the Department of Transportation is acting as the flyer's proxy. It's the DOT's job to make sure passengers aren't cheated or deceived when they buy tickets.

Since even before deregulation, the DOT has attempted to maintain a level playing field for fare advertising. By and large, the agency did a decent job. And airlines, to their credit, largely played by the rules. Even as air travel stopped being a wear-your-Sunday-best outing and devolved into a make-it-cheap, mass-over-class commodity, the airlines and the DOT generally managed to make the cost of flying relatively transparent.

But as startup airlines increasingly drove down the price of flying, the so-called legacy carriers (those that existed at the time of the deregulation) felt the pressure to compete on price. And guess what? They couldn't. So they began fiddling with fares, and the fiddles became full-on price manipulation.