| There’s always a whole lot of idealism when people call for regulations as a panacea. Then you end up with companies like Boeing who are the only players in the country and no one even tries to compete given the massive overhead and then people get surprised the one company who gets 99% of the oversight ends up having a say in the oversight. This type of thing needs constant vigilance and churn to avoid capture. But at the end of the day it’s just going to come with the whole arrangement every once in a while. Of course we could come up with ways to have this type of oversight which the market can’t practically account for financially or organizationally but again that’s wishful thinking as almost every situation like this has resulted in some level of capture. Pretty much the only option is hoping they actually attempt to fix processes when it goes wrong, at least for the next while. But more often than not rules get rushed in during the panics which merely reinforces the company’s monopoly by adding even more special rules only a billion dollar entrenched company with the decades of other specialized processes they themselves helped establish through lobbying. No one wants to remove regulations for the sake of competition but I think we need to be more realistic about the monsters we’re creating in exchange for worse monsters. Instead of being surprised every time the fragility of the whole system gets exposed at least once a decade. While perpetually hoping and expecting for better oversight for the next time it. |
Tangential, but I've read comments on HN saying that part of the reason is that Boeing, along with Lockheed, are strategic to the US and there are actually some regulations to keep them on life support with government money, so that when a serious war starts, they're still there to serve US military's needs.