[_heimdall]

Counterpoint: How about the government doesn't get involved to begin with?

Boeing (and Airbus) is a massive corporation with a large market position. Why do they need government subsidies at all? Is the business, or a specific product, not viable? If they aren't viable, why should the government continue to prop them up?

[piva00]

Pure free marketism is not the answer to everything. Things that are risky, demand a lot of capital investment, and are strategic are not best done by the free market since there are gaps between the profit-motive incentive and long-term strategic assets.

Boeing and Airbus are the backbone of civilian aviation, if one was to falter there would be a massive gap in the market until a new entrant would be able to create a good enough product to fill it, during this period a shortage of planes would have cascading effects through many other industries.

The theory of an efficient market doesn't consider the in-betweens where these gaps can exist, in the long run an efficient market would stabilise itself but who is supposed to suffer the pain of a market failure until it stabilises itself when that can take decades? Government is the way humans have found to collectively act on those gaps, it's not the most efficient way per the free market utopia but it's necessary to dampen market swings when they happen.

This applies to many other industries, it's naïve to believe that no company should have support, it's also unfair in the general sense that some get it. It's a trade-off and finding that balance is where complexity hides away, just trying to shove that complexity away from a spherical cow model of the economy is not realistic, it's pure dogma.

[_heimdall]

While I agree that free markets aren't always the answer, I also don't think government intervention is either. We don't have to have a civilian aviation industry, we definitely don't have to have it at the scale it exists today. If the business isn't viable then so be it. We can fly less, pay more for it, or accept planes with fewer features and creature comforts.

Companies will expand, and spend, to fill whatever space they are given. If a government poor's money into the industry they will find ways to spend it. A company is ultimately trying to maximize the capital it has, sitting on profits and paying the taxes that go along with it don't do the trick.

Markets are much too complex to say what they would look like after removing subsidies, but with something like air travel it absolutely isn't a necessity that must be protected. Travel is great and all, but it isn't as fundamental as food, water, or shelter.