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Comment by Entalpi | Hacker News Reader

So Boeing was slow to react to the market forces at play and lost out to a faster moving more adaptive competitor. When that happens in a market you typically lose money and try to stage a comeback by reinventing yourself or in some way try to work your way back. Boeing chose to rush and is now paying the price for being a slow and complacent behemoth of a company at a market where others are innovating and competing.

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This has nothing to do with markets and everything to do with ethics. It is not ethical for a company to knowingly risk lives to rush out a new product. In the airline industry, it is unheard of for this to happen. Everything is triple redundant for a reason. Typically you would cut corners elsewhere that is not a risk for human lives. Boeing already tried that by outsourcing the construction of the 787 and it was riddled with failure. They should have learned their lesson there.

What they are paying so far is peanuts compared to what others paid with their lives. And compared to the company the executives who effectively said, 'so what if people die' will pay essentially nothing.

That's just it, they are not paying the price. The "free market" goes out the window when the government decides that the continued existence of your company is important to "national security", and abdicates their regulatory responsibility because you're special. Were Airbus allowed to effectively self-certify their planes in the US? I rather suspect not.

I don't know how you can look at this whole situation and think "yup, free market working as planned. Everything fine and normal!"

Besides, the reason we have regulations is because there are limits to the free market if we want to live in a sane society. Markets only find optimal solutions if everybody has perfect information, but in reality nobody has perfect information. You're free to choose between brands of honey, but it's expected that the government will ensure that no honey contains plutonium because 1) a consumer can't easily tell if it does and 2) it's assumed that everyone would avoid radioactive honey if they knew about it. Similarly, airlines are free to choose between aircraft, but it's assumed that none of them want an aircraft that will spontaneously and uncontrollably dive into the ground; it's the government's job to ensure that nobody sells such a plane.

> ...and is now paying the price for being a slow and complacent behemoth of a company at a market where others are innovating and competing.

The horrible thing is that this sentence could be applied to other Boeing products as well. The Delta IV springs to mind.

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