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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a reasonable case for nationalizing Boeing to remove the profit motive.

I'm not saying it's the only play, but Boeing is a strategic interest to the nation (both economically and strategically), it's already receiving massive subsidies, and huge paychecks are being cut to executive leadership.

It might be worth it to continue to manufacture these planes in the US, with an emphasis on safety and providing good jobs, even if that meant it wasn't strictly profitable to do so. If we're giving them billions in tax cuts anyways, which they then use to layoff workers and move plants, maybe we should cut out the song and dance.

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It has been mumbled in many a kitchenette that if St Louis were to sink into the river a lot of these problems would go away. There is something more cynical and, some argue, rotten about the way the MD executives are running things.

10 years ago they were cutting research but keeping the management chain. Fewer people to bill hours for that the same overhead. Yeah that probably didn’t work out.

ETA: the US govt is substantially responsible for this situation. They had the bright idea to reduce the diversity of defense contracts and that they meant to accomplish this by having some of the contractors merge. I believe they actually facilitated the Boeing-MD as well.

So I’m not sure how them taking over entirely will fix this. Defense contracts have always been political chips for Congress. Giving them more control won’t help that.

I’ve briefly been on the inside of government projects. I wouldn’t trust them to build anything like this, unless they allowed NASA or some similarly engineering-orientated agency to manage it.

Even NASA with cost plus space launch system style contracts would spend 10B with nothing to show for it. I too have been inside a govt project. Delivering a product of value to end user on commercially reasonable basis is not the goal of such efforts for better and worse. There is no profit motive.

Is Boeing the company of strategic interest to the U.S., or just its intellectual property and factories?

Its brand has been seriously damaged by these scandals. It used to be, "If it's not Boeing I'm not going," now it's, "If it's Boeing, I'm not going."

Let the company go bankrupt, enact export controls on its capital and IP. The free market will do a better job than the government could.

I agree. Boeing, if it cannot find investors to keep it afloat, can simply sell off its IP. There are a considerable number of aerospace engineers who would kill for a fresh start. Look at the recent article on the Colorado startup with their supersonic experiment, or SpaceX. And yes, SpaceX does got a lot from tax payers and there are issues with that, but it's also a case of the State investing in something rather than owning it.

Nationalization for something like an airplane company is terrible idea.

As SpaceX (and Tesla) have shown, sometimes in order to make real progress you need to restart things from zero. Tech debt piles up and political lines become entrenched to the point where nothing but marginal change can be made. Nationalizing the company would basically make this impossible.

And maybe putting a real engineer in charge of a freaking engineering company wouldn't be a bad first step either...

Is Boeing the company of strategic interest to the U.S., or just its intellectual property and factories?

Both.

Strategic interest because Boeing has a massive military business.

Plus, the sheer size of the company and the fact that's it's one of two airline manufacturers worldwide (ignoring the few companies that focus solely on the regional jet business).

> The free market will do a better job than the government could.

I see this sentiment a lot, but nobody ever says what it will do a better job of: Innovation? Meeting customers’ needs? Or just providing a minimum marketable product while maximising returns for shareholders?

Rather we should let them fail. The US needs a company like Boeing, so simply start fresh, the subsidies will keep it afloat regardless.

It takes an existing major aircraft manufacturer years and billions of dollars to get a new aircraft up and running, and that's leveraging decades of experience, staffing, tooling, and existing facilities.

It's not an easy industry to start a startup in.

No doubt if they went bankrupt some of their existing employees could make a case to investors to take over the company but run it in a way that doesn't destroy the company due to predictable quality issues.

Especially employees who have a documented history of discussing those exact issues with management, being whistleblowers, etc.

>...take over the company but run it in a way that doesn't destroy the company

Obviously, there is selection bias, but rarely have I seen "investors" take over something without hollowing it out withing a few years. Looking at you Sencha and Thoma Bravo...

So what? It takes a lot of money and coordination to run a war effort too, or to go to the moon in the 1960s.

It's not an easy industry if you're private without subsidies. But if the government sponsors it and it is a necessity, it's much easier.

> So what? It takes a lot of money and coordination to run a war effort too, or to go to the moon in the 1960s.

Which is why government managed each of those.

It sounds like you're arguing for nationalization, not subsidies.

I'm not arguing for either option - both are essentially the same thing.

I'm arguing that sometimes you need a new culture, and the old culture needs to be destroyed. So let it fail and just start over again.

I assume "let them fail" = "let them run themselves in bankruptcy". At which point, a court manages their re-org into something (hopefully) more lean, efficient, and probably several smaller independent units.

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