There's at least three problems with this laissez-faire ideal:

1) For some reason that is hard to understand, the prospect of Boeing's long-term decline does not necessarily translate into incentives for the people at the helm to steer it right. They can reap unfathomable rewards while guiding it to its doom. That's not only perverse and unjust, it's also bad for incentivizing success. This is not necessarily something specific to Boeing; any company is vulnerable to this disease.

2) It may be a contagious condition. When executives who ruined Boeing leave the company, they may take up influential positions at other companies, and have similar destructive effects. It's hard to understand how this can happen, but it's the sort of thing that does happen; that is a major problem that deserves to be solved.

3) A Darwinian process of creative destruction is fine if Boeing were sinking because it was improving but too slowly, and Airbus had improved even more and faster and surpassed it. If Canon replaces Kodak, life goes on and we get nice cameras. But in a case where Boeing dies not by being outgrown but by regressing, because 2024-Boeing has worse quality standards than 1994-Boeing, there's nothing fine about that; that's something that should concern anybody who cares about the production of high-quality airplanes. It's worth examining how we got here, and if an incentive disconnect at the executive level is responsible then there could be very valuable lessons to learn about corporate governance going forward.

the industry simply doesnt compete enough, no?