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Comment by randycupertino | Hacker News Reader

Moving their HQ from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia (next to Washington DC) to prioritize lobbying and access sounds like it helped! https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096961418/boeing-moving-head...

> Boeing is a major defense contractor, and the move will put executives close to Pentagon leaders.

According to the book Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison the entire decline of Boeing started when they moved their HQ from Seattle to Chicago and deprioritized engineering, quality and safety.

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I remember when they moved to Chicago the argument was to be closer to their Airline customers. They wanted to shift from a focus on building planes to a focus on selling planes.

Now they can't even sell planes so their new focus is corruption I guess. The good news for them is that business is booming.

Government money will never run away.

Elections matter

To a company like Boeing? I think their tendrils are deep enough into government that it doesn't matter who the administration of the day is.

The number of people who work in government and the military and aren't subject to elections is orders of magnitude greater than the number of elected politicians.

Boeing is at the end stage of the feedback loop where regulatory failures lead to monopolies and vice versa.

The regulatory failures usually come first, either a failure of antitrust (they're allowed to buy up the competition) or a regulatory environment that itself puts the competition out of business. Then you have a consolidated market.

Monopolies are like cancer. They metastasize. If you didn't have regulations that keep upstart competitors out of the market before, the incumbents will welcome them if not actively lobby in favor of them. And then you're stuck with them. They're too big to fail. If you had 10 other domestic aircraft companies and one of them was screwing up, they'd not only have to contend with customers going somewhere else, the government could actually punish them. Whereas if there's only one, what are you going to do? Bankrupt the only domestic supplier? And they know it.

The only way out of it is to restore competition. But the longer you wait, the harder it gets to fix it.

Ah, It’s not so easy to un-McDonnell this Douglas.

There is something to be said about having an airplane company choosing to site executives someplace specific at all, over, you know, using airplanes to get them places. It only takes 5 hours to get across the entire continental US.

Well, presumably the executives would like to see their families at least once a day. And the people in Washington you meet with prefer to do so in their offices.

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