alt Hacker News> Regulatory pressure is a market force and a useful one too.
That's assuming the regulations are competent. But if you let the market consolidate then the incumbent has enough money to buy off the government. Or it happens the other way around and the government is kind enough to set out regulations that only a megacorp can satisfy, thereby destroying the competition and awarding the last company standing the vaunted "too big to fail" get out of jail free card.
Which in turn gets you the 737 MAX sort of problems where the regulations both cause a problem (recertification is prohibitively expensive) and then fail to impede the incumbent's efforts to shirk it because you can't be damaging the business of your only domestic producer.
I agree partially with this. America is a special circumstance because of the way the industrial complex and government contracts are linked, and there’s a lot of blatant corruption. If you look at the European regulation framework I believe it works rather well. You have multiple big companies delivering components for different parts of the airplanes from different countries which are all individually big but not too big to fail because no government is solely reliant on them.. as it should be