Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I'll give an example. ... Are you familiar with those tags on every electric thing you own near the plug that say, "UL certified"?

In the late 1800s, early 1900s, people didn't expect some government bureaucracy to play these kinds of roles.

When electric items started to become commonplace, there was a problem with some of them being dangerous and starting fires. And the insurance companies were getting hammered on claims and manufacturer liability issues.

That led to them wanting to assess risk of things, which meant having to test items as they were manufactured.

Which led to them coming up with safety standards.

Which led to them introducing the "UL Mark" to indicate that products had passed their testing and met their standards.

Manufacturers were all but forced to subscribe to those safety standards for liability reasons (they couldn't get insured without it), and because consumers started to recognize the tag and felt more confident in the products.

Today we just take it for granted. Most people have no clue why the tag is there. But left to our own devices, on big things this kind of stuff tends to take care of itself. As I said, nobody is going to get on an airplane without feeling reasonably sure that the plane and its maintenance meets some standard. And the insurers of those airlines, even if you had an airline being run by a jerk who would do something unsafe, are not going to insure any airline that isn't doing the kind of maintenance we get at a ridiculous cost via a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy that exists to justify its existence.

 

You are kind of making the point that the FAA didn't protect people all that well.

Now consider if people hadn't been lulled into a false sense of complacency that some benevolent hand is always protecting them? Would the 737 Max thing have happened?

I don't have the answer. But I can say with reasonable certainty that the FAA doesn't protect people any better than people would protect themselves on their own (and it may cause actual harm to the extent that it breeds corruption), and on top of it, it is economically destructive, because it draws capital away from more economically productive things, as it gets bigger and bigger and more powerful (the way wasteful bureaocracies do).

 

Yes, Boeing did. It was also ENABLED by our government, due to what you can only call corruption. And there was no other check really, because. ... well, everyone assumes that the FAA is some white knight that we need to protect us, even as our government shifted a chunk of the liability for the Max from those responsible to all of us, creating textbook moral hazard.

Imagine if the some bureaucrats who bare no financial cost for enabling Boeing didn't have that kind of power? I mean, what if a couple of insurers were on the hook for Boeing's behavior and were bankrupt and gone today (along with Boeing) as a result? Do you think the incentives might be different for the next Boeing?