I wonder if this is unchecked laissez faire capitalism at work? Nobody wants to fly on Boeing 737 Max anymore but this has cost hundreds of lives to get to this point.
There was definitely regulatory capture which led to lax FAA oversight, though. Maybe a free-market fundamentalist would argue that they would have done better if they weren't dragged down by all that red tape, but it suggests to me that a looser regulatory environment was more dangerous.
