There's a swath of people who have adopted the position that it's best to let industry be the primary agent of regulation, largely for ideological political reasons. As we saw with the MAX debacle, such a position is foolish, as companies will always be cravenly willing to cut corners in the interest of short term profits.
This is one of the biggest political changes I've gone through. In my early 20s I was much more sympathetic to what I'd now call naive libertarianism. Today I realize there's no magic bullet, and you need healthy leadership in both the private and public spheres. Ideally the two buttress each other against their individual flaws. However in the US the process of regulatory capture has hijacked this ideal.
We won't be able to fix it unless we vote in politicians who see this as a top priority. We get the quality of government we ask for.
Probably because while regulatory capture is a real thing, and the FAA did bend for Boeing, the FAA was partly the cause of the MAX disaster. If there had been a small incremental training sub-type certificate program, then Boeing would have trained pilots in how to handle the different pitch moment of the MAX. Instead the type certificate thing led to... well, everything that happened -- not inexorably, no, because Boeing screwed the pooch in many ways, and perhaps they would have found other terrible mistakes to make. But inflexibility at the FAA was -ironically!- a cause. I say ironically precisely because then the FAA relaxed the redundancy requirement and so on.
There's a subset of this places reader's that are pretty aggressive with the libertarian stuff. If you know the quip about people thinking they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires, I think that's close to the root of it, something more tangible when you work in tech and the possibility of earning truly big money is more near at hand than most other vocations, even if still something of a luck shot.
This is one of the biggest political changes I've gone through. In my early 20s I was much more sympathetic to what I'd now call naive libertarianism. Today I realize there's no magic bullet, and you need healthy leadership in both the private and public spheres. Ideally the two buttress each other against their individual flaws. However in the US the process of regulatory capture has hijacked this ideal.
We won't be able to fix it unless we vote in politicians who see this as a top priority. We get the quality of government we ask for.