Boeing and Airbus aren’t really “regulatory capture” situations. They’re basically state monopolies, and the EU and US have been suing each other for decades for unlawful competition lmao
Also they both have a HUGE defense sector that is completely tied to state policy.
Honestly the most capitalistic part about them is that everybody pretends that they’re private companies operating in a free market (because that’s a politically convenient lie in a neoliberal global economy), but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Their Defense contracts are State-Funded, and their aviation R&D is State-Funded. De facto, I’d argue they are public companies.
Unfortunately part of Boeing’s problem is that they are being slowly outcompeted by Airbus, but the U.S. government cannot let them fail. Not (only) because of corruption, but simply because Boeing’s industrial capacity is crucial to the defense sector and cannot be allowed to perish or be sold off to a foreign competitor. That political reality exists independently of who sits at Boeing’s board of directors, so changing it without doing anything about the politics might not yield appreciable results (at least not in the short term).
My take that the company should be officially nationalized and/or broken up, but both of those are political non-starters for the U.S.
