> > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.
> humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years
You really can't compare pre and post industrial revolution like that. Large scale synthesis of toxic chemicals as a byproduct of some unrelated industry just wasn't a thing previously.
> In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business.
Extremely doubtful. Air travel has been intentionally pushed to a ridiculously high level of assurance by regulation. I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own.
I appreciate where you're coming from, that a large portion of existing regulation is gratuitous, being structured the way it is primarily for the benefit of the incumbent. But that doesn't mean that such regulation isn't doing anything useful at the same time.
> I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own.
Possibly not. Possibly in a free market people still would fly on an aircraft type that was known to have had two recent crashes that killed everyone on board. I wouldn't, but perhaps I'm an outlier.
But if people would be willing to fly on such an aircraft in a free market (which means that the value of flying on it, to them, is greater than the cost, even including the expected cost of the risk of a fatal crash), then the logical consequence is not that our air travel regulations are doing good; it's that our air travel regulations are overestimating (possibly drastically) the value we actually put on human life, and therefore are diverting large amounts of resources to things that actually are worth less to us than they cost. That's not a net benefit.