I think the argument for making it a corporate death sentence is that future companies and shareholders will know it is in their interest to make airplanes that don't kill people.

More abstractly, if you value human life at a high enough dollar value and make corporations liable for loss thereof, they will expend effort to preserve human life. It appears that currently the externality of killing people is priced at a level where Boeing does not mind killing people.

I don't know if lawsuit liability is the best way to police corporate behavior, but it is big part of the system we currently have in the USA.

They do make airplanes that don’t kill people. More people die per mile in cars than have ever died in airplanes. The train fatality rate in the United States is higher than that of airplanes — the majority of those airplanes being Boeing. More people died in cars yesterday than in all of 2018 for Boeing. And given fatalities per mile, air travel on Boeing airplanes is safer than any other form of transportation. Suggesting that Boeing makes planes that “kill people,” is about as ridiculous as saying that Specialized makes bikes that kill people. The safety record of American aviation is unmatched — and most of those planes are Boeing. Let’s tamp down on the hyperbole.

Because its relative. You cant get car traffic as safe as airplanes. Its not reasonable to hold Boeing to the same standards as automotive traffic. Automotive traffic is simply far more dangerous then flying. You also wouldnt be ok with people dying from bread as long as its fewer then the amount of people dying to e.coli or fish poisoning. The question is always how easy it is to prevent deaths not how many are acceptable for a given branch.

If you have companies who are to big to fail they behave that way. We just had that with banks and the financial crisis. Leaving such institutions as is is incredibly dangerous and incentives risky and reckless behavior at the cost of society as a whole.

If saving those jobs is the goal, we should work towards that instead of saving the company in hopes that this will also save jobs.

Like those factories and workers would just disappear. Something new would be established, hopefully something better. We can't keep looking away when companies behave like Boeing did, actively killing people, only because we would put people out of work.

Those factories and workers would disappear from the US to the EU / elsewhere. If you were ordering planes, why would you risk ordering brand new planes from the remnants of a company killed by its own government?

Again, I'm not saying they did no wrong. I'm just saying criminal accountability for those responsible is better than corporate death sentences.

> Airbus, which last I read, had an ever so slightly worse safety record

[citation needed]

Someone linked it during previous discussions, but it was summary posted on Quora here. I'd consider them equivalent:

https://www.quora.com/How-many-plane-crashes-does-Boeing-hav...

...which concludes:

With the exception of the MD-11, there is no statistically significant safety record difference between jet transports put into service since 1980, Airbus and Boeing included.

So break off the civilian plane division and kill it off. No reason to hurt all 100,000 employees, just the division that was responsible. It sucks to hear “sheesh I wish there were more competitors” after Boeing just kicked Bombardier in the Crown Jewels for daring to compete with the C-Series, which is only an Airbus product now because Boeing took advantage of the US political system in the first place (a severe miscalculation in retrospect).

Monopolies aren’t capitalist. Monopolies keep putting us in uncomfortable situations like this. There’s a reason we have regulations to keep them from happening (or at least break them apart post facto) even if we choose not to use them.