We don't have a free market. The market is not allowed to implode. Mega corporations and banks are not allowed to fail. Boeing is not allowed to fail, and that fact, more than anything else, explains why they are such a poorly run company. Where you see a "resounding success" I see an absolute failure that is closer to a scam or a ponzi scheme than a legitimate system.
Boeing didn't take the money anyways, so I don't know why people are so riled up about it.
The defense part of Boeing used to be a separate company (McD). DoD could easily let commercial fail and spin out McD again, or just shrink to defense only. For a long time, Airbus has claimed that the DoD spending subsidizes the commercial side. So TBH, letting commercial fail would result in more bang for the DoD buck.
Regarding military activities, I don't doubt that there are engineering synergies between commercial aviation and military aviation. However I've always heard that from a commercial perspective the two are at odds: for a defense organization you want to make sure to keep as little cash on hands, as it's fairly easy to ask for more. There are always scope changes, delays and shit happening. The last thing you want is to have a war chest that your customers will ask you to tap in to cover the costs of contradictory requirements, feature creep and original underbidding to win the contract. See the A400M as an example: the civil side of Airbus is coughing up quite a lot of cash for that clusterfuck.
On the other hand, developing civil airliners requires cash. A lot of cash. You can't ask American Airlines to cough up some extra cash because your 787 is delayed and is costing more to produce than anticipated. In fact the opposite is true: because your 787 is delayed, your customers will pay much less, and only when you can actually deliver the product (for the most part). Bombardier didn't have pockets deep enough to sustain the CSeries...
What a deal!
Yet for some reason, nobody's buying from the stores that are open.
So the mass layoffs are just a mirage, and not a failure at all, are they?
Yeah, and they caught never-ending flak for it until AWS starting turning a profit and eventually dragged Amazon into the black. Amazon was/is the exception, not the rule.
Amazon went public in 1997. Boeing went public in 1962.
You get leeway as a young-ish public company, which will expire once you are an established player. How do you think markets are going to react if the bottom falls out of Amazon's business in 2055?
Why do people keep repeating this garbage over and over and over? It just isn't true.
Amazon literally didn't make profits for 10 years. Many other tech companies haven't made a cent yet, but investors are looking 5-10 years into the future for those.
Some businesses just make bad decisions, others make good decisions. Overall the free market/public corporation system is a resounding success. Just because boeing messed up doesn't say anything about the rest of the system.