Yes that sounds familiar. Due to that and so much more, it wouldn't be surprising to see this phenomenon in USA building inspection as well. Only, I've built several buildings in the last decade, and I can confirm that the building inspectors (who in every case worked for the relevant local fire department) are very professional and very opposed to letting unsafe shit be built for the use of the public.

It would be very hard to privatize building inspections in the US for two reasons.

1) It’s controlled locally, which means it would have to be privatized city by city or county by county.

2) Building code varies by city and county, which makes it much easier for the county to enforce directly.

That isn't as good a firewall as one might imagine. Organizations like ALEC push through lots of abusive crap at state and municipal levels. They've got their fingers in hundreds of pies at the same time. If locals aren't paying attention, they can have the laws in force and be on to the next town before anyone realizes what happened.

apples to oranges. The USA isn't willing to invest in a branch of the FAA that can actually go through every aspect of the engineering of the 737-max in order to understand if it's working effectively.

Even with the MAX disaster, aviation standards are significantly better than the 70s/80s.

Boeing + Airbus have a very very very vested interest in making sure that aviation is safe, and appears very safe (which is why Airbus did NOT go on the attack on Boeing's safety. It would hurt the entire industry).

Building codes and fire safety are something that should damn well be simple / codified enough that it's inspectable by a reasonable person.

Boeing did lie about shit. Middle management pushed some real bullshit with the max.

1. "Boeing + Airbus have a very very very vested interest in making sure that aviation is safe, and appears very safe"

2. "Boeing did lie about shit. Middle management pushed some real bullshit with the max."

So how are these two things squared? I'd say clearly Boeing has other interests which compete with safety, like profit. The difference between "appears safe" and "is safe" can be profitably "arbitraged", until you mess up and get caught.

It doesn't seem their very very very vested interest in making sure aviation is safe was sufficient to replace outside supervision after all.