You know the answer to that question. Comac, UAC, Airbus, Embraer and others all came from government efforts. Bombardier took Canadair off the government's han

You know the answer to that question. Comac, UAC, Airbus, Embraer and others all came from government efforts. Bombardier took Canadair off the government's hands to get started, so they might be the nearest there is to 'private free market enterprise'. Boeing live off the the defence contracts but they are arguably totally free market. We know this isn't true and pretend. The article talks about how the McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merger was evil. But there is no discussion on why Airbus is okay when Airbus is a merger of various European defence interests with different cultural values. Why is one merger bad and the other not put under the same scrutiny? Also, why isn't there a supply chain where anyone can enter the market? Pratt and Whitney, Rolls Royce and General Electric make engines, so if you can make your own plane you just bolt on ready made engines. But that is as far as the system integration aspect seems to go. Most auto manufacturers do make their own engines so they are not 'systems integrators'. However, if you want to make cars you could go to Bosch for the bits they make, Johnson Controls for the bits they make, Pirelli for a few tyres and before you knew it there would be everything needed for final assembly. You could even get a contract manufacturer to make the whole thing. With computers anyone can build a PC. But there might only be 2-3 supplier choices for a given component. Some PCs are built for a specialist niche, e.g. point of sales systems, or medical. No heavy handed governments made the PC manufacturers merge into giant mega corporations, they did that themselves opening doors for new entrants in the process. Planes could be more about systems integration, so a given airliner might be able to get a local place to build planes for its requirements from off the shelf parts. The governments could have rationalised the industry to work this way. Imagine if, as per the engine example there are 2-3 suppliers for wings, fuselages, avionics packages, cabin interiors, fuel interiors and so on. This idea can be easily nitpicked, however, aeons ago the U.S. government legislated so that airliners could not build their own planes.