alt Hacker News> 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.
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I agree entirely with the sibling comment. Put another way, just because the layman majority would accept something under a given set of conditions that doesn't make it right or ideal or something to strive for.
Even given the current environment Boeing still tried to (unsuccessfully) shift blame away from themselves. Imagine how that might have gone differently in a "free market" where "unencumbered" by regulation there wasn't even proper investigation or disclosure.
More generally, you seem to be approaching this with the a priori assumption that whatever the free market would arrive at is the correct result. Given that we're considering the merits of various regulations it seem to me that begs the question.
Some people are willing to be drive drunk. This doesn't mean that taking into account the views of people who don't want to be killed by drunk people when determining who gets to use the roads is "overestimating the value we actually put on human life"
(also, without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole. You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise, just like if you've ever flown before you evidently didn't know about the last couple of crashes that aircraft type had that killed everyone on board...)