I have never claimed "much better". But given the overall track record of government regulation in actually protecting people from the harmful things it's supposed to protect them from, it would be hard for any private effort to do worse. If you disagree with that, evidently we don't live on the same planet and there's not enough common ground between us for a useful discussion.

That said, perhaps it might help if I rephrase things somewhat. I'm accepting, at least for the sake of argument, your claim that, for example, Indonesians have no way of getting any reliable information about which buses, ferries, etc. are safe (and that the same was true of airplanes for many years, but perhaps that's changing now).

And that makes me wonder: why do people even use these things, if they have no information about their safety? Or why don't they find some way of getting the information? Why can't someone start a business that provides it? Would people just not pay for it because they think such information should be free? What's the mindset here? Am I really that much of an outlier, that it seems obviously foolish to me to be using these things if you have no way of getting reliable information about their safety? Is Indonesia, for example, really full of such "unworldly" people who need to be protected from their own unworldliness?

You call such ideas as starting a business to provide people with such information a "libertarian fantasy". To me the fantasy is the idea that government regulation can be depended on to "protect" the "unworldly" people who otherwise will happily do unsafe things. As I said above, the overall track record of government regulation gives no basis for any such belief.

> you're precisely the sort of uworldly person such regulation is intended to protect

I don't know where you're getting this from, since I've already said elsewhere in this thread that I personally would not fly on an airplane whose safety record I have no reliable information about. It's quite true that my current best source of such information is the US government. But that doesn't mean that situation is the best that can be done.

> the people that don't trust in unregulated airlines but run the risk of being hit by their aircraft anyway

I don't know what you mean by this.