I think you might be unaware of the various regulations that are driving all of these other non-aviation industries towards better safety. Not only that, but liability and insurance claims also drive safety measures, which are also enabled by workman's comp and other regulations). I'm having trouble imagining a single company policy around safety (either for workers or customers) that is not ultimately driven by government involvement or the legal system.
I never claimed anything about company safety policies. Let's keep separate the concept of an industry becoming safer from whatever policies those companies officially adopt after rounds of writing and rewriting.
To wit, three prominent examples of industries frontrunning safety advances well in advance of any regulation around them. One: In the late 19th century, early electrification was burning cities down. Private insurance companies banded together to form the Underwriter's Laboratory to test products, refusing to insure buildings that didn't use UL-listed devices. Manufacturers voluntarily submitted to rigorous safety testing not because the police would arrest them, but because it got them access to insurance at a considerably lower cost.
Two: In 1959, Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seatbelt. Volvo gave the patent away voluntarily to all competitors, partly to establish a brand identity of safety and innovation, and partly because they genuinely recognized that seatbelts saved lives. If your claims were right, Volvo would have either kept the patent to monopolize safety or, worse, buried it to save manufacturing costs. Instead, the market rewarded them for being the "safe car," and other manufacturers had to follow suit to compete, decades before seatbelt laws became universal.
Three: There currently exists almost no federal law governing recreational scuba diving in the United States. Yet, the industry is obsessed with safety. Shops by and large will not fill your tank without a C-card. The PADI and the NAUI update their standards constantly. If tourists started drowning en masse, in a sport virtually custom designed to do so, the industry would vanish. They self-regulate to preserve their market cap.
With all that, let's return to the claim you are endorsing. You say you are "absolutely confident", >99.99%, that the FAA's dissolution would lead an entire industry to be less safe a century from now. This seems like, at minimum, a lack of imagination regarding how markets solve coordination problems. You are assuming that in the absence of the FAA, a vacuum would remain. History suggests the opposite. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that without a shield of regulatory compliance to hide behind in court, liability pressures might actually make airlines more risk-averse, not less.
