tl;dr: Pournelle's Iron Law.
For balance, I stopped reading this article at the end of the first page because it called Boeing "neoliberal", which doesn't mean anything except that the writer is a snotty humanities grad.
Typical engineering humor of that era where they'd make up "rules of the universe" that were just them saying something vaguely cynical.
You see this everywhere. Crazy CEO salaries and golden parachutes, as CEOs sit on each other's boards approving such packages. Charities that prolong the problem they were set up to eliminate. "Old space" where NASA provided decades of unjustified cost-plus contracts.