What are the “boundaries” of a firm? What determines the extent of vertical boundaries?

You may or may not agree with me but from my experience morality sets the vertical boundaries. In my own business we have had slow steady growth for thirty years. Many of my peers have had huge growth and learned to depend on government assistance and incentives to do what makes sense any way. When they overextend them selves and are at risk to have great loss there always seems to be some government program to give loans or tax breaks to make improvements. This relates to all the small businesses that held on since 2008 while GM, AIG, the big banks and so forth all got help.