The American Path to Competitive Advantage
As a global economic and financial power with military hegemon status facing increasing challenges from the East, the United States is presented with a unique opportunity to project its strength and influence. As a reigning technological leader with thriving markets and capital, the U.S. must ensure that its policies continue to adhere to its values while providing the autonomy and support structure needed to enrich its people and contribute to global flourishing.
Permissionless Innovation
The United States must commit to empowering its markets and innovators by advancing permissionless innovation. In the past half-century, the most impactful inventions and technologies developed on American shores have emerged from the bottom-up, as self-maximizing entrepreneurs and industrialists have competed to feed consumer demand, employ talent, and deliver goods and services needed across the world. This status quo has provided dividends for American security and strength, allowing the country to become much nimbler and more adaptive while avoiding the pitfalls of centralized command and control as practiced in China.
In allowing the unprecedented growth of the Internet through light-touch regulation for decades, the U.S. set global standards for tech and innovation. As a result, rules and regulations have emerged over time rather than been imposed by above, giving innovators the ample space and runway to develop both the hardware and software that consumers have come to rely on. We must avoid top-down regulatory approaches on AI and other technologies as they have been tried in blue states, which would only serve to stunt our growth.
By shunning the precautionary principle, which hampers far too much innovation and growth on the European continent and elsewhere, the U.S. has embraced a system that rewards risk and punishes failures through market mechanisms rather than bureaucratic mandate. This unique system, matched with deep capital markets, stable rule of law, and protection of intellectual property, has made the U.S. the ideal launching pad for creative pursuits that have created vast amounts of wealth and opportunities.
In the fields of artificial intelligence, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, financial technology, advanced manufacturing, and robotics, the U.S. can maintain its global lead over adversaries and competitors by adhering to permissionless innovation.
Energy Supremacy
As a nation blessed with vast natural resources, the United States must continue to allow the development of energy projects of all stripes to continue to feed electricity grids, but also to power the next generation of data centers, transportation, and industry.
Affordable and abundant energy will be a dominant force in freeing up the resources, time, and wealth for the economic and technological growth to remain competitive, as well as providing for the higher standard of living that will be demanded by the American population. For data centers and computing hubs, cheap energy will be requisite for maintaining an edge.
While still maintaining environmental standards, removing red tape for pipelines, natural gas extraction, offshore wind, and nuclear energy will have to be viewed as an all-encompassing strategy to maintain the country’s energy supremacy and dominance. Outdated infrastructure will have to be replaced, and regulatory systems will have to be streamlined.
Freed from the global oil market fluctuations outside of American control, maximizing the energy surplus produced domestically and provided to ally nations will ensure that firms can remain competitive and keep prices low, maintaining the relative strength of the dollar as the world reserve currency and giving global investors even more reason to put their funds in the growing technology sector in the United States.
Avoiding Choosing Winners and Losers
Though the U.S. is poised to develop technological solutions to the world, there is a growing movimento antitruste in domestic politics that may harm entrepreneurial efforts to otherwise deliver value. The dominance of Big Tech has unified some elements of both right and left political coalitions intent on trimming these firms down to size, but to cut down our own domestic champions at a time of growing global competition would not be wise.
Though there are many arguments about market concentration, whether certain firms should be allowed to merge with or purchase others, or whether policies should be devised to mandate more competition by force, we should return to the dominating principle of consumer welfare as the north star for competition and antitrust policy. The mandated breakup and competition scrutiny of firms like Google, Meta, Nvidia, or OpenAI may unite certain ideological factions, but it would serve no other purpose than allowing the government to pick winners or losers for reasons beyond consumer welfare. This, in turn, would deprive startup firms of capital and opportunities aided by these companies, either directly by its investors or those who’ve transferred their skills to other firms to compete. At the same time, the U.S. should avoid costly corporate welfare schemes that may serve to prop up inefficient entities while locking out otherwise talented upstarts, not to mention throw good money after bad.
With a strong competition policy that allows winners and losers to be decided by consumers and the market, rather than by lawmakers, attorneys, and judges, the United States can ensure a competitive field that will deliver tech innovation to benefit all consumers.
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