Posted on 08/03/2021 4:31:51 AM PDT by Kaslin
Take a bow, America. It's official and irrefutable: The U.S. is blowing out the rest of the world in tech leadership. No other country in the world comes anywhere close in tech innovation and the dominance of our made-in-America 21st-century companies.
The Nasdaq index of once-small technology companies reached 15,000 last week. Only a few years ago, that index stood at 5,000. Yes, these companies have tripled in their market cap value -- and that doesn't include the dividends that have been paid out to large and mom-and-pop shareholders in America and across the planet.
We are told constantly that China is catching up and achieving remarkable digital-age leaps forward in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, green energy, robotics, 5G technologies and microchips. My friend George Gilder, who has written the wonderfully thought-provoking book about the future, "Life After Google," is high on Chinese tech companies. We should be ever vigilant.
But the value of America's 12 most valuable companies today in terms of stock valuation is well over $10 trillion. Those red, white and blue companies from Silicon Valley to the "Silicon Slopes" of Utah to Boston to northwest Arkansas are worth roughly as much as all of the Chinese publicly traded companies COMBINED.
Firms such as Google -- many of which didn't even exist 30 years ago -- have made millionaires of your next-door neighbor. Ordinary people are getting rich beyond anyone's imagination 50 years ago, thanks to American innovation and inventiveness. Risk-taking, old-fashioned can-doism is a hallmark of this unrivaled success story that has never been matched anywhere at any time in world history.
Almost all of this is a tribute to American financial markets that allocate capital in hyperefficient ways. Capitalists doing a spectacular job of allocating capital efficiently is our secret sauce to financial and technological success.
I am always mystified when highly successful Wall Street investors can't explain how it is they add value and sometimes concede that they are just unnecessary middlemen. Even Warren Buffett, one of the greatest of all time, expresses guilt about his billions, as if he and other great financiers are economic parasites. No. Steering financial resources to winners like Google, not losers like Solyndra, makes everyone in America richer.
Meanwhile, few politicians have any clue of how capital markets create wealth and jobs and shared prosperity in America. If they did, they would appreciate that without capitalists and capital, there is no enterprise -- no material progress. They would instantly understand the economic lunacy of increasing taxes on capital gains and dividends, wealth taxes, and, worst of all, death taxes that threaten the future survival of family-owned businesses. Cutting, not raising, the U.S. capital gains tax would be far wiser if we want America to maintain and widen our competitive lead and keep winning globally. Over a few decades, the returns to the government from more investment will pay a rich bounty to the coffers of the feds and states and cities.
The arrogant fools in the Biden administration believe that to keep America No. 1 technologically, we need to have a multibillion-dollar government-run slush fund with the politicians picking winners and losers with other people's money. China does this, and so does Japan, and it has never worked. One of the most famous stories of government-as-investment banker was when the Tokyo government's brain trust recommended that Honda not get in the business of making cars. Here in the U.S., the political class has made a $150 billion bet on wind and solar power since the late 1970s, and in return, that has produced only a small sliver of our energy needs.
Even more inexplicable is the movement in America coming from senators such as Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on the left and Josh Hawley of Missouri on the right to break up our tech companies. Why? Because, evidently, they are TOO good at what they do. They make too much money. They have too many customers and too many advertisers. Put aside for a moment the rancid political persuasions of some of these leftist Silicon Valley CEOs. Somehow, the left and right agree that building a superior product and even crafting entire new industries is a punishable offense. God forbid.
The rest of the world -- the Chinese, Indians, Japanese and especially the technologically inferior Europeans -- would love to hobble American titans and tax away their profits. The role of the U.S. government should be to repel the foreign attacks. Crazily, the Biden administration has given the green light to foreigners pillaging American companies.
This doesn't put America first.
So, can America's tech dominance continue to blow away the foreign competition for decades to come? Bet on it. Unless we are foolish enough to decapitate our own industries through regulation, antitrust policies and raising tax rates on success. The challenge for U.S. supremacy is coming from Washington, D.C. Not China.
Sure, Google has made millionaires out of many people, but at what cost?
Wrong adverb.
American tech, so you know that you can’t escape surveillance.
American tech, when we cancel you you are canceled.
American tech, the companies that China steals from the mostest.
The USA leads in many aspects of tech because
1. It doesn’t penalise failure
2. It has great higher education
3. It has a concentration of smart folks in certain areas.
However, at different points in history different countries also had a monopoly and became complacent.
China has overtaken the usa in mobile payments and the technology for that in Estonia and Sweden is incredible.
The usa needs to improve primary education
Too bad they gave away all of the middle class jobs to imported foreigners using the sham H-1b visa. So who cares? The American people didn’t share in this...
Excellent point.
Bill Gates et al ( may they all rot in hell one day ) imported a compliant indentured workforce to implement globalist tech dominance. A workforce where freedom and self governance is a foreign concept. I hate them....
I think that the USA is going to be in very bad shape in 2nd tier technologies. Those are things such as airplane design , radio design, designing defense hardware, civil engineering.
In my own company there is no depth in the younger engineers. I think all the talent goes to the googles and other cutting edge companies. It takes a lifetime of study to be good at airplanes, radios, automobiles and defense hardware. The capable people are not going into these things and the ones that do are lectured by political correctness so much that the drive to be excellent at these 2nd tier things is evaporating.
I have worked with Airbus and Boeing , and I hate to say it but Boeing is a broken company and Airbus is not. The MAX 737 debacle is just the tip of the iceberg.
In the 90’s the USA was sold a bill of goods ( Bullh!t by any other name ) that the USA would deindustrialized and become a tech giant and their would be good jobs for all THEN THEY IMPORTED MILLIONS OF FOREIGNERS UNDER H-1B TO UNDERCUT THE US WORKFORCE AND WAGES. F THEM ALL.
It makes me really proud that America leads the way in building a gigantic cybernetic Panopticon to repress its own citizens and displace them. We have the best electronic surveillance, don’t we folks?
Skynet, eat your cybernetic heart out.
H-1B visa abuse had another deleterious side effect by scaring away the best and brightest US students from even considering a career STEM.. H-1B is evil....
The USA is a tech giant.
It is also an industrial giant. The difference is that heavy industry is highly automated.
Oh and gloBULLists can all kiss my American a$$.
Stephen Moore and Club For Growth, never met an illegal alien they didn’t want more of. Phooey!
India will never take over tech. They have built-in cultural and ethical retardation. People in India DO tech because they simply can’t sell apple cores and straw to each other and earn a living. But unlike cheap Chinese consumer goods, quality does matter in tech and Indian companies can’t do quality.
“But the value of America’s 12 most valuable companies today in terms of stock valuation is well over $10 trillion.”
It would be instructive to see an argument for how market capitalization is a good measure of technological innovation. It’s taken as axiomatic here, but it’s not obvious to me.
You may be right about Moore but in this article he sums it up pretty well:
"...can America's tech dominance continue to blow away the foreign competition for decades to come? ... The challenge for U.S. supremacy is coming from Washington, D.C. Not China."
Elsewhere on this point, it is reported China has recently issued a new "Buy China" policy. "When China joined the World Trade Organization, it agreed not to issue such internal documents. The document also violated the spirit of the January 2020 Phase One trade deal with the United States..."
Any doubts about how Team Biden will directly deal with this affront?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.