Making America Great Again Requires Putting Business and Tech Innovation First

America is at a turning point. In terms of macroeconomic performance, the country may be in okay shape, but when it comes to core measures of underlying strength, such as productivity and global market share in advanced industries, it is far from great. In fact, it is faltering and is at grave risk of losing preeminence to China.

Against this backdrop, President-Elect Trump has won back the White House decisively enough to claim a clear mandate for change. In response to the public’s justifiable sense of economic malaise and drift, now is a time for big, bold action. And given that both chambers of Congress will likely be controlled by the president-elect’s party, there is no political excuse for timidity or inertia, especially in the next two years.

It would be a shame if Republicans and moderate Democrats who seek to restore American greatness wasted this opportunity by reverting to Reagan-esque, neoliberal nostalgia or incrementalist reformism that starts and stops with tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. In the Great Depression, FDR took bold, concerted action. Our times once again call for that spirit, but now it should be based first and foremost on advancing business-driven innovation.

That requires thoroughly repudiating the anti-innovation, anti-business agenda that progressives have pushed for more than a decade with aggressive antitrust enforcement, opposition to automation, and a draconian regulatory agenda. But it also requires embracing big ideas that are neither pie-in-the-sky libertarian wish-list items, such as cutting the federal government in half, nor “new right” conservative efforts to put a kinder, gentler face on anti-business redistribution.

In that spirit, here are 11 big ideas to reboot the U.S. economy and make it great again:

1. Recognize that American greatness—and restoring a middle-class standard of living for the working class—depends on vastly accelerating productivity through innovation and technology. The Biden administration wanted to restore the middle-class within a zero-sum redistributive agenda. This was destined to fail. The new administration and Congress need to commit to reviving the America Dream with the formula that has always sustained it in the past: Rapid productivity growth and innovation that enables companies large and small to pay good family wages while still making profits.
2. Get America back into the business of business. Calvin Coolidge famously said, “the business of America is business,” and it was America’s techno-industrial power that made it great. In other words, without strong, productive, innovative, and competitive companies of all sizes, America would become Europe: a statist economy with barely any growth. By contrast, the progressive model for an ideal economic structure would be comprised of fewer big private corporations and more small, ideally worker-owned companies. Some industries would be transformed into government-run “public utilities”—and large (liberal) philanthropies and “civil society” organizations would hold greater sway. That is a recipe not just to turn America into Europe, but something much more stunted. The new administration and Congress should get back to Coolidge’s philosophy. Policymakers need to understand that they cannot help American workers without helping American companies succeed, especially those engaged in fierce competition in global markets.
3. Embrace the fact that American greatness is impossible without muscular, dynamic U.S. multinationals. In the utopia of the progressive left, America would be a nation of small farmers, small shopkeepers—small everything. In that world, the new petit-bourgeois would be freed from their oppressive capitalist yoke, but it would be a recipe for weakness and poverty. And yet, too many “New Right” Republicans join the left in attacking large multinationals and thinking that family-owned companies are better. To be sure, one doesn’t have to like everything corporate management does, or even accept that everything American multinationals do is in the U.S. interest. But believing that big corporations are bad—and, worse, failing to protect them from state-backed foreign competitors—undermines America power. The reality is that without strong and very large corporations that can engage in market-to-market techno-economic combat with our adversaries, America will become like Great Britian—a shell of its former self that is dependent on tourism and commodities. So, it’s time to put emotions aside: The new administration and Congress need to end the government’s regulatory assault on big companies.
4. Derail the Luddite train. All aboard the innovation express! When this year’s Nobel Prize is awarded to American economists who counsel for policies that would slow the rate of innovation, it’s clear that the virus of Luddism has become a pandemic. All else being equal, technological progress and innovation is good—full stop. Americans used to not only believe that but embrace it, and it made us the scientific and technological powerhouse of the world. But too many progressives and elites now have long lists of reasons—all bogus—for why technological innovation is not good. The new government needs to tell them they are wrong: We want lots more innovations to succeed in the market.
5. Put America first, but not alone. President Trump is right when he says that past engagement of America with the world often sacrificed American techno-economic interests in order to cajole other nations into siding with us. Progressives, in their effort to establish a UN-based, Third-World-focused globalism, not only reject the idea of putting America first, but too often effectively advocate for putting America’s interests last. It is time for that to end. The United States no longer has spare techno-economic capital to squander by putting other nations’ interests above our own. Of course, not only are there countries that want to play by the rules and defend democracy, but with China now accumulating massive power, America cannot risk going it alone. If we do, we will surely lose and have to resort to praying that China respects the Monroe Doctrine. So, we must bring our friends and real allies, especially in the “NATO-sphere,” into a deeper, stronger alliance that includes a robust trading system. But doing so also means, as President Trump has spoken about, getting tough with even our closest friends—those with whom we have unshakeable military alliances, but who are nonetheless attacking us techno-economically. That status quo cannot continue.
6. China, China, China. China wants to replace America as the global techno-economic hegemon. And to that end, rather than repeat the Soviet Union’s mistakes, it has for decades allowed its businesses to have significant market freedom, albeit backed by massive state subsidies and other distortions. Progressives either ignore the China challenge, dismissing it as a ploy to divert from their efforts to hobble U.S. corporations, or resort to baseless allegations of a racist conspiracy or “Western imperialism” targeting a people’s republic. But while addressing the China challenge needs to be the central organizing principle of the new administration’s foreign policy, it has to be constrained by the goal of making America great. In our zeal to confront the CCP, we cannot let China fever lead us to hasty actions that result in self-inflicted wounds, including in overly aggressive export controls.
7. Roll back the U.S. regulatory morass and cease and desist importing un-American concepts like EU-style tech regulation. If progressives could have had their way, we’d all live in Germany, and everything from the straightness of bananas to how eggs are priced would be regulated. Large corporations would be pulverized with the antitrust hammer in the name of protecting “social market democracy.” New technologies would be presumed to be as dangerous as sarin gas and heavily regulated. But now is the time to bring common sense to the regulatory state. For starters, the new administration and Congress can start by repealing (or seriously reforming) the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), reforming the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to speed up approvals, and creating an Office of Innovation Policy Review at the Office of Management and Budget to ensure that all new regulations are at least not innovation-killing. And the administration should restore sanity to U.S. antitrust policy by putting the consumer welfare principle back on top.
8. Focus on technology, not social safety-net spending, as the only real “investment” for growth. In their zeal to expand government, the progressive left justifies seemingly endless spending as “investment”—even spending on things like housing, medical care, and nursing homes. With the federal det now soaring over $35 trillion, we just can’t afford excess non-productive spending. Yet, the nation needs to expand real investment that grows the economy: spending by business or government that generates a net present capital rate of return greater than the cost of capital.
9. Use IT to fundamentally reengineer the federal government to drive out waste, make it citizen-friendly, and boost productivity. Since Bill Clinton, every administration has claimed to want to reengineer government with technology. None have succeeded, because none really wanted to reduce federal government headcount through IT-based automation (either directly in government or through public-private partnerships). It is long past time for the government to take a “green eyeshade” approach to IT investment in government: Invest as long as the investment pays off in reduced government costs with the same, or increased service quality.
10. Address climate change through innovation. Progressives have tried to force America to address climate change with a combination of massive green-energy subsidies, mandates, and hectoring. But that won’t actually solve the problem, both because the problem is global, not national, and because today’s clean-energy technologies can’t match the price or performance of dirty energy, so forcing them into the market often wastes money and drives energy cost higher. On the other side of the aisle, too many Republicans continue to deny climate change is a real problem, which will eventually come back to bite them at the ballot box. The new administration and Congress have an opportunity to chart a better course, rejecting the current approach to climate and instead doubling down on clean energy innovation. With a policy framework focused on price/performance parity, American innovators can make clean energy, including advanced nuclear, that companies and consumers around the globe will choose to buy because it makes economic sense, not because they are forced or guilt-tripped into doing so.
11. Launch “warp speed” projects for the next big technology opportunities and challenges. Progressives give lip service to investing in technology, but it’s usually a line item near the end of the budget, behind college tuition bail outs, daycare requirements for CHIPS Act recipients, and ever more welfare spending. On the right, meanwhile, too many libertarians think innovation is a natural market force that grows out of the garages of wild entrepreneurs. The reality is that the federal government provides the seed and fertilizer for innovation, which entrepreneurs and companies grow into success. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that, in the 1960s, prior to the great digital revolution, the U.S. government spent more on R&D than the combined business and government spending of all other countries. So, while the administration and Congress must address the budget deficit, they also must make big investments through tax incentives and direct expenditures to support innovation—particularly in the “next big things,” like semiconductors, quantum computing, AI, new materials, biotechnology, advanced nuclear, and hypersonics. Moreover, public-private partnerships, like the Manufacturing USA network, should be expanded to play central roles in advancing the innovation capacity of U.S. enterprises. Policymakers should remember that, when it comes to supporting U.S. innovation, the choice isn’t between “all government” or “no government”; it’s about the right form of it.

How does this all fit with the new Republican majority? For starters, history makes clear that parties every so often switch their voters. Four decades ago, Republicans were the party of the college-educated and Democrats were the party of the working man and woman. Today, that has switched. Trump’s core strength is the working class. As such, a key filter for judging policies for the new administration and Congress is what will they do for its new base: hard-working Americans. It would be a mistake, both for the long-term health of the republic and for the Republicans politically, if a working-class agenda became one that is anti-corporate, anti-innovation, and principally redistributionist in nature, as some on the right have called for. That is simply a new version of progressive redistribution dressed in the trappings of a faux conservative intellectual tradition.

At bottom, we need to take a page from Dodgers slugger Shohei Ohtani and start swinging for the fences again. It is only large numbers of policy home runs, so to speak, that will make America great again. So, it’s time to step up to the plate and take some big swings.