> sad to see the US thinking about shooting its only real growth industry in the foot.
It appears you are not from the US. Can you elaborate more on your perspective on why you think this to be the case? I am genuinely curious. (Just for full disclosure, the top 10 industries experiencing large growth at the moment are mostly related to construction or engineering in the traditional sense, not much hyper growth coming from web apps these days)
I was born in the US, and I spend about half each year there.
I think it is tradition in the US that whenever there is a new market or opportunity, to both celebrate the early entrants (in the case of tech, the persistent “two founders in a suburban garage” meme) and then also ignore the fact that it’s routine to make it as difficult as possible to replicate the conditions that lead to new companies or new people having wealth creation opportunities. I’ve heard it described as “pulling the ladder up behind you”.
A lot of people play the game as if it’s zero-sum.
It could also just be that I’m somewhat bitter because I have about five great ideas for companies that would make the world markedly better and more useful, and they have all recently been made either de facto or de jure illegal.
I hate that we’re almost always stuck with large incumbents who rent-seek based on their position, or seek for the government to make it harder/illegal for others to use the same general wealth-creation methods that they did.
Witnessing that level of selfishness hurts my soul, especially leveled against those who are most able and willing to build new businesses, cool products and services, and jobs.
It appears you are not from the US. Can you elaborate more on your perspective on why you think this to be the case? I am genuinely curious. (Just for full disclosure, the top 10 industries experiencing large growth at the moment are mostly related to construction or engineering in the traditional sense, not much hyper growth coming from web apps these days)