The problem of US-based or ally-based technology companies that fall behind competitively or economically and then are allowed to fail inescapably ensures US dependence for essential/secure tech supplies on others, some with motives contrary to our well-being. This chink in our commercial, military, and security armor should wake the US government to the necessity of underwriting some essential industries, products, or services -- as China famously does.

The US gov't has underwritten a few niche industries for decades such as supercomputing (e.g. Cray and TMC) and crypto. But for some reason they've been reluctant to do this more broadly for other essential industries like microelectronics, telecom, battery tech, and more. Clearly the potential repercussions of such oversights should compel this laissez-faire policy to be reconsidered.

Well as a citizen of a US ally (UK), that's all very well but I don't think the world works like that. Europe, Japan and other US allies are collectively huge pools of talent and capital. How much would the US government have to spend to guarantee than nothing thought up or developed in any of those countries ever exceeds anything developed in the US? Is that really a feasible objective?

Nobody in the US decided to let Holland develop more advanced lithographic systems for chip manufacturing, or to let ARM in the UK come up with a more efficient processor architecture.

They fund the universities through debt in the form of student loans. The schools then funnel indebted graduates desperate for financial security into various industries where their human capital is securitized. You can call that laissez-faire, but I see a lot of similarities with China’s top down system and predict those similarities to increase as we are forced to compete with China more directly.