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The US will fund as many people who will develop this tech as need be. The national champion approach produces a too big to fail lazy company.


Wouldn’t any form of government funding produce a lazy company vs companies standing on their own two feet with the free market acting as drill sergeant?


Suppose you have to do some R&D in order to make something happen. There is no way to keep it a secret and China isn't going to enforce a patent on it, so if you pay to do the R&D and then have to charge prices high enough to recover it, they undercut you on price and you go out of business. But if the government covers the R&D then you can do domestic production at a competitive price.

Meanwhile the subsidy should be going to every company in the industry so then they still have to compete with each other.

Or to put it a different way, what's really the difference between a subsidy and a tax cut?


The funding can get companies spun up and competing.


Assuming they are picking winners. Western government's usually just throw money at existing legacy organizations, not up and coming companies.

In this case it's an institute attached to a big university (University of Texas) that is scaling up an R&D idea, that happens to be useful for the military https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2024/07/18/semicond...




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