The US was less centralized than the USSR, but not by as large of a margin as most think. It's always -- even going back to the days of Manifest Destiny and suc

The US was less centralized than the USSR, but not by as large of a margin as most think. It's always -- even going back to the days of Manifest Destiny and such -- been a planned economy where major economic moves and expansions are driven by edict and funded by the state or central banks. I'm not really aware of a good example of a complex technologically advanced society that isn't centrally planned to a significant degree. Either it hasn't happened yet, libertarianism being a form of political futurism, or central planning is actually necessary to overcome the natural tendency of human societies and economies toward conservatism and inertia. But you still have the mythology of America, land of the free, where everything is grassroots. You can even see this mythology at work in popular accounts of Silicon Valley. In reality most of the fundamental bedrock innovations that created the Valley were funded by DARPA, NASA, and other state sources in the 1960s, and the existence of the Valley as a concentration of tech talent dates from the concentration of radar and signals intelligence industries there in WWII. Look up a talk called "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" on YouTube. In more modern times there are still strong hints of a deep connection, such as the ties that may exist between large tech firms like Google and the state, though the extent of these ties is a subject of some controversy. I'd actually be curious to hear an example of a major bedrock innovation (like semiconductors, ICs, orbital rockets, etc.) that has occurred in the past ~75 years and has not been the product of either government research funding or a state-enforced monopoly (e.g. Ma Bell / Bell Labs). Only such entities have sufficient exemption from market realities to permit such long-sighted and high-risk investments. Therein lies, I think, one of the big fallacies of the freedom myth-- that markets drive innovation. In reality I think innovation requires at least a period of exemption from markets, since markets mandate short-term thinking. At a smaller scale seed and venture capital allows companies to obtain a short reprieve from the market that in some cases is long enough to allow some innovation to occur before everything has to answer to the god of quarterly profit. If markets get really good at providing such funding it's possible that we could see a future of decentralized market-driven innovation, but this would require a further extension and broadening of the seed/angel/VC model and associated financial instruments that properly model the nature of this kind of investment. We need entities able to make 10-20 year investments in small teams of brilliant people to tackle insanely hard problems the way national labs and academic institutes can, but time frames like that are way outside the parameters of your typical fund turnaround time.