The distillation of Marc’s thesis points echoes “We should have businesses coming out the wazoo!”, at least in my mind. I think plenty of his points about push

The distillation of Marc’s thesis points echoes “We should have businesses coming out the wazoo!”, at least in my mind. I think plenty of his points about pushing investment into broad market innovation are very true. Simultaneously, this post made me think about how we got here. Many of the problems being experienced that are exasperated by the coronavirus are also being contributed to by private industry. I guess the notion of what the government should/should not provide or manufacture is up to personal belief... however, since “small-government” was pushed starting in the 1980s(?), there’s been a big change in the way many public services (and public service dependencies) are operated. I like the idea of supporting home-grown innovation through startups and market disruption - however, seeing it from the other side, those are also the forces that brought upon harsh realities like experiencing PPE shortages because the manufacturing is outsourced to cheap labor overseas or millions of people relying on shit-tier digital services built by an amalgam of government contractors a decade ago and billed at a ridiculous rate. I think there’s an opportunity to take the overall message and shift it inwards towards actually pushing government-enabled innovation and development projects. That at least seems more “by the people, for the people” than proliferating a system of voracious hunger to corner off a big pile of sweet government money.