Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Left and right, politicians and pundits repeatedly accuse the private sector of being so focused on maximizing profits today that government must use tariffs and subsidies if America is to “build the industries of the future.” Your report on Michael Dell belies this accusation (“Michael Dell Spent 40 Years Preparing for an AI Boom No One Expected,” December 14).Guided by his expertise in the IT industry and disciplined by the fact that the money he invests is his own, he anticipated the future demand for much-greater computing power and successfully created private-sector capacity to meet it.
Along the way, he took risks by questioning conventional thinking. You nicely summarize the result: “All the changes Dell made to his company during that period – the $67 billion acquisition of storage maker EMC in 2016 was at the time the largest tech deal in history – have resulted in a company possessing all the bits required to build the most powerful systems that go into data centers – and which are perfectly suited to training and running AI.”
If President-elect Trump and the incoming Congress were wise, they’d abandon all talk of tariffs and subsidies and instead stick to reducing taxes and regulatory burdens so that entrepreneurs can even better innovate, experiment, and compete – and have their ideas tested not by politicians spending other people’s money, but by consumers and businesses spending their own.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
