“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” -- F. A. Hayek
The best thing that the US government could do to help start-ups (and other American businesses, for that matter) is to stop trying to help and get out of the way.
Everyone is influenced by incentives. The primary incentive of politicians is to get re-elected and the primary incentive of government bureaucrats is to protect their jobs and increase their power. This is natural and does not make either group evil; they are simply trying to do what's best for them. However, there's very overlap between these incentives and those which promote wise economic policies.
Even if we assume a selfless government guided only by some desire to do what is best for the economy, there is no reason to believe that government can wisely guide the anarchic and Darwinian process of market competition, and much reason to think that they can not.
For a profound analysis of the underlying knowledge aggregation problem which dooms attempts to guide the economy, see Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html).
The best thing that the US government could do to help start-ups (and other American businesses, for that matter) is to stop trying to help and get out of the way.
Everyone is influenced by incentives. The primary incentive of politicians is to get re-elected and the primary incentive of government bureaucrats is to protect their jobs and increase their power. This is natural and does not make either group evil; they are simply trying to do what's best for them. However, there's very overlap between these incentives and those which promote wise economic policies.
Even if we assume a selfless government guided only by some desire to do what is best for the economy, there is no reason to believe that government can wisely guide the anarchic and Darwinian process of market competition, and much reason to think that they can not.
For a profound analysis of the underlying knowledge aggregation problem which dooms attempts to guide the economy, see Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html).