alt Hacker News> The copyright system is one of the major suspects for why US industry ended up crippled and replaced by Asian labour refusing to respect US IP laws to their significant advantage.
Expand on this.
Wasn't it instead our desire to be the world's reserve currency and rely on cheap imports? You can't be both a net exporter and the world's top reserve currency.
You have to run trade deficits if you want to export dollars.
It comes down to comparative advantages more than anything else and the US raising the cost (in some sense outright banning) people from deploying good ideas in an industrial way seems like it'd be a significant comparative disadvantage to attracting investment. And a much bigger deal than the practical reality that the US imports more than it exports.
Maintaining an import-dependent economy might be a factor, economies are complicated. But there isn't a fundamental reason that taking in more stuff than gets exported should mean that Asia has to be more successful. If anything, a country in a position to import more than it exports should be seeing big jumps in living standards, rather the gains going to a country notionally taking the bad end of the bargain. And there are some easy resolutions to being a net importer and while having a strong industrial economy - import raw materials, make stuff that isn't for export as an example.