Frankly I don't think the US model is something we should be competing with for the same reasons I don't think we should be emulating sweatshops in China or India. Based on recent stock trends their value is largely hypothetical and based on both hype and the assumption that they're able to grow indefinitely. I'd be happier to exclude them from our markets entirely.
The growth-oriented model that's become popular in the US looks increasingly like a cancer that only serves to concentrate wealth. There were a few early successes but it seems far more common that these startups "succeed" by distorting a functioning market with external capital and destroying sustainable businesses operating in the sector through price dumping.
Once they've captured enough of the market they'll IPO and either collapse entirely when their business model proves to be entirely unsustainable without infinite VC funds or limp along providing inferior service and labour conditions to those available beforehand. Either way harm is caused.
The model is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of fair and healthy competition and ultimately makes success a function of who has the most money to burn.
It's helpful to think of the USA as a gigantic factory that produces billionaires. The manufacturing process runs off of energy ("money") provided by banks, investors and government, and the raw materials that get consumed and discarded are the lives and livelihoods of workers, and the end product that pops off the assembly line is "wealthy people".
The options aren't limited to authoritarian dictatorship and capitalist oligopoly.
In the same vein it isn't communist to suggest that billionaires should maybe remain slightly smaller billionaires in order to provide workers a decent quality of life.
Until fairly recently you could support a household on one income in most western countries. We're now seeing people struggling on two after decades of tax cuts and historically low tax burdens on the extremely wealthy.
The growth-oriented model that's become popular in the US looks increasingly like a cancer that only serves to concentrate wealth. There were a few early successes but it seems far more common that these startups "succeed" by distorting a functioning market with external capital and destroying sustainable businesses operating in the sector through price dumping.
Once they've captured enough of the market they'll IPO and either collapse entirely when their business model proves to be entirely unsustainable without infinite VC funds or limp along providing inferior service and labour conditions to those available beforehand. Either way harm is caused.
The model is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of fair and healthy competition and ultimately makes success a function of who has the most money to burn.