Perhaps that's intentional. A whole country dependent on something that's fully based on things not being unique.

Perhaps that's some sort of national salvation plan. Of course, with shares of power in the post-crash USA being divided by the right people beforehand.

To crash it and then create a manufacturing economy, poor, but resilient. Sort of trying to repeat China. Or USSR.

Perhaps some important people judged that USA as a developing union of colonies on a sparsely populated continent is less stable than a normal old world nation. With all the American solutions becoming less efficient over time, because there's less and less of using unoccupied spaces, in various senses, and more and more of continuing the same old tree. And their solution is to destroy the legacy of the time when USA was a leading country, to allow for some modern muscle to grow on that skeleton. Otherwise, when that legacy would run out, the decay would be worse.

Well, I can imagine such thought process. If plenty of people on Lemmy think most of tech is scams, then why wouldn't billionaires, it's not as if they were different creatures from Mars.