"Underneath the statute is a belief, the one that strung the wire and funded the labs and put men on the moon: that building hard things at scale is worth doing, and that this is the country that does them. The American method was never the state alone or the market alone. The wire reached the farms because federal credit met local cooperatives that did the stringing. Apollo was a government program executed by four hundred thousand people who mostly worked for contractors. Warp Speed was public money and private molecules. Public purpose set the pace and wrote the check. Private ingenuity built the thing. Deep capital markets funded the improbable. A bankruptcy code cleared failure fast. Immigration imported a century of talent. The answer to a rival that builds by command isn’t to become one. It’s to run the harness again, by choice this time."