That's what
kills me about these sorts of takes: the
action plan is on the money, but their ideology shows they haven't actually learned anything of value from the failures of the current systems. They're essentially just looking at how
others do a thing, rather than also looking at how
we do a thing, and
why we do that thing in that way, and what the knock-on effects of that process are.
He gives away the game at the end when he decries socialism (because of course he does, it's practically a Free Space on the "Highly Intelligent Engineer has Opinions on Things" BINGO card) and fingerpoints at Europe, despite China having Communism on some scale yet is also somehow what we should be emulating for growth? It reveals the naivety of his position, assuming he's making the argument in good faith.
But getting back to his action plans (which are, generally, not bad), I totally agree that a good step forward is reforming immigration to promote movement of people provided they're willing to contribute to society. He couches his standards in nebulous vagaries like "production" and "productivity", but the core concept is sound, even if his rationalizations leave a lot to be desired. We should be courting smarter and harder workers with pathways to Citizenship, not highly exploitable visas like H1Bs or the various farmworker visas, and we should be holding companies' feet to the fire in ensuring imported talent stays here, on American wages, in American living standards. I've been screaming the same to my EU friends of late, stating that now is the best time since Operation Paperclip for a foreign power to import brilliant talent from a failing state.
On the topic of the EU, something I'd like to challenge is this popular (with laissez-faire Capitalists and Libertarians) narrative that the EU is somehow failing because it hasn't exploded with growth like the USA or China. From what I've seen, Europe has been remarkably stable on the whole (with pockets of success and failure, a la the United States) precisely because it built up modern infrastructure when it could, maintained a diversified economy, and didn't give in to scams or grifts - like the ones he cites in the American economy as artificially inflating the economic numbers to create the appearance of growth where none has really occurred. If we had real growth, like China, we'd have the same amenities - high speed rail, modern freeways, high levels of infrastructure replacement and improvements, and a burgeoning middle class. China built these things as part of its rapid industrialization over the past century, whereas we squandered our post-war advantage on corporate subsidies and hawkish conflicts abroad for decades. If anything, I'd argue that the EU may very well be a model of a sustainable economy of sorts, provided there's not some crisis boiling beneath the surface that could cause a collapse; the people there generally have everything they need, and healthy regulations minimize the risk of exploitative or anti-consumer practices.
But I digress. The TL;DR is that he has valid points, but man does he undermine his argument with the same tired tripe at the end exposing his ignorance on the subject.