This week we celebrated the anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their achievement on Dec. 17, 1903, is rightly celebrated for ushering in the age of modern aviation. But one lesson is often overlooked: the Wrights succeeded not because of government grants, tax incentives, or industrial policy. They succeeded because they were free to experiment.
America’s greatest innovations emerge from freedom, not government direction.
The Wright Brothers began in a small Dayton bicycle shop. They financed their experiments themselves, built gliders from scratch, and tested them on the windswept dunes of North Carolina. Early “permissionless” innovation allowed them to quickly innovate. They failed, learned, and tried again. No bureaucracy dictated their designs. No state or federal agency approved their work or the impact to the site of their test flights.
Today’s regulatory and subsidy-heavy environment slows the next breakthrough. Economic development is increasingly shaped by subsidies, tax incentives, and government-chosen “winners.” Startups face complex regulations, licensing requirements, and costly permitting processes. The complicated process discourages risk-taking. Small innovators are often pushed aside or swallowed up by large companies. Innovation often becomes something the government manages rather than the “better mousetrap” that the market discovers.
Subsidies and regulation distort incentives. When government absorbs risk, entrepreneurs innovate less efficiently. When regulations favor incumbents, small innovators are grounded. The Wright Brothers’ success was possible because the risks and the rewards belong to them. Today, much of that kind of risk is shifted to taxpayers.
Celebrating the Wright Brothers means more than erecting monuments. Honoring their achievement is best done by resurrecting the regulatory environment that made their work possible. Policy goals should be broad-based tax relief instead of targeted incentives, regulatory restraint and regular sunset reviews of such regulations, a “sandbox approach” to foster new ideas, faster permitting, fewer barriers to entry, and trusting entrepreneurs to allocate capital better than bureaucrats or taxpayer-funded non-profits.
It also means asking simple question about our policies: Would the Wright Brothers have succeeded in today’s regulatory environment? Each time we are faced with a new regulation, ask whether it would have helped or hindered innovators like them. If the answer is no, then North Carolina should rethink the way it encourages innovation.
Freedom, not government, made First in Flight possible. Preserving that freedom is the best way to ensure the next generation of innovators can take off.
