Technology

You're selling the the rest of country short - there's a lot of businesses in Seattle, Redmond, Portland, Austin, Dallas, Boulder, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc.

I think the main issue is that all the money pools in the US due to their big international businesses and monopolies, leading to higher productivity and salaries, and so all the investors in the US. And the US investors mostly want to invest in the US as they can use USD and their US bank account, and US legal protections, etc. with everything in English and so on. The US is also a much bigger consolidated market with one currency, one language and generally one set of laws (although some states differ depending on the industry) - making it easy to scale up an operation (although Sales Tax implementations are a complete disaster being at the county-level - wtf).

Countries (and economic blocs) need their own companies. I think in Europe we can learn a huge amount from China's success with Baidu, WeChat, ByteDance, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc. and even Russia with Yandex, Mail.ru, VK, etc. - this helps keep the money in the same area and leads to re-investment.

Otherwise it's just the same as being a banana republic - just serving as cheap labour for American corporations who send all the profits back to the US, and might even be outright hostile to democracy like ITT and United Fruit / Chiquita (both American corporations).

The over-regulation is a big problem too - we need to make it as easy as possible for people to take calculated risks and try start-ups, but here in Europe a lot of companies ban you from having your own side-work as an employee or contractor, you have to file taxes manually and some bureaucracy with the bank and accounting, etc. and then for Tech you have the GDPR and data privacy stuff to deal with.