By Richard A. Williams, November 30, 2015 | From: US News & World Report

Where does innovation come from? The new devices for sale on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? It's certainly not driven by the government. Rather, it's all about tinkerers who ultimately drive scientific discoveries. No matter how smart our leaders are, they are never going to outperform the vast power of the millions of dabblers and dreamers in each of their individual pursuits. Tinkerers often don't start with dreams of riches; they just see a better way. They are, as my Mercatus Center colleague Bob Graboyes describes it, on the frontier, not in the fortress.

But lately, these tinkerers face too many obstacles to truly generate economic growth. Want to invent a medical device? The time, money and complexity of going through the Food and Drug Administration's process is bound to discourage most. That's why it's so depressing to read about attempts to improve innovation with more central funding, guidance and big meetings. Is that really what we need to take advantage of the fantastic new sciences of robotics, nanotechnology, genetic manipulation and more to enhance our health? Certainly from Washington's limited vision, all solutions must start and end within the 61 square miles of the District of Columbia.

That's just not true, and if you want to do something, make the world safe for garages. "If you're not allowed to tinker and sell your stuff without going through complicated bureaucratic systems to set-up expensive companies and pay all kinds of hidden taxes," blogger Ivan Raszl writes, "you can say good-bye to any start-up. Start-up experimentation requires freedom of business." In other words, let's find a way to have much more permissionless innovation. 

Recognition of garage-style thinking and setting up our institutions to foster, allow and celebrate this creativity is the key to keeping America competitive in the way we always have led the world. We took the best thinking the world had to offer and created a new type of country that was expressly about freedom of the individual, with the government there to serve the individual. We don't need to plan anything other than how best to stay out of the way of our fantastically creative individual minds.

Congress may be the last place to recognize the need for this tinkering mentality. A current bill in Congress is grounded in a 20th-century mentality, despite its goal of moving innovation forward. Known as the 21st Century Cures Act, it imagines that more funding for the National Institutes of Health and the FDA – along with some regulatory tweaks – will speed up medical innovation. But the potential for success under these policy changes has a short shelf life. To create the lasting changes our system desperately needs, we need institutions that are the equivalent of the information revolution that has occurred as a result of the Internet: unrestricted synapses that connect and fire of their own accord, inventing and innovating in a permissionless world.
In short, get the planners out of the way. That would truly be the government equivalent of disruptive innovation.