While, as shown above, the received economic analysis was about finding the balance between rewarding innovation and throttling it, campaigners for global IP protection wrapped themselves "in the mantle of property rights." The new language of IP in the 1980s figured it as "a system to protect and exclude, rather than one based on competition and diffusion." National competitiveness rather than the competitive order was the watchword, a shift signaled by the Presidential Commission on Industrial Competitiveness created in 1984 and the rise of both competitiveness indices and the competitiveness advice industry.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 198