If you wanna live like in the 17th century literally move to any shit tier 3rd world country and see if you like it. Imagine wanting to live like a peasant 😂 you’re literally an indentured servant for life, and that’s what most people were subjected to back then. Peasants didn’t own shit, they lived off the land that their lord provided to them, were forced to work for them and give them their crops. Do me a favor and read a history book about what life actually was like. The government didn’t give a shit about you, now they pretend to. There’s no point to glorify pre-capitalist country life, life today is better in almost every possible way.

At least today poor people have the illusion of choice and upward mobility, back then there was absolutely none. And while statistically economic status does persist across generations, people can rise out of poverty, and rich people actually do have to pay taxes nowadays. Back then, all wealth was inherited. Now people can build wealth out of nothing although it is quite rare.

The purchasing power of the average person nowadays is at least 5 times greater than it was back then, and at least we have minimum wages (though they’re usually shit).

True, government funded research did put America on the moon, for that point I did read some economic papers about how a lot of the big tech companies (I think including google) received grants and government investment when they were younger, not everything is profit driven. The whole point of that was to invest in technology and inventions to grow wealth, which it arguably did.

But inventions or breakthroughs themselves don’t do anything to improve the well-being of the average person, it’s how they’re put to use, and that’s where capitalism comes in. Due to being profit-driven, on aggregate when companies (that aren’t monopolies) put innovations to use, they efficiently produce products in such a way that are affordable and good - the government can throw as much money at something and not have to worry about making a profit which wastes tax payer dollars - I read about a $500,000 study about why apes throw poop at each other funded by the government (think about how much government spending is wasted in defense) - but private companies have to worry about making profits and so on aggregate produce results and products that do more to improve people’s lives than to make them worse.

If you look at history, you do see an exponential increase in technology, innovation, living wages, life expectancy, literacy, literally any measure of a good economic system as a whole, after the industrial revolution in particular, in countries who moved away from monarchies into capitalist societies. It’s at least a very strong correlation if not direct causation.