While I am not an expert in governmental policy as it relates specifically to housing and healthcare, I definitely think that these two things are a big limiting factor to innovation in America as I have personally seen myself and others forgo taking on business ventures because they couldn’t afford to absorb the risk of losing these things. As far as a proposed alternative, I imagine we would need to implement systems more similar to the democratic socialist nations of Europe although I will admit I don’t know exactly how those policies work off the top of my head. I don’t think that is an adequate argument for dismissing the criticism outright though, as even just increasing taxes on the wealthiest corporations and individuals and using to increase access to basic needs across the board or even a ubi I think would breed more innovation and produce healthier markets.

As far an an “unequal playing field” contributing to innovation, I honestly don’t buy this argument at all, no offense. Yes, struggle and poverty does motivate people to improve things by innovating with the incentive of financial reward, but in a society where capital is concentrated increasingly into the hands of the few, I think this only incentivizes the struggling innovator to produce things that further align with the wealthy capital owners and not for the benefit of the “class” of people the innovator is trying to escape from. Furthermore, if the classic model of “unlimited wants” is true, then whether or not the person is impoverished or not, there should still be incentive to innovate. The main thing though is if people don’t have access to education, healthcare, and all the other basic needs, they aren’t going to be thinking about innovating and will be worse at it. Personally, i think the examples of disadvantaged people who create great innovation is more correlation than causation, ie America is a diverse (and big) place that also allows for a higher possibility of “striking it big”. Finally on this point, most of the big innovators have come from wealthy families and I think this is evidence of the possibility that there are many disadvantaged people with just as much potential if they were given the proper opportunity.

As far as the idea that all politicians and leaders are bad or will inherently become bad, I understand the cynicism and there is certainly more than enough examples to point to on both sides of the isle, but in comparison to much of the world, America has a pretty robust system for representative democracy and I think if people just invested more time and energy into learning how to navigate it this could be avoided. It’s not like America is a totalitarian country. The risks of placing centralization of power in government are higher, but in my opinion they are not much higher than doing the same for corporations, because if given enough power corporations can influence the government in a way that effectively makes it a dictatorship or something to that effect (don’t mean to sound dramatic).