One of the big issues is the incredible amount of research and development dollars and investment capital that is squandered on the military. Global spending on war is beyond comprehension. Just look at how much they spent to develop the f35, fighter jet. That is just one weapons system among thousands. If you try to calculate how much a century of warfare has cost us you will be staggered by the sheer incomprehensible scope of the waste.

Tesla had to have dollars to do what he did. Inventors need avenues to obtain capital and need to be protected from infringement at least until they have some control and can self fund new projects. the entire system is structured to ignore, or co-opt and destroy or misuse the inventors intellectual property and there are few that are sufficiently capitalized to defend themselves against the power of modern nation states and the multinational corporate overlords.

If we spent a fraction of what we spent on professional sports or national televised talent shows on funding startups and created incubators for nascent ideas to emerge and develop, we might see golden age proportion development. I haven't seen it yet and I have been waiting for years while watching dollars flow down the military industrial complex drain or into utterly banal and ridiculous so-called hi-tech development.