Investment happens anywhere there is a chance of positive return.
Investing in new technology either as an inventor/entrepreneur or dumb money still offers returns exponentially higher than anything else, should it work out.
There is a point where excessive taxation/regulation hurts innovation, but I don't think we're anywhere near that.
It's been happening since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
The harnessing of fossil fuels and machinery should have put everyone out of work forever.
We used to be 85% living and working on farms, and now we're 5%.
In short, we found ways to make people way, way more productive, and the standard of living for the average person is astronomically higher today than it was 200 years ago.
I think special attention needs to be paid to accumulation of assets, and that this can definitely get out of hand (even as wages and standard of living rise, it can still be a problem), but overall, it's worked out.
Paradoxically, I still trust markets and regulation more than I do centralized control and distribution. The current US governments multi trillion dollar budgets come with all sorts of special requirements, usually of the social kind that can be liberally interpreted by institutions receiving the money (i.e. schools have to comply with our social view in order to receive the money, instead of just making sure that it's fairly spent).
For example, I think min. wage increases tend to be a better social measure because it's attached to actual production, and, it's generally not encumbered by some kind of employment and hiring ideology.
I honestly believe the tools are available to us, and we can make a ton of progress by just doing basic adjustments, closing loopholes, ensuring standards.
As an example, Healthcare reform of one way or another, even something that disentangled employment from Health Insurance, and somehow got 'pretty much everyone' covered one way or another, might yield gigantic side benefits with reduction of poverty and individual calamity. 50% of individual bankruptcies are Healthcare related. Imagine how much strife comes from that, and it's most unnecessary using a policy framework that we could apply today.
Especially things like offshore tax havens, tax loopholes, bogus charities etc. etc..
So much low hanging fruit, or at least, low-hanging from an ideological perspective.
The key many Americans seem to forget.
I have a home solar-panel system to sell you. It will pay for itself in a mere 25 years. Now, normally, it'd pay for itself in 8 years, but taxes have raised the price. You will surely invest in this system anyway.
All you've done with this example is try to say that X is better than (X + tax), failing to identify the actual benefits and tradeoffs derived from the tax. Please at least try to be somewhat intellectually honest.
Cut that return to a third of its previous value and I’ll leave my money in stocks and just buy electricity made from natural gas.
Thats not how it works. Taking a higher percentage of returns, can leave the returns positive, but the expected value of risks negative.
EX: To make a simplified example, imagine that you can invest 10$, in an investment that has 50% chance of giving you an additional 11$.
That has a positive expected value. But if you put a 20% tax on the winning, now that investment no longer has a positive expected value, even though the returns in the wining case are positive.