> Private land works. Mostly. With a few caveats.
Tell that to all the people who could easily live on the vast swaths of property suburbanites have set aside for doing absolutely nothing with (lawns).
> Usually "governments and friend monopolists" are to blame, too.
I assume you let homeless people pitch camps in your yard, and are thus not part of the problem?
> Do patents work? Not sure. Sometimes maybe.
The U.S. is the most technologically productive society in the history of the world, and we have had patents since our founding. Much of the valuable technology around us was funded either by: 1) patent monopolies; 2) natural or government-sanctioned monopolies; 3) government research funding. Much of what wasn't was funded by other mechanisms for reducing competition (for example, Intel's trade secrets to keep its manufacturing edge).
Ultimately, there is no money in highly competitive markets. Competition drives prices towards the marginal costs of production, which not only saps R&D budgets in capital-intensive fields, but without IP protection reduces any incentive to engage in capital-intensive R&D when the results can be easily copied by competitors.
Look at one company we consider innovative today: Google. Google benefits from several features of its industry that tend to undermine perfect competition: network effects, a government granted monopoly (over the trademark Google--imagine if Samsung could redirect "Google Searches" to their own search engine), a privately-granted monopoly (domain names), government-monopolies over their copyrighted-software, etc. And of course, the half-trillion dollar advertising industry from which it derives nearly all its revenue would collapse if trademark monopolies didn't prevent companies from free-riding on advertising investments. As a result, Google makes a ton of money, and can use it to do cool things like research Google Glass and self-driving cars that don't immediately turn a profit. If Google was trying to eke out an existence in a perfectly-competitive market based purely on the quality of its search results, none of this would happen.