> It's almost like capitalism stifles innovation.
It's not. It's nowhere close. "Capitalism" (which is a weasel word to begin with), has produced far more innovation than any other economic system.
Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point, your argument is designed to deceive:
> It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation.
Strawman argument - very few people believe or claim that "capitalism" directly incentivizes innovation - the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work - and does so extremely effectively. Unless you've been living under a rock the past century, it's not hard to see the incredible technological advances that have happened purely as a result of "capitalism". The "small intersection of the Venn diagram", while small in relative terms (and there's nothing wrong with that), is a large absolute amount.
It's also the case that it's completely infeasible to directly incentivize innovation - the best that you can do is attach it to some other measurement - which is exactly what "capitalism" does.
> It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.
It's pretty obvious that a system created for a purpose can initially fulfill that purpose very well and then be corrupted by humans over time, with no implication of being initially unsuitable.
Patents have become rent-seeking because of corrupt regulators - corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.